Most of the predictions for the Canadian election I’d seen were for a continuation of Conservative minority government, with all the interest lying in whether the leftish National Democratic Party would overtake the Liberals, as polls had indicated. The first prediction has been invalidated, with the Tories gaining a clear majority. The second has proved truer than many had anticipated, with the NDP surging to 31% of the vote as opposed to the Liberals’ 19. The NDP will now form the official opposition for the first time.
It would also appear that The Greens have won a riding (the Canadian term for a seat). Canada, of course, uses first past the post, which radically distorts the seat count compared to the popular vote, particularly since the two party system has fractured over the last few decades.
It’s interesting, though, to consider whether the Liberals’ “centrist” posture has been squeezed out by more clearly defined alternatives on both left and right. There might be a message there for the Gillard government.
The problem for the Canadian Liberals was that they were being led by a guy who had lived outside of Canada more than he lived in Canada for most of his adult life and had a record of publicly talking down about Canada.
Well Done, Steven Harper. CBC must be gutted.
I think it should be a salutary lesson for the Poms: first-past-the-post really is a JOKE.
At least 58% left of centre (thats not even counting BQ) and of course, the result is: a clear Tory majority, on 34%!
The one concern regarding a Tory majority was the prosepct of vote splitting, particularly in Ontario. This has happened worse than imagined.
The Conservatives have picked up 30 seats, a net gain of around 22 seats at this stage. Of this 18 have come from the Greater Toronto Area alone.
Quite a few of these would have fallen in an OPV system due to the size of the lead on primaries. But in quite a few – maybe half of them – the size of the primary vote lead to the Conservatives is so small that they would clearly be run down on preferences on any reasonable estimation of prefernce flows.
The double whammy was not only the collapse of the Liberals but equally the collapse of the Bloc Quebecois.
Interesting to note that the FPTP system which gave the Conservatives their majority came off less than 40% of the vote. Centre and left party votes came to nearly 60% of the vote.
Lefty E,
“At least 58% left of centre (thats not even counting BQ) and of course, the result is: a clear Tory majority, on 34%!”
Yes, that will certainly be a lesson for the UK Torygovernment. Don’t change anything!
Indeed, I&U. But occasionally one hopes the people might get a look in.
Me, I’m all for proportional (or even better, MMD). But I am grateful we at least have preferential here rather than FPP.
@4:
Only one Bloc Seat fell to the Conservatives. The rest all fell to the NDP, so the collapse of the Bloc was itself insignificant in terms of getting a Tory majority.
Updated figures courtesy Martin B:
Popular vote – Cons 39.7, NDP/Lib/Grn 53.3, BQ 6.1.
Seat share – Cons 53.9, NDP/Lib/Grn 41.6, BQ 1.0.
Once again, it seems very clear that FPTP is a seriously flawed method for reconciling the sentiment of the governed with the composition of the government/parliament. Indeed, the mere perception that a party getting less than 40% may win in its own right distorts and truncates public policy discussion in way that could exaggerate the already unreasonable advantages of parties with efficiently distributed voter cohorts.
If I was Tony Abbott the first thing I’d do as PM is reform the electoral system to bring in FPTP. And I’d also bring in voluntary voting. Tory for life then.
So it looks like us latte sippers are swimming against the right wing tide. For all the smearing of Harper he’sin with an increased majority.
Are the Canadian tories a solid block or some sort of LNP arrangement? I ask because if they are it appears that without PV the progressive parties are doomed to opposition by their fractiousness. And on reflection the NP part doesn’t add a helluva lot.
Happily, it’d never get through the Senate, Tssk. Of course, in Australia, it was the Libs antecedents who introduced it, to prevent vote splitting with the Country party.
New Democratic Party?
The Conservative Party of Canada are a merger of the old Progressive Conservatives (one of my favourite names for a political party) and “Reform” (which became the Canadian Alliance) one of the populist parties that occasionally leaps out of the western prairie provinces. After the 1993 election, when the PC went from a majority government to TWO seats, and the subsequent fighting between the parties, a “Unite the Right” movement began resulting in the CPC in 2003.
Interestingly (or perhaps not, if you’re a person with sensible interests) “Unite the Right” has not been successful at a provincial level, except in Saskatchewan, where Liberal and PC MLAs formed the Saskatchewan Party to oppose the NDP.
Canadian political parties do have a tendency to dry up and blow away. I suspect the Canadians have one of the most multi-party systems in the developed world that uses FPTP, and vote splitting can wipe a party off the map.
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Ambigulous@13
The “New” in the NDP reflects its origins in the “National Committee for the New Party” which was formed by the Canadian Labour Congress (like the Canadian ACTU) and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (Farmer-Labour-Socialist) in the late 1950s. The “democratic” bit is because it’s a social democratic party.
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Like a few others here I am utterly gobsmacked by a result which sees a right wing conservative government with less than a quarter of the eligible vote get into power. What’s even more bizarre is they received votes than their opponents by a long shot and still wind up with a majority.
On the raw figures, the outcome seems very un-democratic. As Ambigulous said “the New Democratic party”????
Actually, it is not 100% clear who would have won with a preference voting system. The key question would be how the Libs and BC preferences split. Don’t know enough to be sure but with the conservatives on 40% (latest) they would need only 40% of the combined Lib/BC vote to reach 50%2PP. My guess is that it would be touch and go whether the NCP or the conservatives would form the government.
The interesting thing is that a majority of Canadians would prefer the libs to form the government in preference to both the NCP and conservatives. To get this preferred result you would need a system that counted to simulate one on one contests between say the last three parties standing after the preferences of the other parties had been distributed. More democratic? It all depends on whether you think democracy is about letting the biggest party win (FPTP), votes after preference distribution or a series of one on one contests are the most democratic. All you can really say is that one on one is more likely to yield a center government.
Center parties are in trouble when they haven’t got any natural constituency. At the moment Labor seems to be pissing off the rich, pissing off the working class and pissing off the educated middle class – which means there aren’t many people out there arguing its case with passion. By contrast, Abbott is giving his core supporters what they want while using conservative social policies to gain some working class support.
You wonder what the Canadian libs core constituency was?
@14
Were the PC to P for most Cs hence the near wipeout?
hmmph. Here’s an interesting blog reaction from “Wintery Knight…integrating Christian faith and knowledge in the public square”
WN adds the footnote, Well done, Canada! Congratulations!
Patrickb@19
Not C enough for some, unpopularity from introducing a GST, and the collapse of Constitutional reforms discussions which had upset many westerners for ceding too much to Quebec, and when it collasped, upset Quebec. This resulted in the formation of le Bloc, whose founder Lucian Bouchard, was a PC Cabinet minister. The Constitutional issues were the big ones, it was a total disaster.
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I’m a little chuffed. It appears that I grew up in the riding that went Green: Saanich-Gulf Islands. Half of it is located in the suburbs and rural areas north of Victoria, BC; the other half is the Gulf islands between Vancouver Island and Vancouver. It’s an utterly beautiful area: islands covered with temperate rainforest plunging to the sea, streams flowing with salmon. A bit like parts of Tasmania, except with conifers rather than eucalyptus. Since my dad was a birdwatcher, I got taken to see a lot of it.
It’s a shame the election result was such a shocker, and there isn’t even a decent excuse for a Senate to mitigate things. Canada’s equivalent are really unrepresentative swill: they’re “appointed by the governor general on the advice of the prime minister”, they serve until they die or turn 75, and the apportionment algorithm is really FUBAR. There’s 24 for Ontario, 10 for tiny New Brunswick, and 6 for British Columbia.
@17
Do I hear the footsteps of Condorcet?
Gillard already has that message and won’t go for the centrist position – it’d be too much of a lurch to the left.
Martin B: Thanks for the new word. Sounds something like what I was describing. Rules that put limits on who gets into the shoot-out phase avoid the possibility of a candidate who gets few primary votes ending up winning.
One way of separating the systems is the weighting given to unpopularity. In FPTP no account is made of unpopularity – merely how many really likes each candidate. In the Condorcet system relative unpopularity is of critical importance. The Australian preference system is somewhere in between and takes account of both.
Anyone know what the conservatives immigration policy was, going into the election?
DB @24: Abbott and Brown leave a fair bit of space for a center party to fit into – if we had one.
Brown seems to say things that ought to put him in or near the “centre” of any pragmatic, thoughtful, educated and engaged electorate. The problem is that the electorate is, by and large, missing at least two of these things (and often all of them) and those that fit the description are marginalised by the candidate selection, voting and public propaganda systems.
What we need is a system for fostering an electorate capable of making informed choices on substantive matters. The current system of voting and propaganda subverts that.
Re John D: I thought we had a centre/centre right party already, aka as the ALP.
No, Doug, we have a right party (Labor), a far-right coalition (Libs and Nationals) and a centre left party (Greens).
Seeing some real senate reform may be the silver lining of this result. There’ll be a fair amount of pressure on Harper from his base in this regard.
The NDP has a very good record in the prarie provinces, so I don’t see why the federal party can’t draw on that tradition.
My feeling, based on interactions with progressive Canucks: a pragmatic ALP type party can succeed with the Left-of-centre national Canadian electorate, as it would have a blank slate as teh gubmint, and therefore there would be no heritage of Leftwing grousing against said party for selling out. Cough, cough.
Funny thing is all the ‘impotent by pure’ whining in Canada (outside of the francophone separatists) is traditionally from the Tory Right.
Titspolling or GTFO.And I’d say Fran that the current system of neglecting public and preschool education (while claiming, of course, that we don’t) also subverts an electorate which can make informed choices. Of course the people who fund the education system (mostly at the State level) are beneficiaries of this.
What I like about Canadian politics is the way they have of discarding political parties after they have demonstrated their worthlessness, as happened to the conservatives in the 1990s and has now happened to the Liberals.
I wish we could get rid of both our worthless main parties here.
@31 “Seeing some real senate reform may be the silver lining of this result. There’ll be a fair amount of pressure on Harper from his base in this regard.”
They can exert all the pressure they want, but that kind of amendment will require the consent of the Provincial legislatures, some of which themselves require a popular referendum. And by convention, each ‘region’ is held to have a veto over amendments, so Quebec on its own, or the prairies together can scuttle any changes. Historically the west has demanded more proportionality in the Senate, which means less representation for Quebec.
The Canadian constitution is surprisingly vague on how it should be amended and ‘convention’ carries a lot of weight. But this is Stephen Harper we’re talking about so he might throw convention out the window.
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“Brown seems to say things that ought to put him in or near the “centre” of any pragmatic, thoughtful, educated and engaged electorate.”
Ooops….. way out of touch with mainstream Australia! Brown is to one side of Australian politics as Hanson was/is to the other.
The last truly centrist leader of any political party in Australia was Malcolm Turnbull. I still don’t give up hope that he’ll replace Abbott before the next election…
The ALP are gone, and the thought of Abbott as PM is kinda scary.
NICKWS @32: More background from someone who, unlike me, knows more about the Canadian parties might help the debate. Where, for example, did the libs natural support come from and how much of this might prefer the conservatives to the NCP?
Quebec has 23% of Canada’s population and 24% of its Senate seats. Proportionality would hardly affect its representation.
Numbers transposed but point stands (in fact stronger – Quebec is very marginally underrepresented).
Andrew quoted me:
then added:
These aren’t in logical contradiction if “mainstream Australia” doesn’t largely fit the descriptors: pragmatic, thoughtful, educated and engaged. Is there even such a thing as “mainstream Australia”? Not sure.
In any event, most people, according to polls, support withdrawal from Afghanistan, gay marriage, voluntary euthanasia and a price on CO2, which suggests Brown is not as way out of touch as one might suppose. Right now, Brown is on the sharp end of that sentiment, IMO.
Would be funny to see a province veto an amendment to a constitution it hasn’t even signed on to. Having absolutely no support in the province anyway, I’m sure Harper would have even less qualms than Trudeau about going over their heads. That being said, Ontario would most likely object if Harper moves for a “triple-E” senate (elected, equal and effective)
This Jack Layton character really has something of the Whitlams and the Hawkes about him: http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canadavotes2011/story/2011/05/02/cv-election-leader-layton.html
John D @ 37, I take it you choose the ‘get the funk out’ option vis-à-vis your claim that the Canadian Libs actually win on preferred government status with Canook voters?
I’m not surprised Michael Ignatieff and his party lost so badly: “When Canadians met me, they thought, ‘Hey, he is not so bad.’ But I didn’t meet enough Canadians.”
Positively Abottonian.
They can exert all the pressure they want, but that kind of amendment will require the consent of the Provincial legislatures, some of which themselves require a popular referendum. And by convention, each ‘region’ is held to have a veto over amendments, so Quebec on its own, or the prairies together can scuttle any changes. Historically the west has demanded more proportionality in the Senate, which means less representation for Quebec.
But this is Stephen Harper we’re talking about so he might throw convention out the window.
Harper has already defenestrated convention, Darryl. In 2008, he stacked the Senate with 18 Tories. But there may be reform afterward, in reaction to Harper. It could take two forms:
(a) Abolish the Senate altogether, as the NDP and BQ want to do. No surprise, as the total representation for these parties is zero.
(b) Make it a Triple-E: “equal, elected, and effective”. It’s not that easy to do, for the reasons you pointed out. But hell, BC and Alberta are already gypped under the current system, with the 160 year old anachronistic “region” system. I reckon it wouldn’t be that hard to sell in Quebec either. Who would the Québécois prefer to represent them in the Senate: 24 cronies of past and present PMs, or 10/11/12/whatever senators actually elected by the people?
Selling it is going to be the hard part. My preference is a rough copy and paste from the Australian constitution under the “KISS” principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid. Alas, the model presented may turn out to be an overcomplicated mess like the Charlottetown Accord, and with elite contempt for the “No” voters turning the country eventually against it.
The last paragraph should read “Modeling it is going to be the hard part. My preference, etc.”
I think we have a far left party – the Greens, A centre-left party – the ALP and a centre party – the Libs, and a agrarian socialist party – The Nats.
Thank-you MartinB and Down’n'Out, I had a fact backwards: the west generally wants equal representation in the Senate, not more proportionality.
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Thanks Darryl Rosin @15.
I was being pedantic about the “National” Democratic Party in the post.
Thanks for all the background.
Here’s an opinion on the possibility of a sharper left right political divide
oops…
Here’s an opinion on the possibility of a sharper left right political divide
from Dan Gardner.
But in terms of mainstream politics, left v right, why does it seem that in an age of economic malaise democracies around the world are electing right wing conservative parties? Where is the left?
Surely one explanation is that the flow of information from the mainstream media is now (perhaps more than ever) utterly under right wing conservative control and the left’s messages are drowned out or simply denied a platform.
Another explanation must also exist in the post industrialised workplace which has fragmented worker’s capacity and reason for organistation.
And if Gillard and the ALP are anything to go by, then so-called parties of the left can only hold onto power if they do the bidding of organisations like Rio Tinto, BHP and the banks.
Razor@1: The CBC probably will be, fiscally and organisationally.
tssk@10: No, because the unions would save the ALP, that’s why they have all those voting rights.
I don’t have much time, but quick and dirty notes from Canada after the election.
1, Harper and his conservatives are very smart, and ruthless and cunning, and unseating him is going to be really hard.
2, The NDP despite all the weight of media opposition and negative campaigning from the Liberals and the Conservatives made big gains across Canada, not just in Quebec. This is what happens when a progressive party sells a clear, positive message and doesn’t try to straddle the fence and offers a clear alternative. The NDP has some union support and it busted its arse to raise funds. Also, Jack Layton worked like a trojan for this result, and bear in mind he had a hip replacement operation a week before this election was called; and he is recovering from prostate cancer.
3. As a Pom once said, people who stand in the middle of the road get run over.
4. Academics, no matter how smart, should not try to become politicians. Ignatieff got thrashed from both sides because Harper and Layton are both veteran politicans who know exactly how to win support off disaffected Liberals.