The 2011 Colours of the Ridings: Toronto

So in the lead-up to the election, I played with an idea of looking at election returns in primarily tripartisan Conservative-Liberal-NDP ridings and, by converting voting percentages to hexadecimal RGB values, come up with a unique 'colour' for each riding. RGB means 'red, green and blue', and since the Liberals and the Conservatives happen to use those very colours, I had to rebrand the NDP green in colour, and then we're off.

A riding, then, that voted very strongly for one party would find its 'colour' very close to that party's colour, while a party that split pretty evenly between, say, the Liberals and the Conservatives would be a deep purple. A three-way race, by comparison, would be a grey colour.

Colourwise, here's what Toronto looks like as of May 2. A click will make this bigger.

The first thing one notices is how 'green' (i.e. orange) downtown Toronto suddenly is. This is not only because seven of the eight NDP ridings in Toronto are side-by-side in the heart of the city (save the ex-NDP Bob Rae's Toronto Centre) but also because those ridings tended to have more decisive victories: of 23 Toronto ridings, only three returned their MPs with over 50% of the vote, and all three were NDP (Davenport's Andrew Cash is the only Toronto MP elected with a majority not to be moving into Stornoway, unless Jack and Olivia are letting him bunk). Outside of the NDP, the Liberal elected with the strongest mandate was York West's Judy Sgro with 47.0% of the vote, and the Conservative with the strongest mandate was her neighbouring riding of York Centre, where Mark Adler upset Ken Dryden with 48.5% of the vote.

Other than that, there's a lot of wishy-washiness here. The three neighbouring ridings of Scarborough Centre, Scarborough Southwest and Scarborough-Guildwood all look the very same colour, and indeed in none of the three was the difference in percent between the winner and the third-place finisher greater than ten percent. Yet all three returned an MP from a different party - a wonderfully accidental example of proportional representation.

While Scarborough and 'Old Toronto'are different shades than they used to be, Etobicoke and North York are still reliably the purple of classic Toronto Liberal-Conservative contests, whichever of the two came out on top. In fact, the rumours of the death of the Liberal party in Toronto are greatly exaggerated: even if they lost 15 of the 21 seats they used to hold in the 416, the third-place finishing Liberals came third in only two ridings in the city - the two NDP seats in Scarborough. Otherwise, all nine Conservative ridings featured Liberals in second and NDP in third, while all six Old Toronto NDP ridings featured the Conservatives in (a sometimes-distant) third. Among the six Liberal victories, four featured the Conservatives in second and two featured the NDP in second.

Indeed, this situation reveals a curiosity: while the NDP's strongest performance (60.5% in Jack Layton's Toronto-Danforth) was much higher than the other two parties', their lowest was lower as well - a sad 11.6 in Eglinton-Lawrence, even less than the NDP's paper candidate in Don Valley West. The Liberals and the Conservatives bottomed out, by comparison, at 17.7 and 14.4 respectively - both in Jack Layton's Toronto-Danforth (the most vividly green dot in the city).

The Colours of the Ridings: Manitoba, 2008

So the previous blog entry explains what 'the colours of the ridings' means. The day I did the map for Saskatchewan, I also did one for Manitoba. Events are rapidly conspiring to make 2008 ancient history, but I did the map, so I might as well get it out there, pre-election. It looks like this:

Manitoba has the urban-rural split that strange riding boundaries have denied Saskatchewan. And there's a clear difference too. Of course, by square kilometres the vast majority of this province is one riding, and a reliably NDP riding it is too. But outside of Churchill, the rural ridings are pretty darn blue. In Winnipeg, though, we see more colours. It never gets overly red, but it gets a pretty deep purple in the south. The north is more reliably green though.

The Colours of the Ridings: Saskatchewan, 2008

Have you ever seen a variation on the colour wheel that you can find on some 'paint'-style computer programmes, that I call a 'colour hive', since it is often a grid of hexagonal cells?

Well, in any case, I was thinking about how to visually represent voting percentages in multiparty elections when it popped into my head. I got thinking about how you could use RGB values to produce a colour that was made up of the relative voting percentages of three parties - one for each primary colour.

Of course, there were no three-party races in Canada in 2008. Outside of Québec, they were four-way, and in Québec they were five-way. I decided to ignore the Green Party, and then be left with the Conservatives, the Liberals and the NDP. It was a no-brainer to call the Conservatives blue and the Liberals red - which left green for the NDP. A far cry from orange, but green is the NDP's secondary colour.

In other words, in a riding that went 50% CPC, 49.9% LPC and 0.1% NDP, the result would be a pretty vivid purple colour: half blue and half red. A riding that went 34%, 33% and 33% would more or less be grey.

I thought it would be a decent way to show the underlying differences that exist between 'a blowout for party A' and 'a narrow win for party A', something that you can't readily observe in areas that are painted as huge swaths of the same colour.

I chose Saskatchewan. I was curious to see how the province, the historical heartland of the NDP, could have elected no NDPs, letting in a Liberal amidst an otherwise uniform blue wave.

Was it really so uniform?

In retrospect, I shouldn't have chosen Saskatchewan for the experiment. Blue-green splits are less dramatic, colourwise, than, say, red-green. But I liked the experiment anyway. Most of these circles are pretty darn blue. Wascana fails to be red at all, since the Conservatives put up a good fight and the NDP were also in the mix - the result is an attractive brown. The NDP's best performance in the province, Saskatoon-Rosetown-Biggar, shows up as that colour, 'cyan', that no-one outside of the world of computers has heard of. And the northern riding showed good Liberal numbers and weak NDP numbers, giving it a purple colour.

I find it interesting that Saskatchewan has a strange riding system that kind of smells like Gerrymandering - though I don't accuse Elections Canada of actually intending it. There are no 'urban ridings' at all in Saskatchewan: four huge ridings, spreading across miles and miles of prairies, happen to intersect into a four-corners located squarely in downtown Saskatoon, and another four do the same thing in downtown Regina. These two cities each encompass part of several ridings, but no riding can claim to be 'Regina only' or 'Saskatoon only'. I wonder what urban dwellers in Saskatchewan think of this - certainly the NDP do best in cities, and were the election map drawn differently, the NDP would have taken a few seats in the province.

Anyway... I think aftert the election, I'll do some of these maps for the whole country. In the meantime, I might try a more competitive area. Manitoba, perhaps?