A Few Post-Election Numbers

I didn't have much of an opportunity this election to contribute to poll analysis. To be honest, I feel like this site ought to be non-partisan, and in the heat of the battle, I can get rather partisan. No harm done, though. Here are a few quick numbers:

Regarding the talk of 'vote splitting', Elections Canada's current numbers suggest that:

• 107 Conservative seats last night were won by 50% of the vote or more (meaning no combination of opposition support could have won them), while only 59 of them were in some way 'split'.
• Conversely, only 36 NDP seats were sure things. 67 of them could have gone another way if the opposition broke down differently (though the term 'vote splitting' rarely describes such a situation).
• Shockingly, only Gerry Byrne and Scott Simms of the Liberals got over 50% of the vote in their riding. Otherwise, 32 of their 34 ridings - every Liberal victory not on the island of Newfoundland, would have been lost in a conceptually strange 'ABL' combined vote.
• Not a single of the four BQ MPs got a majority of the vote in their riding. The highest, unsettlingly, was 38%.
• Though it was close, Elizabeth May fell short of 50%, and if the people who voted Liberal and NDP in her riding all voted for Gary Lunn instead, he'd still be in the cabinet today.

So with our new party alignment, what are the new two-way races? We know who came first in all the ridings, but who came second? Well, the numbers are truly shocking, and probably tell the real story even more than the baseline:

• Based on who came first or second, 148 of the ridings, just shy of half, are now Conservative-NDP races. The NDP came second in a remarkable 107 of Tory seats, and the Tories came second in 41 NDP wins.
• Quite amazingly, nationwide the NDP are 'competitive' (meaning first or second) in 233 of our 308 ridings - by a whisker, this is even more than the majority-government Conservatives, with 231 of the seats. That paints a shockingly bipartisan picture of our electorate, doesn't it?
• The full numbers, then, are as follows:
• Con-NDP: 107 races (64% of Conservative seats)
• Con-Lib: 56 races (40 of these are in Ontario)
• Con-Ind: 2 (Edmonton-Sherwood Park and Renfrew-Nipissing-Pembroke)
• Con-Green: 1 (Dufferin-Caledon)
• NDP-BQ: 42 races (remarkably, a higher number than the NDP-Con races)
• NDP-Con: 41 races
• NDP-Lib: 19 races (12 in Ontario or Québec)
• NDP-Ind: 1 (Portneuf-Jacques-Cartier)
• Lib-Con: 23 races (oddly only 8 in Ontario; also notice a total of only 79 ridings, barely a quarter of Canada, remain battles between the 'big two parties')
• Lib-NDP: 11 races
• BQ-NDP: 3 races
• BQ-Lib: 1 (Haute-Gaspésie-La Mitis-Matane-Matapédia, the only riding in Québec where the NDP came less than second)
• Green-Con: 1

Those are truly dramatic numbers. And for those who talk about 'vote splitting',  the Conservatives won by less than 50% in 35 of the 56 Con-Lib battles (this is a larger number than the number of seats the Liberals actually took), and in 23 of the 107 Con-NDP battles. I don't know how many of those 58 ridings would have turned away from the Tories merely by adding the Liberal and NDP numbers. Of the two Con-Ind battles, the Tories beat Hec Clouthier by a majority but beat James Ford by a mere plurality - although I'm not convnced that the 'vote splitting' in Edmonton-Sherwood Park was between Ford and the Liberals or NDP.

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?

The Liberals' and NDP's Strategies of Mutual Destruction

Please note: the above graphic requires detail that isn't really visible when it's this small. Please click on it to make it larger.

Jack Layton is criticising Stephen Harper. Michael Ignatieff is criticising Stephen Harper. It's a strange country we live in where the main goal these two men have in attacking Stephen Harper is not to steal votes from Harper but to steal votes from each other.

But it's true. The sad fact is the the NDP sees its best chance for growth in siphoning from the Liberals, and the Liberals see their best chance for growth in siphoning from the NDP. Both parties seem to think that Harper's 35-or-so percent is more or less carved in stone, and as yet they haven't made much of an attempt to take votes from the two seemingly 'single-issue' parties.

As Harper himself seems eager to paint them as natural coalition partners dying for the chance to jump in to bed with each other, it may seem bizarre to see these two 'infighting' so much. It must seem, from the outside, counteractive as hell - and there are many who consider it the surest way to get Harper's Conservatives a majority.

Is it?

Well, what I've done here is looked at the results of the 2008 election. And then what I've done is determined what the composition of the house would look like if we shifted support only between these two parties. So that suggests a scenario where everyone who voted CPC, Green or BQ last time does again this time, and the only fluidity is between the Liberals and the NDP, in a completely consistent and predictable fashion across the country. For the sake of consistency, the graph I've generated looks only at increments of ten percentage points, even though a shift of merely 1% is enough to get seats changing colours. So when it says, for example, "LIB-10%", that imagines a scenario where one in ten Liberal supporters starts voting NDP - in each riding, one-tenth of the 2008 Liberal vote is shaved off the Liberal tally and added to the NDP tally. Obviously this is going to see Liberals lose seats and the NDP gain seats, but it can also effect the other parties too: a riding where the Liberals finished first, the Conservatives finished second and the NDP finished third is likely to turn Conservative sooner than turn NDP as in this scenario Liberal support bleeds to the NDP. To what extent is this a problem?

Well, the results are interesting. The centre column of the graph shows the Commons composition that actually resulted from the 2008 vote. When we start to move left from there, as Liberal support goes, ten percentage points by ten percentage points, to the NDP, we see that the Liberal seat count drops swiftly and the NDP seat count rises. Ten percent gone and the Liberals lose ten seats, another ten percent gone and they lose another seventeen seats. Yet where the Liberals have lost 27 seats, the NDP have picked up only ten. Where have the other seventeen seats gone?

Amazingly, to the Conservatives. With no other factors affecting voting preferences, the defection of one in five Liberals to the NDP gives the Conservatives a majority. That is to say that in my scenario the Conservatives get not a single voter more than they had in 2008, yet this movement on the 'opposition' side gives them their majority.

It continues from there - to a point. If the Liberals shed 30% of their vote to the NDP, then the NDP pick up eleven seats, passing both the Liberals (now down to a mere 33 seats) and the stable BQ to form the official opposition - but to a further strengthened Conservative majority. The NDP's success at the Liberals' expense in this scenario has handed the Conservatives a remarkable 22 seats, which is even more than the NDP themselves have been able to pick up. In these 22 ridings, the Liberal vote has dropped below the Conservatives, but the NDP vote hasn't risen enough to pass the Conservatives. Yet, I hasten to add, though while the model continues, past here I think it really stretches the boundary of 'possibility' into 'strictly theoretical'.

But let's carry on: an extra ten percent reduces the Liberals to an eight-party rump, and this time it's just the NDP who benefit: the Conservatives and the Bloc stay more or less the same, while the NDP seat count vaults from 58 to 83. When we reach the 50% mark, the point were one in two 2008 Liberals have left the party and are now voting NDP, the Liberals have disappeared from Commons altogether and the NDP have now hit the 100 mark. One hundred MPs and a turnaround where the Conservative numbers are now starting to drop again - but at this 50% point, even if the 100-person-strong NDP caucus unites with the essentially-unchanged 50-strong Bloc caucus, and even in the unlikely event that Bill Casey and André Arthur side with them, the opposition is still not enough to topple Harper. The Conservatives still have a majority.

As we preside over the final destruction of the Liberals here, as we watch 60%, 70%, 80%, 90% and finally every last Liberal vote cross over to the NDP, these numbers switch. At 60%, the Conservatives lose their majority. At 80%, the NDP passes the Conservatives and we finally see the spectacularly unlikely face of Prime Minister Layton (provided Harper doesn't form a coalition with Duceppe...). And at the terminus of 100%, we have the point at which the Liberals and NDP have entirely combined to form a new party - a different 'unite the left' scenario - we see the NDP/Liberal party with 152 seats to the Conservatives' 113 and the Bloc's 41, and Casey and Arthur still laughing. But still no majority.

Which raises and entirely different point: that for all the talk of a divided left, that neither the NDP nor the Liberals can sneak to a majority by reaching into each other's pockets. In more than half the ridings in Canada, the theoretical combined Liberal/NDP vote remains less than the actual vote given to the Conservatives or the Bloc - there is simply no way either the Liberals or the NDP can get a majority without stealing votes from the Conservatives or Bloc, and there's no way they can get a functioning coalition without working with either of them. Not based on 2008's numbers, anyway.

Excepting that I've completely ignored the Green vote here. The Green vote could serve as a spoiler in a number of ridings, I don't know. That might be another thing to look at on another day.

However, I've only looked at half of the above graph. As the current Liberal caucus is much larger than the current NDP one, obviously the game of dominoes I've set up tumbles more entertainingly when we watch the Liberal vote shift to the NDP vote. But looking in the other direction, we see a very different story indeed.

Superficially, much is the same: the NDP number drops quickly, to the point where it takes a 50% vote shift to kill of the NDP completely (meaning that if half of all 2008 NDP voters in every riding in the country cast their votes this time out for the Liberals, the NDP would not win a single seat). We have to go all the way to 70% to see the Liberals pass the Conservatives as the party with the largest number of seats - what Harper would like to call 'the winner' (it was 80% for the NDP, though the 70% number was pretty close). And of course the end point is the same - as it should be, since 100% NDP support going to the Liberals is much like 100% Liberal support going to the NDP. The Liberals are as unable to vault to a majority on NDP backs as the NDP are on Liberal backs.

Yet there is a huge difference between these two scenarios: bleeding support from the NDP to the Liberals never pushes the Conservatives into majority territory - in fact, it never results in anything greater than a single seat gain for the Tories. In fact, as an NDP-to-Liberal bleed starts peeling seats away from the Bloc much faster than the other way round (since the NDP were much less of an issue in Québec in 2008 than they're shaping up to be thins time round), NDP-to-Liberal transfer immediately improves the total combined Liberal/NDP seat count.

A million other factors muddy the issue to the extent that nothing here has any value outside of the strictly academic, I concede. Yet when viewed strictly on the basis of this information here, the outcome is tough to overlook: to the extent that 'vote splitting' between the Liberals and the NDP can be seen as a 'key to a Conservative victory', it's really only true whenever the NDP manage to take votes from the Liberals: the Liberals can fearless steal from the NDP as much as they want without risking a Conservative majority, while the NDP can make no such claim.

A surprising result, perhaps. But one with many repercussions for the campaigns over the next month.

The Progressive Fiction on the Eve

In the past, I've mused aloud about a theoretical 'Progressive Party' - not one that would unite the Liberals and NDP, since I don't consider the Liberals a progressive party, but one that would unite the NDP, the BQ and the Greens. Implausible though I realise this is, I consider those three parties to represent the 'progressive voice' in Canada, and if you combine their levels of support, based on current polling, you'd have a party that would surpass the Liberals and compete very closely with the Conservatives.

Now I know, I know - such a party could never exist, and were such a theoretical beast occur anyway its levels of support would not be the current levels of support of the three parties added together: the question of Québec sovereignty obviously complicates things. As does the fact that not all Green voters (or BQ voters for that matter) are politically to the left, though as a countervailing force a strong united-left party would siphon some support from the current Liberals.

Anyway, let me have my fun. Since we might be minutes away from an election, I thought I'd use the current numbers Éric Grenier has at his sight threehundredeight.blogspot.com. He combines recent polls and uses his own algorithms to make seat projections. At the moment he has the following:

• The Conservatives: 38.3% support and 149 seats.
• The Liberals: 27.4% and 75 seats.
• The BQ, the NDP and the Greens in combination: 33.2% and 84 seats.

So just adding Grenier's seat counts for the Bloc and the NDP gives 84 seats and official opposition status. That 84 is 52 for the BQ and 32 for the NDP (1 in Québec, the other 31 in the rest of the country). That's interesting, but it's only half of the story. Since Grenier has riding-by-riding projections, you can add the vote for those three parties (or two outside of Québec) together and see if 'vote splitting on the left' is coasting any seats at the moment, seats that Grenier has going to the Conservatives or Liberals but that would go to a united Progressive Party if their votes were combines.

The answer is yes: not as much as you might suspect, but yes. Let's take a look:

In British Columbia, Grenier has 7 NDP seats, but the "Progressives" would get nine: Elizabeth May's obviously high Green numbers in her own Saanich-Gulf Islands would tip it from the Conservatives, and Greens more modest numbers in Vancouver Kingsway, a three-way split currently looking Liberal, would still be enough to tip it.

Grenier has every Alberta riding going Tory, but a united left could pry one away: Edmonton-Strathcona, which anyway has an NDP incumbent.

Grenier gives the NDP four Prairie ridings, all in Manitoba. A united "Progressive Party" would change nothing there.

In seat-rich Ontario, Grenier currently projects 15 NDP seats. Not that much would change, actually, but the Greens could help snag three more: Guelph, a comically mutipartisan riding with great Green numbers, would tip from the Liberals. Neither Sault Ste. Marie nor Welland have particularly impressive Green numbers, but they're currently neck-in-neck CPC/NDP races. Those stray percentage points would tip them both away from the Tories.

Québec is where the story gets interesting, obviously. The Bloc dominate, of course. The Greens aren't much of a presence here, but the NDP are at an all-time high in the province. So already the vast majority of seats are progressive: 52 BQ and 1 NDP. The Conservatives and the Liberals get a measly 22 combined, and a united "Progressive Party" would wrest away a further ten of those: Four of the Tories' current nine would tip: Beauport-Limoilou, Charlesbourg-Haute-Saint-Charles and Lotbinière-Chutes-de-la-Chaudière. Fully six of the Liberals' thirteen would tip as well: Honoré-Mercier, Hull-Aylmer, LaSalle-Émard, Laval-Les Îles, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce-Lachine and lastly Papineau. Additionally, I should note Lévis-Bellechasse, where the combined projected BQ/NDP/Green vote equals the projected CPC vote exactly. I decided to give the advantage to the incumbent, though, so it's not in the counts.

In the Atlantic provinces, across four entire provinces, not a single seat would waver in a combined "Progressive" scenario. Grenier's numbers, 13 Conservative, 15 Liberal and 4 NDP (read: "Progressive"), woud stay completely the same.

And in the North, Grenier's numbers, giving one each to the three main federal parties, would remain.

So in total, then, a united "Progressive Party" would see the following numbers: the Conservatives with 141, the Liberals with 67 and the Progressives with 100, and either official opposition status in a Conservative minority, official opposition status against a Tory/Grit coalition, or senior partner in a Progressive/Grit coalition. Not really wonderful numbers, actually.

But that's the rub at present: Grenier's current numbers show a scenario where the "Progressives" would still trail the Conservatives in every part of Canada except Québec, where they'd be trampling all over the opposition. Almost two in every three "Progressive" seats would come from Québec. Regionally, support percentages would be as follows:

• BC: CPC 41.5, Prog 32.3, LPC 24.0
• Alberta: CPC 62.4, Prog 18.0, LPC 17.0
• Prairies: CPC 51.0, Prog 26.3, LPC 21.2
• Ontario: CPC 41.4, LPC 33.7, Prog 23.7
• Québec: Prog 58.8, LPC 21.4, CPC 18.8
• Atlantic: CPC 36.9, LPC 35.4, Prog 24.6

Progressives in 2011 should thank God for Québec.

Canada: Alberta Unreformed

So it goes without saying that there's certainly a good reason why, in discussing the Conservative Party of Canada, they call Alberta 'Fortress Alberta'. It's tough to imagine a place so fond of a single political party. In the six elections they've contended under the names Reform, Canadian Alliance or the Conservatives, they've never taken fewer than 22 seats in a province that has a total of either 26 or 28 seats (depending on the year). In fact, there is a seventh: the Reform party comtended the 1988 election, but as a relatively minor party that took no seats. I don't include the 1988 election, because it ruins the narrative: one of the PC imploding spectacularly and two parties being born as a result, one of which is called Reform. Canadian electoral history is divided into pre-1993 and post-1993. So 1988 is 'old-school'. Irrelevant.

Anyway, I've been noticing with surprise that the Liberals seem to be doing rather well in Alberta - 'well' doesn't mean much, of course, as it's inconceivable that they could actually threaten the CPC. But the fact is that they are currently presenting themselves as the only real alternative in Alberta to Harper's party. I was a bit surprised to see this; I know the NDP have tended to do horribly in Alberta, but at least they're a Western party with at least a historical taste for a bit of populism. The Liberals are supposed to be everything Albertans hate about Ottawa, aren't they? Elitist, centralist, resource-stealing, Ontario and Québec controlling the country. Right?

Well, I decided to look at those six elections with the following premise: what would happen if the Reform / CA / CPC party just disappeared? If this party just didn't exist, where would the Albertan vote go?

Now, obviously my techniques here are hardly scientific. What I did was look at each seat that this party won and considered which party came in second. So if, say, the Reform Party took 65% and the Liberals took 15% (with the remaining 20% going to the NDP, the PCs and various other parties and candidates), I say that in the non-Reform world, this seat goes to the Liberals. Now, that's not entirely realistic. The Reform/CA/CPC gets in some ridings enormously high margins of victory, and with such a huge voter base left to redistribute, the numbers are really quite up in the air: and one imagines a fair amount would go to the PCs, despite the animosity those two parties had for each other in the early days.

Still, the results are intriguing. Here they are:

• In 1993, Reform took 22 of Alberta's 26 seats, and the Liberals took the other 4. In a non-Reform Alberta, the Liberals would dominate, taking 19 while the remaining 7 would go to the PCs.
• In 1997, Reform increased their seat count in Alberta, getting 24 and leaving only two to the Liberals. but a non-Reform Alberta would look exactly the same as it did in 1993: 19 Liberal seats, 7 PC seats.
• And how weird is this: in 2000, the renamed Canadian Alliance got 23 seats, while the Liberals took 2 and the PCs took 1. But without the CA? Well, we're starting to see a trand here, but 19 Liberal seats and 7 PC seats. Any hope for long-term trends dies here though, along with the PC party.
• In 2004, the newly-minted Conservative Party of Canada took 26 seats to the Liberals' 2 (a seat redistribution gave Alberta an added two seats). Amazingly, if there were no CPC, all 28 seats would have gone Liberal. So the Liberals being the main opposition to the Conservatives is evidently nothing new.
• In 2006, the Conservatives made a clean sweep of Alberta: all 28 seats. A non-CPC landscape (so this, the second-place finishers across the province) are a bit more interesting, though: the Liberals would have 18 seats, the NDP 8, the Greens 1 and one seat would go to an independent.
• The most recent election a near sweep for the Conservatives: 27 seats and just one for the NDP. There's a sea change below the water level, though. An Alberta sans Harper would give 16 seats to the NDP, 8 to the Liberals, 3 to the Greens and 1 to an independent. Intriguing stuff.

If we do have an election this year, Alberta's not going to be the most interesting story. It'll still be CPC all the way, with perhaps a few seats here or there (likely in Edmonton) being competitive. But if current trends hold, the NDP won't be what they were in 2008, when they made significant inroads as the main alternative to the Conservatives in Alberta. Odd that no-one even noticed that.

Canada: When to Leave

Beleaguered Alberta premier Ed Stelmach is stepping down.

It's interesting news: we've had three premiers retire or resign in the past few months. Danny Williams of Newfoundland retired with levels of support the likes of which we rarely see in Canada . The question there is how much the PC's sky-high levels of support depend on the personage of Williams himself - in other words, how much of those astronomic poll numbers are now available for the Liberals and (snort) the NDP to cherry-pick.

Gordon Campbell and Ed Stelmach wish that was their parties' main concern at the moment. You get the sense that Campbell understood that the BC Liberals were in a real free-fall, and that they had yet to bottom out. You sense that Campbell 'took one for the team', stepping down for the good of the party in order to take the blame personally for BC's current problems and let the party carry on without him. Amazingly, due also to similar stories in the NDP opposition, it may actually have worked. Time will tell, but on the day of Campbell's resignation he was looing at polls so terrible that an NDP victory at the next election seems like a done deal.

Alberta's somewhere in the middle, and this is where it intrigues so much. Its history is one of single-party dominance, where one party dominates politics for a generation and then in a single election is crushed into insignificance by another party, who holds the reins for a generation. Since 1935, these have been parties on the right: Social Credit until 1967, when they were challenged by the reemergent Progressive Conservatives, who have held the reins ever since.

By March of 2010, Stelmach's PCs were in a freefall, and the Wildrose Alliance had overtaken them in the polls. Projections based on the polls at the time showed that the WRA would have decimated the PCs, overtaking them as the party of government and as the main party of the right. And if we can understand anything from Alberta's history, that change might have been permanent.

Were Stelmach Cambell, that is the point at which he would have resigned. But he's not, and interestingly in the past 10 months or so, polls suggest the PCs have come around: surpassing the WRA or at least drawing even with them. "The inevitable" suddenly seemed a good deal less so.

I'm genuinely curious and unable to guess what this means for the 'battle for the right' in Alberta. The captain abandoning a sinking ship might be the single event that pushes Danielle Smith's Wildrose Alliance to electoral success (for thirty-some years, perhaps). Or does Stelmach see in Campbell's departure an example to imitate? Will Albertains forgive the party now that Stelmach is gone? One thing I can say for sure is that it's a huge gamble, one that I never saw coming.

Another thing I can say for sure is that while Dalton McGuinty is probably nonchalantly pretending not to care, Jean Charest is almost certainly in the curious position of wonder if there is anything - anything at all - that Québec can learn from Alberta.

Canada and the UK: Lessons From Britain

What we know, heading into 2011, regarding the Canadian political scene is this: there might be an election, but there might not. And if there is an election, it might change a lot, but it might not. Not much to go on, really.

The interesting thing, though, is that those among us who sense that the stasis that has set in regarding our political landscape might be shaken up (might need to be shaken up) have by-and-large ignored the Westminster System just across the Atlantic that has a half-year leg up on the changes we might well be seeing in Canada in 2011.

If we really do enter an era of coalitions, we shouldn't be looking at countries like Germany or Italy that know them well: we should be looking at the UK as it stumbles through its first proper coalition. The other way the UK presents a model for us is in the existence of Caroline Lucas, the UK's first-ever elected Green MP. This matters because (for now, anyway) the UK has the same problematic FPTP system that we do. So if Nick Clegg's reform referendum fails, sticking the UK with its current dysfunctional system, Caroline Lucas's successes and failures will tell us a lot about the feasability of having a Green Party in a Westminster FPTP system.

The comparison is not entirely valid. For instance, the three-party system that the UK has right now might seem to match ours quite closely (with the same colours, even), but since the mid-nineties, the non-right of the political spectrum in the UK has been really confused. The Liberal Democrats, whose participation in the current coalition has been disastrous for their popular support, appeared to be an option more progressive than the Labour party - an appearance not borne out of the histories of the two parties but on recent trends in parliament, current platforms, and to a large degree on the personages of Nick Clegg and Gordon Brown. Nick Clegg was the story of the 2010 election, and his party seemed like a vital alternative to the two stagnant main parties.

Things are different here. Setting aside the Greens and the BQ (who, of course, correspond to the SNP and the PC), we're quite clear on who our left, our centre and our right are - to the extent that the actual beliefs and policies of the NDP, the Liberals and the Conservatives respectively would do little to change that popular perception. A Conservative/NDP coalition seems even less plausible than a Conservative/LibDem one, which means that Nick Clegg's noble aspiration, as the third party, to negotiate with the first party before talking ot the second party might be dead on arrival domestically. It's a pity, because it's a mature and intelligent working system in a 'coalition era' of politics. But the concept of coalition has coalesced so firmly around the Liberals and the NDP that nothing else is even considered. Realistic in the short-term, I realise, but dangerous in the long.

Dangerous, perhaps, for the NDP. Whatever the rank-and-file might think, I think the NDP as a party has grown comfortable with its role as kingmaker: in Ontario it has been kingmaker a few times before and in 2011 there is a decent chance it will be again. Federally it was kingmaker in the 1970s, and was more comfortable in the role under Martin than it has been under Harper. If the scales tipped just enough this year to give the Liberals more seats than the Conservatives, I think the NDP would be happy to 'prop up' a minority - if they could introduce some key legislation during that time (say, regarding Afghanistan), then it might even help them. If the Conservatives still lead in total seat count (which seems likely), then the NDP are stuck where they were before - either discussing the so-called 'coalition of losers' that so inflamed popular opinion in 2008 or carrying on as they have been for five years now.

A genuine Liberal-NDP coalition presents an interesting challenge for the NDP: as we saw in the 1970s, failures would taint the NDP brand while successes would not necessarily vindicate them. It's tough for a junior partner to take much credit in a coalition, and it's here also that we need to look at the LibDems.

The numbers in the UK are horrifying: scant months ago at the polls, the LibDems took 23.0% of the vote to Labour's 29.0 and the Conservatives' 36.1. This happened after a heady post-televised-debate bubble that had all three parties polling equal numbers; there were even four polls that put the LibDems out front - on 24 April, YouGov posted the LibDems at an unbelievable 34%.

It was unbelievable. Unrealistic and unsustainable. YouGov today posts the following numbers: Labour 43%, Conservatives 37% and the LibDems 9%. The cost of coalition has been astonishing for the LibDems, though you could argue (quite rightly) that the LibDems' numbers were artificially inflated by wavering Labour supporters who have since returned home. Why they have returned home is important, and I don't think it's merely a distaste for the government side of Commons (though there's that). Yet think this way: of any five people who voted LibDem just a few months ago, only two remain faithful. More than half have wandered away. Obviously the tuition fiasco is of great importance. But it reflects the strange situation the LibDems, historically a centrist party, find themselves in: are they responsible to their party loyalists or to their most recent electors? If their intentions have been misunderstood by a large number of the people who cast votes for them (though the tuition fiasco is a bit different - it does seem to be a genuine turnaround), is that really their fault? And how grateful should they be for the votes they managed to secure last time around, if many of those votes were cast against the other two parties as opposed to genuinely for them?

For the moment at least, the LibDems and Labour are tied to each other: one party's success is the other party's failure. One wonders how well a Labour/LibDem government would have performed - and one wonders how well the LibDems would be polling were Nick Clegg Ed Miliband's junior partner. One also wonders where the UK Greens - a more soundly left-wing party than the Green Party of Canada - fit into all of this (quite well in the short-term, at least - were an election to be held tomorrow, Caroline Lucas's seat would seemingly be secure and perhaps joined by a few others). All this matters over here because whatever fluidity can be squeezed from the stone of Canadian politics falls clearly on the left side of the Conservatives-vs.-everyone-else axis. Coalition, merger, collapse, whatever: it's only a shakeup in the relative positions of the four non-Tory parties that can really change the composition of parliament. The signals from the UK are mixed at best. But we need to be reading them much more carefully than we currently are.

2008 Alternate Scenarios #1: D'Hondt, Part One

Image via WikipediaSo I've decided to look back at the 2008 election and crunch some numbers to consider how the votes cast in 2008 might have brought a different parliament had Canada had a different voting system than it currently does. I'm starting with the D'Hondt Method, a proportional representation system that delivers MPs in a ratio approximating the ratio of votes they recieved. It's a 'party list' system in principle, meaning you vote for a party and not an individual, and the MPs are chosen from lists. It might not necessarily have to be that way, but that's how it's applied generally.

Now, 2008 gave is the following result:

CPC 143, Lib 77, BQ 49, NDP 37, Ind 2.

A simple nation-wide proportional representation calculation using the D'Hondt method would have returned this:

CPC 118, Lib 82, NDP 56, BQ 31, Green 21.

Which is a huge decrease for the Conservatives and the BQ but a huge increase for the NDP and Greens. I'm surprised to find the Liberals actually gaining seats in a prop-rep simulation.

I can't really see a system like this flying with the Canadian people, mind you. It's too anonymous, and it sees Canada as one huge mass as opposed to a federation of provinces. It might go over better to apply the D'Hondt method to the results of each province (retaining the current number of seats per province). If we do that, we get the following:

Newfoundland and Labrador: Lib 4, NDP 2, CPC 1.
Prince Edward Island: Lib 2, CPC 2.
Nova Scotia: Lib 4, NDP 3, CPC 3, Green 1.
New Brunswick: CPC 4, Lib 4, NDP 2.
Québec: BQ 29, Lib 18, CPC 17, NDP 9, Green 2.
Ontario: CPC 42, Lib 37, NDP 19, Green 8.
Manitoba: CPC 7, NDP 3, Lib 3, Green 1.
Saskatchewan: CPC 8, NDP 4, Lib 2.
Alberta: CPC 20, NDP 3, Lib 3, Green 2.
British Columbia: CPC 17, NDP 9, Lib 7, Green 3.
Yukon: Lib 1.
Northwest Territories: NDP 1.
Nunavut: CPC 1.

Which gives us a grand total of:

CPC 122, Lib 85, NDP 55, BQ 29, Green 17.

Not radically different from the nation-wide D'Hondt: a few extra seats for the Conservatives and Liberals, a few fewer for the Greens - closer to reality, maybe, except for a further BQ drop. But you can see how having this additional distribution of numbers might make for a more convincing system: Prince Edward islanders, for example, would be able to identify the two Conservative MPs and the two Liberal MPs who were 'theirs'. The North, incidentally, remains exactly the same, since a prop-rep region of one seat is effectively a FPTP region.

Ontario and Québec in particular, however, remain pretty impersonal. How would someone from, say, Trinity-Spadina or someone from, say, Nickel Belt know which MP was 'theirs'? Which one to write a letter to for whatever reason it is that normal citizens write MPs? Sure, with 105 riding and 105 MPs, we could arbitrarily allocate one MP to each riding, but that would be a sheerly bureaucratic decision. Which eight ridings would get Green MPs?

The smaller a D'Hondt region gets, the less useful the D'Hondt system is. But if you broke up larger provinces into smaller regions, you might have results that gave an increased sense among the public that the MPs actually represented a constituency and not merely represented their parties. That's what I'd like to do, but it'll take a bit of time, and number-crunching...

Canada: King Jack

Image by mattjiggins via Flickr
Of the several ways that Jack Layton is very truly Ed Broadbent's heir, one of the most obvious is that he is personally much more popular than his party. One wonders if this is not a prerequisite for leading the NDP (or, thinking of Carole James, Darrell Dexter and Bob Rae, among others I should say a prerequisite for leading the federal NDP). One almost wonders if people don't compensate for not supporting the NDP by tossing their leader a few bones.

The extent, though, is almost comical. Angus Reid does this kind of stuff best. In addition to simple 'approval/disapproval' questions, they also ask what characteristics best describe the four main pary leaders (Elizabeth May is not included, for one reason or another). On this particular front, Layton has always performed well, but Angus Reid has new numbers and they're even better than usual. I thought it would be interesting to quantify just how well.

A random example of these numbers might be 'open' (as opposed to 'secretive'). Harper, Duceppe and Ignatieff are seen as 'open' by 8%, 9% and 10% respectively of the public polled by Angus Reid. Layton, on the other hand, is seen as 'open' by fully 29% of the public. 29% is not a stellar number, but it's more than the other three combined. You might not believe that that was a random selection, but let me put it this way: of the nine positive traits on Angus Reid's poll (down-to-earth, open, efficient, compassionate, honest, strong, exciting, in-touch, and intelligent), Layton scores better than the other three on every one except 'efficient' and 'strong' (in both cases, he comes second behind Harper). Of the nine negatives, primarily opposites to the positives (arrogant, secretive, inefficient, uncaring, dishonest, weak, boring, out-of-touch, foolish), Layton gets the best scores (obviously, the lowest percentages in these cases) on every one except 'weak', where he is beaten by both Harper and Duceppe.

Putting these numbers into action, I decided to add together the 'negative trait' values of each of the leaders and then the 'positive trait' totals. The numbers are interesting.

Stephen Harper's total negative-characteristic score is 258. That means that the total of the percentages of people who attributed each of those nine negative values listed above to Harper is 258 - his number is highest, which doesn't mean he's the least-liked leader, merely the one the most people have an opinion on. Ignatieff comes next with 245, quite near to Harper. Duceppe's negative values total 178, though I should mention that Angus Reid only asks about Duceppe in Québec. Nationwide this number would presumably be higher. Jack Layton leads the pack with 121, which is less than half of Harper and Ignatieff's numbers.

Looking at those nine positive traits, Ignatieff can muster only a meagre 82 points across them. Considering that that's the total of nine different percentages, that's a lousy number. 'Intelligent' is the only thing that a decent number of Canadians have positive to say about Ignatieff, and even at that Harper and Layton beat him (Ignatieff's numbers are bottom of the pack in every other positive trait: only one in fifty Canadians, for example, describes him as 'exciting'). Duceppe gets an also-weak total of 105. Harper may have the largest negative total, but his positive total is high too - 146 points, reflecting again the fact that more people have opinions about him (one way or another) than the other three. Still though, Layton pulls far ahead with 215 points. The average Canadian can find almost three good things to say about Layton for every one good thing they can find to say about Ignatieff.

If you subtract the negative totals from the positive totals, the results are striking: Ignatieff fails miserably, with a total of -163. Harper does only a little better, with -112. Duceppe remains in the negative, with -73, but Layton not only has a net positive rating, but quite a decent one: +94. That's an amazing difference, really. By this particular measure, Layton is head-and-shoulders above the competition.

It's arguable how much that actually means: Ipsos Reid also has numbers out that show Harper leading the competition on the question of 'who would make the best prime minister': 43% say Harper, 33% say Layton and 24% say Ignatieff. It's tough to be sure how to analyse that, except to say that Canadians like Layton more than they actually want him to be prime minister. That's an awkward position for Layton to be in, but all in all these polls clearly look good for him. Especially if he ignores polls that discuss voting intent.

Related articles

• Contrasting New Democrats (theglobeandmail.com)
• Lessons from successful politicians: How Canada's junior coalition partner went on to win more votes and seats (solutionfocusedpolitics.wordpress.com)
• Harper best choice for prime minister: poll (nationalpost.com)

Ontario and Other Kingmakers

So there's a belief that you come across every now and then that Ontario determined federal elections; that what Ontario wants, Ontario gets. Historically, this claim has most often been made in connection to so-called 'Western Alienation', the feeling that the Western provinces are left outside the halls of power. In fact, as often as not that claim is made not merely of Ontario but of Ontario and Québec in combination as 'Central Canada' or the whole of the country east of Manitoba as 'Eastern Canada'. As those geographic blocs, however, form a majority of seats in parliament, I'm not sure how meaningful it is to talk about them dominating politics. To take my point to an extreme, if someone from the North complained that 'the provinces' held too much power, they would by any definition be factually right, but it would be tough to argue it as a failing of democracy.

Breaking the country into four blocs - the West, Ontario, Québec, and the Atlantic - is practical as the four contituent parts each hold a large amount of seats (at present 92, 106, 75 and 32 respectively), and as they're each terms with historical merit ('The West' is the most nebulous term, really, consisting of four provinces each with very distinct voting trends, but when totalled, trends do emerge).

In this exercise, I've gone back to Diefenbaker's 1958 landslide, and in each case I've looked at the total number of seats per party returned in each of the four regions, and I've also considered what Parliament would look like if it were composed of the whole country minus the region in particular. In other words, a "minus-Ontario" result would be the combined seat totals for the West, for Québec and for the Atlantic (the North as well - in each case I include the North's three seats in relevant national totals, but otherwise ignore them); as if Ontario had seceded from the union prior to the election.

The point of this math is to consider scenarios where the actual government formed by the election in question (which party, and whether it was a majority or a minority) differed from the "-Ontario" result; if removing Ontario from the equation would produce a different government than actually occurred.

The overview results are interesting themselves: In 17 elections, the nation as a whole has returned 6 Liberal majorities and 4 Liberal minorities, 3 PC majorities and 2 PC minorities, and two Conservative majorities. So Liberal domination, but a relatively healthy bipartisan mix. Looking at the regions, though, shows quite a difference: the Atlantic considered alone returned 9 PC majorities, 8 of them straight, between 1958 and 1984; after that, they switched teams decisively, electing 7 liberal majorities, interrupted by their only plurality: the surprising result in 1997 when the Atlantic returned a plurality of PC MPs.

Québec looks similar. Though they went PC for Diefenbaker and Mulroney (being largely responsible for Canada's only two near-consensuses in recent history), otherwise it was Liberal pre-Mulroney (7 straight majorities, one plurality) and BQ post-Mulroney (6 straight majorities). The West, despite an amazing volatility in BC and intermittently strong NDP results in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, have been remarkably consistent in their affections. Trudeaumania took over BC in 1968 enough to return a Liberal plurality, but otherwise it's been non-stop PC majorities from 1958 to 1988, non-stop Reform/CA/Conservative majorities since.

That leaves Ontario, which perhaps is the Bellwether, based on how consistent the other three regions have been. Ontario has returned 11 Liberal majorities, 2 PC majorities, 2 PC pluralities and 1 Conservative plurality.

Overall, the West has swayed the winning party on three occasions (1962, 1979 and 2006), while Ontario has done so on three occasions (1979, 1997 and 2004), and Québec on four occasions (1963, 1965, 1972 and 1980 - remarkably a Québec-less Canada would have returned the PCs every year from 1958 to 1988 except in 1968). The Atlantic since 1958 have not once swayed an election.

Looking down the years, then:

• In 1958, Diefenbaker won a decisive majority. Each region gave a majority of seats to the PCs, so obviously each 'minus parliament' also did so. It's interesting that while the Liberals tend to be 'Canada's natural governing party', the only true landslide sea-to-sea consensuses we've seen have both been PC.
• 1962 brought a PC minority, the first of three minorities. The coasts stayed majority-PC, while Ontario returned a Liberal majority and Québec a Liberal plurality. 1962 definitely shows that the 'Central Canada' thesis has holes in it: Ontario and the Atlantic had no affect, while Québec held the PCs to a minority (a minus-Québec parliament would have returned a PC majority) and the West actually chose the PM (a minus-West parliament would have been Liberal minority).
• 1963, though, shifts the numbers just enough to prove the West's point: a Liberal minority brought about by the coasts returning majority PC MPs and the 'centre' returning Liberal majorities. But the minus-numbers tell an interesting story. Again, Ontario and the Atlantic had no effect, while the West this time kept the Liberals to a minority and Québec turned the tides, from a PC minority to a Liberal one.
• 1965 was another Liberal minority, and everything I've said for 1963 applies here too, except that a minus-Atlantic parliament would have been an even split: 116 Liberals to 116 'others'. I think technically that's a Liberal minority, but I'm not entirely sure how to classify it.

• 1968 is Trudeau's big year, and a Liberal majority. It's interesting to note, looking back, that Trudeau's party-poopers were not the West so much as the Atlantic. The West brought a threadbare Liberal minority, while the Atlantic decisively stuck with favourite son Robert Stanfield, giving his PCs 25 in 32 seats. 'Central Canada', of course, went deep red. This was a Liberal majority, and no single region could have changed it from a Liberal majority.
• Trudeau won 1972 too, but by two seats. The Atlantic kept its PC majority, the West returned to a PC majority (never again to waver), and Ontario went to a PC plurality. Thus, it seems like 1972 was Québec's year, with their decisive Liberal majority keeping Trudeau at 24 Sussex. And indeed, Ontario and the Atlantic had no effect, while the West held Trudeau to a majority, and a minus-Québec parliament would have been a PC majority.
• In 1974, Trudeau got his majority back, and the numbers are similar, just shifted in the Liberals' favour. PC majorities in the West and Atlantic, Liberal majorities in Québec and Ontario, and the notion that 'Central Canada' runs the country quite firmly established by now. This is certainly the case in 1974, with neither the West nor the Atlantic having any sway, with Ontario enough to shift it from a Liberal minority to a Liberal majority, and with Québec's vote enough to move from a PC minority to a Liberal majority.
• 1979's PC minority was interesting. This time out Ontario joined the West and the Atlantic in returning PC majorities, while Québec returned another Liberal majority. Only the Atlantic had no sway this time: were it not for the West, the PC minority would have been a Liberal majority. Were it not for Ontario, the PC minority would have been a Liberal minority. And were it not for Québec, the PC minority would have been a decisive majority. No wonder the government was doomed to failure.
• 1980 brought Trudeau decisively back, with another Liberal majority. With the West returning only two Liberals and Québec only one PC (PC majority and Liberal majority respectively), it increasingly looks like Ontario really is the kingmaker, its fickle preferences dictating results when the West and Québec are so decisive in their support for their 'home teams'. In fact, both it and the Atlantic 9for the first time) went Liberal-majority. Only Québec can lay claim to holding sway, though, as minus-parliaments for the other three regions still return Liberal majorities, while a minus-Québec again brings a PC minority.

• 1984 is our second landslide, with Mulroney's PCs gaining a majority in each region (in each province and territory, in fact) and reducing the Liberals to 40 seats. There's little to say here - electing Mulroney was a nation-wide effort, and no individual region could have stemmed that tide (or wanted to, as it transpired).
• 1988 was another PC majority, but less decisively. Ontario gave the PCs only a plurality, while the Atlantic returned a Liberal majority. With the West handing the NDP their best-ever result (while still going PC-majority, though), it seems like Mulroney had Québec to thank, proving that after years of kingmaking for the Liberals, La Belle Province could play kingmaker for the PCs too. Interesting, then, that after this election Québec will decisively turn away from affecting federal outcomes, remaining by and large on opposition benches henceforth. As it turns out, though, no single region kept Mulroney in power. A minus-Québec would have still been PC, but minority, while the other three regions had no effect.

• 1993, of course, is where everything changed. I imagine most Canadians old enough to remember could tell you that Ontario and the Atlantic sent decisive Liberal majorities, while the West sent a Reform majority and Québec a BQ majority. What all this means, though, is that ultimately not one region could be said to have turned this election, however it appears. A minus-West election and a minus-Québec election would have unsurprisingly returned Liberal majorities. So would have a minus-Atlantic parliament. A minus-Ontario parliament would have returned a minority, but the Liberals would still have won it.
• 1997 was perhaps even more interesting. The only regional overall change from 1993 was that the Atlantic went plurality-PC (thus each of the four regions preferred a different party). Like last time, neither the West nor Québec nor the Atlantic could have prevented a Liberal majority, but this time the majority was all Ontario's - two-thirds of Chrétien's MPs were from Ontario. A minus-Ontario parliament would have returned, of all things, a Reform minority. But it would have been almost completely dysfunctional, with 60 Reform MPs, 54 Liberals, 44 Bloquistes, 21 New Democrats and 19 PCs. God know what kind of bills, if any, that parliament could pass.
• 2000 was 1993 again: Liberal majorities in Ontario and the Atlantic, a barebones BQ majority in Québec, and another majority for the Party-Formerly-Known-as-Reform in the West. A Liberal majority, that without Ontario would have been a minority, but otherwise no region could have changed.
• The Liberals won in 2004 too, if a minority mandate can truly be called 'winning' and 'merely not losing'. The regions once again still look the same, though that western party is now called the Conservatives. Neither Québec nor the Atlantic could have swayed a Liberal minority, but but for the West it would have been a Liberal majority, and but for Ontario it would have been a Conservative minority. As indeed it was about to be.
• 2006 brought Harper's Conservatives a minority, elected through regional majorities: the BQ in Québec, the Liberals in Ontario and the Atlantic, and the CPC in the West. So while all four regions have returned the exact same results in each of the previous three elections, the result has shifted from Liberal majority to Liberal minority to Conservative minority. And quite clearly the West were kingmakers this time, as no other region could have prevented a Conservative minority, but a minus-West parliament would have been another Liberal minority.
• By 2008, the Conservatives had been able, with a pickaxe, to slowly pick away at Liberal support in Ontario to the point that this time out they'd tipped the balance - a CPC plurality in Ontario. The other three regions have stuck with their favourites for the sixth time in a row (excepting the Atlantic in 1997) though, suggesting again that Ontario is where elections are made and broken. In fact, though, we have Québec to thank for the current government makeup. None of the West, Ontario or the Atlantic could have changed a CPC minority, but were it not for Québec, Harper would have had his long-dreamed-of majority.

What to do with all this information? Well, what it shows me is that the West is more of a kingmaker than Westerners might think but that ultimately Québec wields the most power - especially before the birth of the BQ. It's also interesting to see just how little power the Atlantic actually have. Unsurprising, perhaps, in terms of overall numbers, but seeing how independent-minded they can be, still unexpected.

Related articles, as Zemanta would like you to know.

• ‘Cluster’ strategy puts Tories on track for majority, poll suggests (theglobeandmail.com)
• Ten years later, Trudeau divides us still (fullcomment.nationalpost.com)
• The Liberals shall rise again (fullcomment.nationalpost.com)
• Hebert: 10 years on, who will save Trudeau's legacy? (thestar.com)

The Progressives: A Further Fiction

Just playing around with the Uniform Swin model Excel file that you can download at the Paulitics blog.

I decided to try using the current projection at ThreeHundredEight, which is to say the current regional voting estimates. The Paulitics model crunches the numbers differently than ThreeHundredEight does, though, since the same numbers give pretty different results. The Paulitics model gives us:

• Conservatives: 129
• Liberals: 88
• NDP: 36
• Bloc Québécois: 52
• Green: 0
• Others: 3

It's a bit odd to see three 'others' seats, and I guess it's a problem with the model that it lumps all 'others' data together. Still, interesting numbers, that produce the same kind of result as any other poll or poll ananlysis out there: Conservative minority.

But that's just the starting point. I then decided to look at the numbers for my 'progressives' fiction, wherein the NDP, the Greens and the Bloc united, without shedding any support. In other words, I combined the current vote for the NDP and Green Parties, putting the combined total into the NDP box, for all of Canada except Québec, where I combined the total of the three and put that total in the BQ box. What did that give us?

• Conservatives: 113
• 'Progressives': 110
• Liberals: 82
• Others: 3

Interesting numbers. And interesting in that 'Progressive' gains would come pretty much completely at the expense of the Conservatives - the Liberals would stay more or less constant. The regional seat-by-seat breakdown would be as follows:

• BC: Prog 15, CPC 14, Libs 7
• Alberta: CPC 25, Prog 2, Other 1
• Prairies: CPC 20, Prog 5, Libs 3
• Ontario: CPC: 44, Libs 41, Prog 21
• Québec: Prog 61, Libs 12, CPC 1, Other 1
• Atlantic: Libs 18, CPC 9, Prog 4, Other 1
• North: Prog 2, Libs 1

I don't know how reliable these numbers are, but they're intriguing. BC, where the Greens are not an insignificant party, gets its numbers rearranged dramatically. Much of the rest of the country doesn't, however. I'm surprised to see the 'Progressives' so low in Atlantic Canada, for example.

This particular parliament would be pretty darn unworkable, wouldn't it? Or rather it would put a lot of power into the hands of the Liberals. It actually resembles the UK political dynamic.

But let's take it further: let's imagie that a united Progressive party would be enough to win over one in ten current CPC supporters and one in five current Liberal supporters. What then?

Well, we still wouldn't be in majority territory. There might be something off about my calculations, but now I get:

• BC: Prog 22, CPC 10, Libs 4
• Alberta: CPC 25, Prog 2, Other 1
• Prairies: CPC 17, Prog 9, Libs 2
• Ontario: CPC 46, Libs 30, Prog 30
• Québec: Prog 65, Libs 8, CPC 1, Other 1
• Atlantic: Libs 13, CPC 10, Prog 8, Other 1
• North: Prog 2, Libs 1

For a grand total of:

• Progressives: 138
• Conservatives: 109
• Liberals: 58
• Other: 3

A minority, but a significantly stronger minority than the one we currently have. Interesting that my 'step one' ate away at the Conservatives more than the Liberals but that my 'step two' has decimated the Liberals. Highly interesting (though not implausible) that my 'step two' actually increases the Conservatives' seats in Ontario. And interesting that despite all this number crunching (combining three parties and taking a significant chunk from the remaining two), the Progressives not only don't get a majority nationwide but they also lag far behind everywhere except BC and Québec.

Strange numbers. Expect me to use the Paulitics model for other stuff too.

Canada: "The Progressives", a Fiction

Image via Wikipedia
So I'm looking at the newest EKOS numbers - they have a few extra parameters this week. I've been considering a particular fiction that crops up every now and then: the idea that more unity existed on the left side of the spectrum. I'm not talking about some grand coalition or merger between the Liberals and the NDP; considering the Liberals to be what Trudeau once called the 'radical middle', I consider the three mainstream parties that have left-of-centre platforms (regardless of the political alliegances of their supporters): the NDP, the Bloc Québécois and the Green Party.



Let's consider a particular fiction: that these three parties somehow merged and shed no support to other parties. Would it affect the political landscape? Wow, would it ever:

• Nationwide, the Progressives have a slight lead over the Conservatives at 35.5% to 34.4%. The Liberals trail at 27.8%.
• In BC, the Conservatives have a slight lead, at 40.9% to the Progressives' 38.7%. The Liberals are far behind at 16.3% (though British Columbians are to pollsters as Samoans are to anthropologists).
• 'Fortress Alberta' remains firmly in Conservative hands with an amazing 61.8%. The Progressives and the Liberals are far behind at 19.9% and 15.0%.
• The Prairies are also safe for the Conservatives, with 45.0%. The Progressives are in second at 30.7%, with the Liberals trailing at 20.2%.
• Ontario is a tight race between the Conservatives at 37.8% and the Liberals at 37.3%. The Progressives trail at 23.8%.
• 'Fortress Québec' remains firmly in Progressive hands, with a remarkable 59.8%. The Liberals and the Conservatives trail at 24.0% and 13.7% respectively.
• Atlantic Canada has the Liberals out front at 37.0%, but it's a rather tight race, with the Progressives polling second at 33.7% and the Conservatives at third at 26.9%.
• Urban centres look like the following:
• Vancouver: CPC 43.6%, Prog 34.0%, Libs 16.5%
• Calgary: CPC 57.6%, Libs 22.0%, Prog 16.0%
• Toronto: Libs 44.4%, CPC 35.8%, Prog 17.9%
• Ottawa: Libs 37.5%, CPC 35.0%, Prog 27.5%
• Montréal: Prog 62.6%, Libs 27.2%, CPC 8.1%
• The gender gap is strong.
• Nationwide, the Conservatives lead among men at 40.0% to the Progressives' 32.4% and the Liberals' 25.8%.
• Women, on the other hand, put the Progressives ahead at 38.6% with the Liberals in second at 29.9% and the Conservatives in third at 28.5%
• Huge gaps surround age too.
• Under 25s have the Progressives at 45.1 to the Liberals' and Conservatives' 26.5% and 25.4%.
• The 25-44 age group also has the Progressives in the lead at 38.6%, but the Conservatives overtake the Liberals 31.8% to 27.1%.
• In the 45-64 group, the Conservatives overtake the Progressives 36.3% to 34.8%. The Liberals trail at 26.7%.
• In the 65+ group, the Conservatives are well in the lead at 41.8%. The Liberals pass the Progressives 32.4% to 24.1%.
• Country of birth matters as well.
• Canadian-born Canadians have the Progressives ahead at 38.0%, with the Conservatives at 32.8% and the Liberals in the basement at 26.2%.
• Foreign-born Canadians put the Liberals in the lead, however, with 38.1% to the Conservatives' 31.4%. The Progressives trail at 27.8%.
• Education also makes a significant difference.
• People with no post-secondary education put the Conservatives and the Progressives almost exactly equal, at 38.3% and 38.0% respectively. The Liberals trail at 20.7%.
• People with a college or CEGEP education are similar, though they push the Progressives ahead at 36.4% to the Conservatives' 34.5%. The Liberals again trail at 25.7%.
• Among university grads, though, the split is effectively three-way, with the Liberals at a slight lead with 33.8% over 33.2% for the Progressives. The Conservatives keep it tight at 31.9%

Quite interesting, no? Considering it this way shows a rough three-way split nationwide but all kids of variation across demographics. Looking at these stats a little more graphically, in each case I'm forgetting the numbers and just looking at the one-two-three positions, colouring them blue for Conservatives,  red for Liberals and green for the theoretical Progressives:

• #1, #2, #3: Nationwide
• #1, #2, #3: BC
• #1, #2, #3: Alberta
• #1, #2, #3: Prairies
• #1, #2, #3: Ontario
• #1, #2, #3: Québec
• #1, #2, #3: Atlantic
• #1, #2, #3: Vancouver
• #1, #2, #3: Calgary
• #1, #2, #3: Toronto
• #1, #2, #3: Ottawa
• #1, #2, #3: Montréal
• #1, #2, #3: Men
• #1, #2, #3: Women
• #1, #2, #3: Under 25
• #1, #2, #3: 25-44 years old
• #1, #2, #3: 45-64 years old
• #1, #2, #3: 65+
• #1, #2, #3: Canadian-born
  
• #1, #2, #3: Foreign-born
• #1, #2, #3: High school
• #1, #2, #3: College / CEGEP
  
• #1, #2, #3: University grads

Or, what is probably a better way to view this whole mess:

• #1, #2, #3: Nationwide, 25-44 years old, Canadian-born, College / CEGEP
• #1, #2, #3: BC, Alberta, Prairies, Vancouver, Men, 45-64 years old, High school
• #1, #2, #3: Ontario, Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa, 65+, Foreign-born
• #1, #2, #3: Québec, Montréal, Women, Under 25
• #1, #2, #3: Atlantic, University grad

There is no demographic ranking Liberals first, Conservatives second and Progressives third.

Canada: One Loser, No Winners

So Nanos has some new numbers out.

Nothing spectacular about them - just corroboration of EKOS, both of whom see, surprisingly, a Conservative rise this week. But apart from the current numbers, what caught my eye was a chart tracking voting intentions all the way back to 2002. I'm not happy to cut-and-paste from another site, but the graph that I'm including here, for reference, comes directly from the link at the top of the page.

Interesting it certainly is. Looking across the chart from 2002 to present, the main thing you note is the terrible dive Liberal numbers have taken: from 49.0% to 32.9%, meaning fully one in three 2002 Liberals can now be found elsewhere.

But where exactly? While each of the other four parties has shown an increase in the interim, the increases are all mild: to the Liberals' -16.1% drop, we see relatively paltry gains of 1.6% for the Conservatives, 3.8% for the BQ, 6.3% for the NDP and 4.9% for the Greens, since they weren't even on the survey in 2002.

There are a few huge caveats to observe here: first, it's remarkable that in 2002, 35.0% of the country was willing to vote for a party that wouldn't exist for another year and a half. I have to presume that 35.0% was the combined total of the PC and CA numbers, rather dodgy science to be sure. And even if this is true, conventional wisdom has it that the redder Tories reacted badly to the merger, drifting to the Liberals or elsewhere. And yet the first major thing we see happening after December 2003 is not a drop in the blue line but a huge drop in the red line. What's that all about?

After all, after that drop, the Liberals are sitting at 37.0% - it had already shed 12.0 of the 16.1% it was due to drop, and the remainder is not all that significant, statistically. You might call it stasis since then.

If it is stasis, though, it's highly unstable. Based on unreality as those numbers may be, the left side of the graph shows a political scene Canadians are well familiar with - two clearly dominant parties with not-insignificant additional parties laying well below the others. Somewhere between bipartisan and multipartisan. That's still true when you look on the right side of the graph, perhaps, but it's much muddier. For a while now, the combined totals of the NDP, the BQ and the Green Party have surpassed or at least drawn even with the two 'ruling' parties. Not that that means anything except as an intriguing reading of the statistics, but parties are hardly 'fringe' when in combination the rival the 'majors'.

We've been here before. The merger of the PC and CA parties really was a game-changer, but it only brought back the appearance of a renewed bipartisanism. The 1990s were a strange time for Canadian politics. Chrétien's Liberals were able to get back-to-back majorities with as low as 38.46% of the vote. That bears consideration: Chrétien was able to secure a majority with just a percentage point or two more than Harper's Conservatives are currently polling.

The cure in 2003 was to 'unite the right'. The death of bipartisanism was dealt with by attempting to revive it. I'm sceptical of equivalent 'unite the left' talk at the moment, because the perception of unity the Liberals, the NDP, the BQ and the Greens appear to have (all parties are happy to admit that at the moment 'us vs. them' means Conservatives vs. everyone else) is little more than skin-deep. I think we need to have a discusison in Canada about the permanent death of bipartisanism, and how to overcome adversarial politics in a landscape where it's no longer feasable.

32.4% is an atrocious number for the party that has spent the majority of Canada's time as a nation as the government. 36.6% is a horrible number for the party currently controlling the government. But those are bad numbers only in the context of 'how we do things in Canada': in Germany in 2009, the CDU/CSU had a 'decisive' victory with only 33.8% of the vote, in Italy in 2008 Berlusconi comfortably won with 37.4%. Our closest parliamentary role model, the UK, just saw the Conservatives take power with 36.1%. This is how democracy works in modern western countries. Multipartisanism is the norm.

Within the Canadian context at the moment, the word 'coalition' is always assumed to mean a Liberal/NDP coalition. The is mostly based around the adversarial character of the Conservative Party at the moment: both that it suits their purposes to frighten people about the spectre of a 'coalition of losers' (perhaps with the BQ tossed in) and also that it's quite impossible to imagine the conservatives entering into a genuine power-sharing agreement with any of its opponents.

But that will have to change sooner or later. Harper is right when he says a coalition of parties that excludes the single party that earned the most votes lacks legitimacy. Globally there is increasingly a sense that in multipartisan democracies, the single party that gets the largest share of votes and/or seats has the right to attempt to form a viable coalition. For the sake of the maturity of our political system, I would welcome the idea of the Conservatives entering into formal coalition talks after the next election, provided they got the most votes.

A majority of Canadians, EKOS tells us, want a return to majority government. That might be all but impossible; what we need is to turn away from unstable minority governments. The unchecked power to follow an agenda as far as possible is a risk we might in the long-term be happy to avoid. But operating under the constant threat of, and the well-honed dread of, elections has caused out entire political system to coalesce around opinion polls. Never before have Ipsos, Angus Reid, EKOS and Nanos wielded so much power. Canada needs to enter into a discussion about how to learn to accept the idea of coalition.

On the other hand, though, at present the Conservatives would seemingly be unable to put together a stable coalition with any other party. What then? I suspect that the 2008 attempt by the Liberals, the NDP and the BQ to form a coaltion was so poorly recieved because it seemed undemocratic. Perhaps it was: but if the first party proves unable to put together a stable parliamentary majority, it should fall to other parties to attempt to do so. This would, I think, be the beginnings of a modern political system, one where a multitude of voices does not come at the price of an increase in instability, and one, hopefully, that can get over the destructive adversarial nature of Canadian politics at the moment.

Toronto and Canada: One vs. the Others

The municipal race currently 'heating up' in Toronto, an election campaign that makes the American presidential race seem like a sprint, is an interesting paradox: it's by far the most partisan non-partisan electoral system I've ever seen. While there may tehnically be no parties on the bill, it still feels very much like a  party system. And furthermore, as superficially different as they might look on the outside, it reminds me most of our federal political landscape.

How? Well, post-Sarah Thomson there are now four major candidates. Similarly, federally we have four major candidates outside of Québec. Seemingly a healthy multipartisan democracy. But one which, after the battle lines are drawn, still seems quite polar. Still seems 'us vs. them', or rather 'us vs. him'.

Neither Toronto as a whole nor Canada as a whole is especially conservative. Within the '416', in fact, conservative viewpoints (small-c intentional but capital-C too) form a distinct minority of the public discourse. In both cases, the front-runner is a distinctly conservative candidate, but in both cases they are running at the front with far less than 50% of the vote.

Whenever people are talking about Coca-Cola and Pepsi, and claiming to like one while hating the other, I am baffled. "But they taste the same!", I call out, and people disagree vehemently. "Put it this way," I say, "Compare Coke to Pepsi and, say, a glass of milk. Don't they seem the same now?"

Municipally and federally, it seems like the same kind of thing. Looking merely at Joe Pantolone, George Smitherman and Rocco Rossi, there seem to be a million differences between them, and in fact those three names alone do roughly represent the left, centre and right of the spectrum. Yet introduce front-runner Rob Ford into the equation, and suddenly the first three seem like mirror images of each other. How is this? Well, Rob Ford and Stephen Harper are both highly polarising figures, and the influence we inevitably must tolerate that comes from south of the border in waves familiarises us with the politics of polarisation. For a large variety of reasons, Rob Ford and Stephen Harper represent American-style politics in a way that our other candidates don't. I think to a certain degree the inability of the other candidates to catch onto this new dynamic, or their unwillingness to respond to it, is a good part of the reason they lag behind. Let's take a second to look at current polls:

• Federally, averaged for the month of September by threehundredeight.blogspot.com:
• Stephen Harper and the CPC: 33.4%
• The Non-Stephen Harpers: 65.0% (LPC: 29.6%, NDP: 15.2%, GPC: 10.2, BQ: 10.0)
• Others: 1.6% (I won't be so Manichaean as to lump everyone into the non-Stephen Harper camp, since some of these other voices might well be conservative; my point is that the four I listed above are very specifically not Stephen Harper; in other words, they are Coke, Pepsi, RC and Cott next to Harper's milk)
• Municipally, I can't find anything more recent than the one from 28 September here:
• Rob Ford: 28%
• The Non-Rob Fords: 47% (Smitherman: 23%, Pantalone: 10%, Rossi: 7% and the ghost of Thomson: 7%)
• Undecided: a whopping 20%

Similarly, even though Rossi is a rightist, he seems to have more in common with Smitherman and Pantalone than with his wingmate. Muncipal debates give the impression of Ford on one side and everyone else on the other, just as, federally, the 2008 leadership debates seemed to pit Harper against a 'gang of four'. And importantly, the poll I referenced put Ford ahead but also claimed that if it were a two-person race between Smitherman and Ford, Smitherman would win. I have to imagine if it were a two-person race between Ignatieff and Harper as well, that Harper could win.

But it's not. Neither race is bipartisan, and both races run the risk of seeing a man elected who is disliked by a majority of the electors: not a great way to establish a mandate.

What is there to do about it? Well, every time the opposition appears united against them, Harper and the Conservatives like to paint the other parties as a 'coalition', a strategy that I think might backfire if it succeeds in making the public familiar with, and used to, the idea of a 'coalition'. The truth is, though, that federally we are sooner or later going to have to get used to post-election coalitions; our electoral landscape is too fragmented to ever again see majorities on the horizon, and our ability to tolerate minority rule is being tested, it would appear. It's really only possible to envision a Liberal-NDP coalition at the moment, and indeed it is that very possibility that is mentioned so often you'd be excused for thinking it already exists. But there might be any kind of coalition in the future. They will come; as a country we have no choice.

But municipally? The election for mayor is the closest we in Canada get to American-style politics, because it's voting for an individual, in a very strict winner-takes-all fashion. There is no opportunity for coalition here: the losers go home, out of a job. True "Anyone-but-Ford" believers might claim that tactical voting is even more essential municipally than it is at other levels, and certainly tactical voting must be what Smitherman dreams of when he crawls into bed at night.

An Alternate-Vote system is probably the answer for mayoral races. I don't love AV, but it's tough to see an alternative in a winner-takes-all scenario. I don't suggest that (a) this is useful merely to keep out Rob Ford or that (b) every supporter of Pantolone or Rossi would by default put Smitherman higher than Ford on the list. Though three of the post-amalgamation mayoral races have been cakewalks (in one case with over 80% of the vote), I think future elections will be less so. AV would be useful not just now but subsequently. If FPTP would, at the moment, produce a Ford victory but AV would produce a Smitherman victory, that clearly indicates that voter intentions are not reflecting reality.

Which I think is a contributing factor to voter malaise. One thing that has Ford running first at the moment is that, for better or for worse, he's the only candidate that inspires much of a reaction at all either way. Otherwise this campaign has largely been a disappointment, and it's difficult to be anything but disspirited about it.