2021 Canadian general election - Election Day and Results

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CBC having no purple/Bernier/coverage of PPC is a little Nineteen Eighty-Four-ish.

CNN, Fox, MSNBC, etc. at least shows the Greens and Libertarians for a second. Some even showed Kanye West in November. How is this not obvious bias?

They don't?  So far, they have.  Maybe I'm not watching the same CBC that you are.

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I love the election night tradition of CBC seriously analyzing election results based on a few hundred votes in Newfoundland and Labrador.

And if we go by '19, the polling results in rural Newfoundland could *really* depend on *where* they're coming from within the riding...

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I also wouldn't jump to conclusions yet about Halifax, because the counting's been slow and the NDP played a lot of catchup from unfavourable earlier figures...

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Peterborough-Kawartha looks like it is going to lose it's bellwether status thanks to Liberal incumbent Maryam Monsef's controversial statements.

Fixation upon Peterborough as an ever-reliable bellwether is about as insufferably lazy as Canadian psephology gets, so all ideology aside, I actually find this to be a bit of a relief.

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Unfortunately, Liberals hold Sherbrooke. Had been excited about the BQ candidate there.

What explains Liberal gains in the GTA in places like Thornhill or Markham-Unionville (where you'd think O'Toole would be a better leader than Scheer?) coupled with fairly impressive results for Conservatives in their non-GTA target seats (currently flipping Peterborough-Kawartha and Kitchener-Conestoga, and within inches in Cambridge and London West)? As an American I expected urban/rural polarization, or educated/uneducated, but what's happening in Ontario seems to be O'Toole getting decent results outside the GTA, even in educated or urban seats, while bombing within it even worse than Scheer.

If you seek an explanation, it might be through the hybrid nature of Durham riding--that is, as something straddling the frontier btw/GTA diversity and the old-stock "heartland".  And as much as he might have played the "GTA" card, O'Toole is really more of a "heartland" political figurehead at heart--and the result reflects the fact.

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TIL there is literally a riding called Quebec, that is within Quebec.

Just like until the mid-90s, there was a riding named Ontario that was within Ontario.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_(electoral_district)

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Spadina-Fort York flipped to NDP but I'm willing to bet Vuong will squeak through because I'm feeling pessimistic.

If anyone would be helped by mail-in ballots, it'd be him (by default)

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I think the slowest counting riding right now is King-Vaughan in the 905, which flipped blue while we were down. Would be a lol moment that the cons lose two York seats but flip one.

I don't know how many people would have imagined that Vaughan-Woodbridge would have been a closer call than Richmond Hill.  (Such is demographics: the Vaughan ridings lack the massive Lib-shifting Chinese electorate evident in Markham & Richmond Hill)

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TIL there is literally a riding called Quebec, that is within Quebec.

Just like until the mid-90s, there was a riding named Ontario that was within Ontario.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_(electoral_district)

One wonders how it got that name.

A vestige of Ontario County (which was dissolved on behalf of Durham Region in 1974)

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Ok Question time: Liberals look like they really gained with the Chinese - both Hong Kong and Mainland - vote which allowed him to get seats even in Richmond not won in 2015. There is one seemingly obvious thing one might obviously attribute this to: the same culture we saw in California's Vietnamese where you want stability in a crisis. Anything else on can think of - I'm no judge of whether the relationship with the homeland is positive or not, so people might like or disapprove of any hawkish moves.

East Asian voters seem to love unnecessarily harsh COVID restrictions.

Yeah, remember that we're dealing with something that's been racist-stereotyped as the "Wuhan Virus" or the "Kung Flu"--plus, don't forget how Toronto was an epicentre for the SARS crisis...

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Singh should of course go, after two disastrous elections in a row now, but there is nothing NDP voters love more than losing while feeling superior about themselves, so they will of course keep him.

This is right. On CBC the NDP woman they had was talking about how proud everyone was of Jagmeet; it doesn't matter whether they won or not, what was important was that they made such a great stand by making the turban man their leader. It's the attitude that comes from being in permanent opposition. Nobody got into the NDP because they wanted to win, so nobody can even imagine what winning would be like. It's not surprising that Rachel Notley has tended to keep her distance from the federal NDP, because she is a winner and they are losers.

Speaking as the person who first sounded a "could the NDP underperform 2019?" note, let me say this:  "disastrous" is an overstatement.  If you want "disastrous" in the bigger scheme of things, look to Audrey McLaughlin in 1993, or to the Mulcair tailspin over the course of the 2015 campaign.  And yes, this result highlighted a certain all-surface-no-guts element to the Jagmeet campaign--and in a weird way, I think PPC energy-hogging plowed a big mound of dirt on top of Jagmeetian "positivity" over the course of the campaign.  Otherwise, "bittersweet" might be the more fitting term, not too much different from the Douglas/Lewis leadership era--or else you might as well suggest that the federal NDP's very existence has been one continuous disaster (2011 excepted) for six decades running, and more if you include the CCF.

Painting this in blunt-testosterone winners vs losers terms betrays too much conditioning within hyper-binary systems a la the US or Australia.  I prefer my electoral politics gynaecological over phallic, thank you.

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I used to think that Canada was less partisan and more elastic than America. This election doesn't exactly support that. Every party coming out with virtually the same number of seats compared to two years ago is a little surprising.

Even in Canada, status quo elections can happen.  In this case, it's less a measure of inelasticity than a measure of *meh*.  (Probably a little like the UK in 2001, largely upholding the 1997 Blair-landslide status quo out of *meh*)

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PPC getting pretty good results in NB with the Tories holding on to their 2019 vote share.

Worth noting that the best Tory result seems to be Souris-Moose Mountain in SK - 76%.

From what I can tell, though I might be wrong, PPC topped off in Portage-Lisgar around 20%.  (That is, higher than Mad Max.)  And I *think* it might have been Chatham-Kent-Leamington in Ontario...

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Right, but Trudeau winning 170 was never likely. And the Tories won the popular vote in 2019 as well, so that's not really anything new. Not to mention, tons of leftists voted for NDP, so the 'left' faction is a lot bigger than the Liberal # would suggest.

Keep in mind, though, that the Cons were polling well back in mid-to-high 20s when the Libs were preparing to call the election.  So when all of this started, it *did* look like a likelihood (at least in Liberal eyes)

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PPC getting pretty good results in NB with the Tories holding on to their 2019 vote share.

Worth noting that the best Tory result seems to be Souris-Moose Mountain in SK - 76%.

From what I can tell, though I might be wrong, PPC topped off in Portage-Lisgar around 20%.  (That is, higher than Mad Max.)  And I *think* it might have been Chatham-Kent-Leamington in Ontario...

Yes, and excepting Beauce I think the adjacent Provencher is second. Which reflects the polls suggesting that the PPC would do better in MB/SK than Alberta. Any thoughts why?

When it comes to Portage-Lisgar and Provencher, I'd imagine the heavy Evangelical Xtian communities around Winkler/Morden and Steinbach are a major factor.

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Another thing about the NDP: if Jagmeet is a glib stunter, so was Jack Layton--even the way he nabbed Mulcair and so seeded the Orange Crush was more of an electoral stunt than anything.

Speaking of byproducts of Jack's stunting, I continue to find the fixation upon REB as some kind of party folk hero and saviour to be a cloying distraction, even if she remains popular enough to *nearly* have won this time around.  Besides, it detracts from the quiet fact of the party's more "organic" future-QC base being within urban Montreal--that is, the future's w/the Nima Machouf end, not w/the REB end.

Oh, and Hamilton might be to '21 what Windsor was to '19--the NDP looking to "unexpectedly" lose Hamilton Mountain and finish 3rd in HESC...

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Singh should of course go, after two disastrous elections in a row now, but there is nothing NDP voters love more than losing while feeling superior about themselves, so they will of course keep him.

This is right. On CBC the NDP woman they had was talking about how proud everyone was of Jagmeet; it doesn't matter whether they won or not, what was important was that they made such a great stand by making the turban man their leader. It's the attitude that comes from being in permanent opposition. Nobody got into the NDP because they wanted to win, so nobody can even imagine what winning would be like. It's not surprising that Rachel Notley has tended to keep her distance from the federal NDP, because she is a winner and they are losers.

Speaking as the person who first sounded a "could the NDP underperform 2019?" note, let me say this:  "disastrous" is an overstatement.  If you want "disastrous" in the bigger scheme of things, look to Audrey McLaughlin in 1993, or to the Mulcair tailspin over the course of the 2015 campaign.  And yes, this result highlighted a certain all-surface-no-guts element to the Jagmeet campaign--and in a weird way, I think PPC energy-hogging plowed a big mound of dirt on top of Jagmeetian "positivity" over the course of the campaign.  Otherwise, "bittersweet" might be the more fitting term, not too much different from the Douglas/Lewis leadership era--or else you might as well suggest that the federal NDP's very existence has been one continuous disaster (2011 excepted) for six decades running, and more if you include the CCF.

Painting this in blunt-testosterone winners vs losers terms betrays too much conditioning within hyper-binary systems a la the US or Australia.  I prefer my electoral politics gynaecological over phallic, thank you.

Still feeling this way? I’m waking up to the NDP being at 25, which is frankly pitiful given all the potential upside they had this year. I wasn’t thrilled when I was going to bed with them at 29, but now I’m actually upset.

I probably preemptively insulated myself through my prior "could the NDP underperform 2019?" speculation.  And again:  when all is said and done, more bittersweet than "disastrous", much less "two disastrous elections in a row".

Still, I agree that there's a *bit* of delusionality among partisans.  And while I've suggested that Layton was himself prone to novelty gimmicks, at least he set out to build an organizational foundation "where it counts", and a lot of that as a carryover from his latter-day approach to municipal politics, setting up alliances and seeking common ground in unlikely places.  Whereas Jagmeet and his team seem more adept at whipping up millennial-friendly pixie dust than that kind of Laytonesque meat-and-potatoes kitchen-table fare (and millennials and post-millennials are too "lateral" a demo for the "verticality" that a FPTP electoral system demands).  Too much AOC, not enough "2016 Bernie".  The result being that the *actual* unsexy ground-level riding-by-riding party infrastructure winds up being undernourished--and of course, Covid concerns don't presently help; perhaps they were hoping the pixie dust could compensate for necessarily thwarted groundwork.

Let's presume the NDP *does* clue into that deficiency.  And if Jagmeet is *still* not the right vehicle (perhaps because it'd be hard to get him to do meat-and-potatoes without putting a cute "Punjabi" spin on it?), then as future leadership goes...anyone for Avi Lewis?  (Seriously.  He finished an awfully strong 3rd in a universally-agreed-upon hopeless cause, *probably/perhaps* as a preview to a future run in a more viable riding--and on top of that, his family bloodline practically *codified* a certain characteristically "NDP" hyperintensive street-level voter-identification approach to electoral politics.)

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Yes, the NDP didn't do well this time but it's certainly conceivable that they'll win Laurier-Sainte Marie, Outremont and/or Hochelaga if the Liberals become unpopular in Quebec, which was not the case at all pre-Layton. They do much, much worse in immigrant-heavy and nationalist working-class areas, but while that's very bad for a social democratic party, it's at least a different class of problem.

That "different class of problem" probably has its Toronto parallel in ridings like Etobicoke North or Humber River-Black Creek or York South-Weston.

Another conceivable NDP Montreal target were it not for the present office holder: Papineau.

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I don’t know if Angus would be the best bet. I think Timmins is getting tired of him. He’s no Gilles Bisson. To be honest I think he should step down next election so the NDP can run a fresh face.

His result in his seat was poor but it's noteworthy that the major swing seems to have been to the PPC. Is that a particularly unvaxxed area?

Not particularly. 73% of people have one dose and 82% of people have two doses.

https://www.timminstoday.com/local-news/12-to-17-year-olds-have-lowest-vaccination-rates-in-the-region-4336796

I also don't think it was the candidate either. He was just some random guy who moved up north from southern Ontatio a few years prior and he was a truck driver.

To be honest, sadly I think PPC/right-wing rhetoric plays up well in the area. I hate to say it. It's a predominantly white area but before I moved away, Timmins was starting to get some South Asian people moving in. I did hear some unpleasant things being said by people about it. That's the kind of place that is unfortunately.

edit- forgot to say this because it happened after I moved away. There's also an opioid crisis now and it's causing a lot of crime and break ins. Angus is the incumbent MP and Liberals are in government and so I'm guessing people probably think neither have helped them with this situation, so they went CPC or PPC.

Though camouflaged by the broken-up opposition, I find Angus's underperformance one of the more interesting details of the election--and I wonder what his figures would be once one takes away all the Northern reserves.  (And needless to say, the "united right" would have outpolled him.)

And while Angus's big tent has been magnanimous enough to previously embrace and neutralize them, there is a certain populist unruliness that's led to high figures for rogue forces like Confederation of Regions in the past--and a high PPC seems in keeping w/that spirit.

I almost feel Charlie Angus to be a tragically thwarted figure, and not just through his losing the leadership to Jagmeet--it's like his whole political narrative represented an Xer counterpart to Jack's boomerism and Jagmeet's millennial-appeal, and for a while in the noughts the kind of big tent he represented really did seem to hold Jack-augmenting promise for the party, a kind of Muchmusic-and-Rheostatics-generation hip Canuck pride.  But now, his seat's looking like one of those UK "Red Wall" seats poised for a potential Tory steal...

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Sorry for multiple posts, but seems Liberals and NDP really struggling rural Canada.  Yes won a few seats but even ones they won were way closer than usual.  Charlie Angus won by a rather small margin while rural Newfoundland which was where Liberals had best numbers in 2011 and 2015 was quite competitive.  Total flip of early part of this century where Tories dominated St. John's, Liberals rural parts whereas now Tories irrelevant in St. John's (NDP/Liberal) while rural Newfoundland quite competitive. 

When it comes to Charlie Angus, it's more the low share than the "small margin" that's concerning (in fact, the margin's not much different from that over the Libs in '15).

And Newfoundland, by its nature, isn't really comparable in its rural vs urban patterns; it marches to its own election-by-election drummer (plus, St. John's Toryism is really *Red* Toryism).  Even the Long Range Mountains close call is of the sort that *could* have happened in the past with the right candidacy and the right circumstances in place--that it has the solidest Lib history of all N&L ridings is more happenstance than baked-in.  (The Tories nearly took its equivalent in 1997, for one.)

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- NDP generally does slightly worse on mail, somewhere around 2% worse on average, haven't actually found any ridings where they've done better. Even in Timmins-James Bay which they won overall, they did slightly worse while Liberals narrowly won the mail-in vote there.

When it comes to TJB, I can imagine a disproportion of mail-ins coming from Timmins, which is something of a Liberal stronghold and where their candidate's served as Mayor.

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Heat has already alluded to this, but since Tommy Douglas the only NDP leader who was even sort of from the west was Audrey McLaughlin, who grew up in Ontario and moved to the Yukon as an adult. With that possible exception, they've all been easterners. The federal NDP should fare much better in the west than it does; it's hard not to imagine that this has something to do with its constant longing for what is not there.

And of course, even more tenuously than Audrey, Jagmeet presently by way of parachute.  (Which is a little like Justin by way of maternal ancestry.  Maybe even lamer.)

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He was. Unfortunately he was also a poor leader of the new federal NDP. Not really his fault - it hardly being a surprise that an agrarian socialist who saw politics in essentially moralistic and religious terms struggled to connect with the 'new Canada' emerging in the 1960s - but an important warning that success in one context does not lead automatically or inevitably to success in others.

And the fact said "poor leadership" didn't prevent Douglas from being reverentially embraced by the party, or being voted "Greatest Canadian" by CBC online vote in 2004, tells you a lot about why it's jumping to conclusions to declare Jagmeet to have been a "disaster" in both '19 and '21.  It's simply the nature of the electoral beast.

And in general:  sure, Americans might look at Canada's FPTP system in blunt terms of winners vs losers vs why-do-they-bothers.  And I understand:  if things worked the American way, seats like Battle River-Crowfoot would likely be uncontested acclamations.  But believe me, it's more barometrically interesting when, in the name of democracy, they *aren't*, when there's a Lib/New Democrat/Green on the ballot even though they're seldom likely to hit double digits.  And because of the Canadian way not being like the American way, even the bottom-feeding no-hopers from the other major parties are seldom as wingnutty as their US counterparts, in the "you have to be nuts to run as a Liberal in xxx riding" sense.  Said suicide runs can often be practice for credible (and winning) local runs.  So it'd be like running as a Dem in Wyoming knowing that the odds are long-to-negligible, and still getting pleasure out of the run, out of getting a feel for the state, out of poring over the precinct results and comparing to past elections, etc.  It's worth it even if the "winning" part is absent...

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It seems obvious to me that Tommy Douglas's canonization has a lot more to do with his time as premier of Saskatchewan than with his tenure as leader of the NDP, which was not successful by any measure I can think of. I don't really know what "the nature of the beast" being referred to here is, but I am reasonably sure that the NDP is not a Dutch-style confessional party that is content simply to get its message out; its purpose is to win elections, and given that Jagmeet Singh is not doing that and is not doing anything to bring the party closer to that, I'm not sure by what standard he could be considered anything but a failure. Maybe in forty years he'll be named one of the Greatest Canadians, but I wasn't under the impression that that is why the NDP exists. Maybe I'm wrong.

You realize that within a parliamentary democracy, "winning elections" isn't bound to winning government outright, as opposed to on a seat-by-seat basis--and also that "failed" bids at one level of government can act as practice runs for another level.  Indeed, there's many symbiotic levels at which elections, and running in the same, work; and they're not crudely bound to simply "winning".

Elections are a network of routes btw/ Point A and Point B which infer infinite routes beyond, they aren't a simple boring GPS-guided Interstate corridor.

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And with all of this hand-wringing over the NDP and its purpose...anyone want to speculate on the future of the Conservatives, O'Toole's leadership, etc?