Canadians go to the polls on Tuesday to decide whether to grant a third term to Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, who have been in minority government since 2006. The Conservatives currently have 143 of the parliament’s 308 seats, with their main rivals the Liberals on 77, the separatist Bloc Quebecois on 47 out of the 75 seats in Quebec, and the leftist New Democratic Party on 36. The current election campaign has produced a major astonishment in the polls, which after pointing to a roughly status quo result at the start of the campaign have had the NDP rocketing into second place at the expense of the withering Liberals. Localised polls also show the NDP taking the lead over BQ in Quebec. The precise impact of such shifts in terms of seats would require an expertise on matters Canadian which I cannot claim. Nonetheless, there is serious discussion of the prospect of an NDP-led coalition with the Liberals, granting the prime ministership to the party’s leader Jack Layton rather than Liberal Opposition Leader, Michael Ignatieff (a circumstance with many precedents at provincial level, but not federally). Failing that, they might at least displace the Liberals as the official opposition. The latter result would seem to my untrained eye to be a lot more likely: surely any split in the left-centre vote will prove a boon to the Conservatives, who monopolise the right. It is also tempting to recall that the Liberal Democrats went into last year’s British election with expectations nearly as lofty as those of the NDP, only to be disappointed on polling day.
Incidentally, that means turnout was higher than the last election which set a historic low (58%).
The Green leader May is a Christian, her famous saying, Amatures build the Arc, the professional build the Titanic… that went down well for her
The Liberals spend almost the whole campaign attacking the Conservative with a negative message, which did not swing any Conservative votes, but did ensure they lost all their support to NDP
NDP did well in Quebec and was not great in the rest of the country.
The final primaries was Conservative 40 Liberal 20 NDP 31
NDP support in Quebec may well prove unreliable, but the NDP did gain seats elsewhere, was second behind the Conservatives in nearly every other province, and has outdone its own best previous performance even without counting the seats in Quebec.
On the other hand, Canada in general (not just Quebec) exhibits greater political volatility than we typically see in Australia, and this result could easily be followed by an equally dramatic turn-around. All we can be sure of now is that the Conservative Party will have an unhampered four years to implement its policies, for good or ill.
What a wipeout. However my wife’s cousin has become part of an endangered species the re-elected Liberal. She is a small ‘l’ Liberal but has backed the wrong horse twice in Dion and Ignatieff only the 2nd and 3rd Liberal leaders never to become PM.
The Libs and NDP had a chance to form a coalition after the last election and the Libs squibbed on it and then had continuing internal bickering – its no wonder that they have been left as a rump – they appear an impotent lot to me.
My Canadian expat colleague is quite intrigued by what Harper will do now. He has spent the past 5 years blaming inaction on his being a minority government – so now he has to actually do something.
The other interesting aspect of this result is that the Tories have a majority without being dependent on Quebec. Their only other post war majority governments (58,84,88) have all included big pluralities in Quebec.
whispers that a few seats may be challenged
btw congrats to the greens on getting there first lower house seat
Wow!
Whilst we generally may not be loving Canada’s archaic FPTP system, I’ve got to say they have what appears to be one of the best voter registration systems available:
http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=yth/bas/faq&document=index&lang=e#a9
They regularly add people to the register based on government collected information like driver’s license application so it would appear most eligible young voters are already registered.
And, you can register on the day and then vote!
Now that’s real enfranchisement…
According to my assessment of all the individual riding results. Had the NDP and Libs worked together or had there being STV in Canada up to 58 seats could have transferred to Lib or NDP from Con (40 to Lib, 29 in Ontario alone! and 18 to NDP). In addition it would also have been possible for NDP to wipe out the remaining 4 Bloc seats.
Of course, this could have also been achieved under FPTP either through electing not to oppose candidates earlier on or by encouraging candidates to run dead and tactical voting later on.
The NDP is a fringe group, I do not believe the Liberals would do very well to work with them. Some of their believe is a mix of One Nation and the Greens
“the NDP’s distrust of the free market, the party’s anti-Americanism and opposition to free-trade and engagement in overseas active military campaigns, to say nothing of its attachment to the trade union movement”
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/jeffrey-simpson-on-the-lessons-of-the-2011-election/article2007432/
Jay: Do you expect the next Liberal leader to be one of their 34 MPs or an outsider? In your opinion, would Justin Trudeau as leader hurt or help their cause?
Jeffrey Simpson: You heard it here first: Justin Trudeau will not be a candidate for the Liberal leadership any time soon, according to what I will just say are “well-placed sources.”
As was the case after the 1993 election, the Official Opposition will have no representation in the Canadian Senate, so the Liberals will continue to hold Opposition status in that chamber.
Wikipedia (yes I know) lists the NDP’s policies as:
[# Gender equality and equal rights for LGBT residents
# Improving environmental protection through government regulations
# National water safety standards
# Increasing corporate taxes
# Reducing poverty in Canada
# Aggressive human rights protection
# Expanding funding for public transportation
# Expanding public health care, including dental and prescription drug coverage
# Social assistance policies that reflects citizens’ needs and assist their re-entry to the work force
# Abolishing the unelected Senate of Canada and ensuring more proportional representation
# Workers’ rights including raising the minimum wage to pace the cost of living
# Aboriginal peoples’ treaty, land, and constitutional rights
# A foreign policy that emphasizes diplomacy, peacekeeping, and humanitarian aid instead of offensive military action
# Renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
# One wing is focused on ending the Canadian War on Drugs and legalizing recreational drugs]
Nothing all that crazy in there. Most of it would be at home as mainstream policy in any moderate European country. We tend to get lulled into thinking that our “right and right-er” political spectrum is normal here just because the USA is similar – in fact we are unusual IMHO in not having much of a genuine left wing/progressive option.
They’re not a ‘fringe party’ either and have held government at provincial level several times. In some provinces the state parliament has an NDP v Liberal contest, and in one province the Liberals and Progressive Conservatives merged in order to compete with the NDP.
[The NDP is a fringe group, I do not believe the Liberals would do very well to work with them. Some of their believe is a mix of One Nation and the Greens
“the NDP’s distrust of the free market, the party’s anti-Americanism and opposition to free-trade and engagement in overseas active military campaigns, to say nothing of its attachment to the trade union movement”
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/jeffrey-simpson-on-the-lessons-of-the-2011-election/article2007432/ ]
That columnist doesn’t say that those policies make the NDP a ‘fringe group’, he says they make it different from the Liberals, so that a merger is unlikely. In fact, he goes on to say: ‘it is not axiomatically clear that there is much of a role for the Liberal Party in the future, just as it became obvious in post-World War I Britain that the country had changed in such as way as to render obsolete the Liberal Party that had been one of the great national parties of 19th-century Britain. Parties do die, you know. Ask the American Whigs.’
If the Liberal Party does dwindle away and Canadian politics does turn into a two-sided contest between the NDP and Conservatives, it will just be following the example of what happened in Australia 100 years ago and in New Zealand 80 years ago. I wouldn’t bet on this happening (Canada is not just a copy of Australia and New Zealand) but it is one of the several possibilities for the direction in which things might go from here.
The NDP is in fact a ‘sister party’ of the ALP (which I don’t suppose you’d call a ‘fringe group’) and also of New Zealand Labour (ditto), in the sense that they’re all affiliated to the same international association of labour, social democratic, and socialist parties.
Of course those parties are different, just like their countries, but they have a lot in common. The NDP probably has even more in common with the ALP as it was in its early years, before it became a government party, and if it ever does become a government party (which, again, I wouldn’t bet on, but is one of the possibilities), the chances are it will undergo much the same sort of changes that the ALP did when it first became a government party.
Of course, lots of people don’t like the ALP either. But that doesn’t make it a ‘fringe group’.
I think the NDP is closer to the Greens then the ALP, the ALP is more like the Liberals in Canada, ie a centrist left party.
The problem with the Liberal in Canada is that people think it has move so far toward the right that it might not stand for anything anymore, which also is like the ALP in Australia
For me, any party whose manifest includes the following
# Aggressive human rights protection
# Expanding public health care, including dental and prescription drug coverage
# Abolishing the unelected Senate of Canada and ensuring more proportional representation
# Renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
# One wing is focused on ending the Canadian War on Drugs and legalizing recreational drugs
are more a left wing/protest party
Abolishing unelected upper houses, expanding public health care, and increasing human rights protections are all things which have been ALP policy, and in fact all things which Labor Governments have actually done at one time or another.
Of course the ALP has never attempted to renegotiate NAFTA, but I still don’t see why anybody would think ‘renegotiation’ was an extreme policy.
re earlier ‘whispers’
http://www.boingboing.net/2011/05/04/new-canadian-prime-m.html?dlvrit=36761
[This breach of the Elections Canada Act also comes on the heels of alleged voter fraud in swing ridings at risk of losing Conservative control, as voters are being telephoned in these sensitive ridings and falsely being informed that their polling stations have been changed. In some cases voters have been sent as far as one hour away from where they are supposed to be voting by these fraudulant calls.
The Canadian Headlines Examiner on Examiner.com said that “Reports are coming in from key swing ridings in Ontario and other other provinces that voters are being called at home with false information that their voting locations have changed, and in some instances sending voters an hour in the wrong direction” in regards to the voter tampering reports.]
hmmm