calimac: (Blue)
calimac ([personal profile] calimac) wrote2015-10-20 07:09 am

Canadian breakdown

Since I haven't seen a province-by-province breakdown of the Canadian election results yet, here's one, from east to west:

Newfoundland: 7 Liberal (a gain of 3 from the previous election)

Prince Edward Island: 4 Liberal (gain of 1)

Nova Scotia: 11 Liberal (gain of 7)

New Brunswick: 10 Liberal (gain of 9, wow. Total loses in the 4 Atlantic provinces are 14 Conservative and 6 NDP)

Quebec: 40 Liberal, 16 NDP, 12 Conservative, 10 Bloc (with 3 new seats, that's a gain for the Liberals of 33, Conservatives of 7, and Bloc of 6 [but if that looks impressive, the Bloc used to get about 50], with the NDP the big losers, down net 43; still, 16 seats anywhere, let alone Quebec, is a great result for them historically)

Ontario: 80 Liberal, 33 Conservative, 8 NDP (with 15 new seats, that's a gain for the Liberals of 69, with the Conservatives losing net 40 and the NDP net 14)

Manitoba: 7 Liberal, 5 Conservative, 2 NDP (net movement of 6 seats from Conservative to Liberal)

Saskatchewan: 10 Conservative, 3 NDP, 1 Liberal (net movement of 3 seats from Conservative to NDP)

Alberta: 29 Conservative, 4 Liberal, 1 NDP (with 6 new seats, the Conservatives are up 2 and the Liberals 4, having not previously won a seat in Alberta since 2004)

British Columbia: 17 Liberal, 14 NDP, 10 Conservative, 1 Green (with 6 new seats, the Liberals are up by 15 and the NDP by 2, with the Conservatives losing net 11)

Territories: 3 Liberal (gain of 3, from 2 Conservatives and 1 NDP)

Total: 184 Liberal (54% of the seats), 99 Conservative (29%), 44 NDP (13%), 10 Bloc, 1 Green.

That makes Saskatchewan and Alberta both the only provinces without at least a Liberal plurality and the only ones that moved counter-cyclically (I told you they're still mad at Trudeau's father from 30 years ago).

The NDP has recovered slightly in its old home base of the west, while losing big in Quebec and the Atlantic, both new territory for them - they rarely won a seat in Quebec before their big blowout in 2011, or in the Atlantics before about 20 years ago. Their total of 13% of the seats is still their third-highest ever. The Conservatives funked out almost everywhere, recovering only a little in Quebec, rarely a good province for them anyway, and overall they've done worse, both in the distant past and in the 1990s right-wing schism. In percentage of seats won, this isn't the Liberals' biggest win ever - Pierre managed better in 1968, among others - but it's close, and it's their biggest single-election recovery ever after their worst result ever in the previous election. The Bloc, like the Conservatives, has recovered a little, but is still mostly cut out by the Liberals as they were last time by the NDP. And the Greens still have their leader's sole seat on Vancouver Island.

[identity profile] kevin-standlee.livejournal.com 2015-10-20 02:21 pm (UTC)(link)
Thanks for that. Wow, that's quite a swing. Canadians appear to be much more inclined to quick governmental swings rather than the entrenched incumbency system so prevalent in the USA.

[identity profile] kalimac.livejournal.com 2015-10-20 02:32 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh yes. Canada is prone to major political earthquakes. It happened on the federal level in both 1958 and 1984, when the previously-marginal Conservatives swept out of the West and took over the country, and in 1993 when they collapsed into dust. After that, Harper's takeover 11 years later was also a major restructuring, though over a slower period. And there have been other changes too: a whole fourth party softly and quietly vanished away in the 1970s, and apparently nobody noticed it was gone.

On the provincial level, the earthquakes have sometimes been bigger. The NDP winning Alberta earlier this year was perhaps the biggest ever, though Ontario had a similar earthquake in 1990, and watching the entire party systems restructure themselves in Quebec and Alberta in the 1970s, and in B.C. in the 1990s (in all 3 cases following a previous entire restructuring some 40 years earlier) has also been amusing.

[identity profile] cmcmck.livejournal.com 2015-10-20 02:31 pm (UTC)(link)
I think the term 'landslide' is not too strong!

[identity profile] randy-byers.livejournal.com 2015-10-20 03:47 pm (UTC)(link)
I had no idea that Vancouver Island was Green. Very interesting.

[identity profile] kalimac.livejournal.com 2015-10-20 04:02 pm (UTC)(link)
Well, one seat on Vancouver Island: Saanich/Gulf Islands. With 54% of the vote. The other 6 seats on the island all went to the NDP, though the Greens did well in most of them, coming in second in Victoria.

[identity profile] randy-byers.livejournal.com 2015-10-20 04:08 pm (UTC)(link)
Even more interesting! I always imagined that outside of Victoria it would be as conservative as the fishing and logging areas of Washington and Oregon tend to be. Apparently not! But the islands are probably full of countercultural types, so I guess it's not so surprising that that's where the strongest Green vote is. And maybe retirees from other parts of the country outweigh the locals in other parts of the island, but why they would tend toward the NDP I don't know. So I'm probably just plumb ignorant.

[identity profile] kalimac.livejournal.com 2015-10-20 04:55 pm (UTC)(link)
Well, the Greens got 54% in the seat they won, 33% in the one they came in second, and between 9%-20% in the other seats on the island. They didn't do better than 9% in any other seat in the province. I suspect the concentration of counter-cultural types on the island in general and its SE side in particular.

The NDP is descended from an old labor coalition, and there's still a strong labor tradition in the timber and mining areas of BC. So the NDP does best in some of the rougher interior areas and in the working-class areas of the Vancouver metropolis (mostly on the east side).

The Conservative stronghold, even more than the middle-class Vancouver suburbs, is the more genteel settled Okanagan area of the interior.

Liberals seem to do best in the more upscale areas of the north Vancouver region and in the main city, the parts that look like the north side of Seattle.

I get a sense, looking over the statistics for BC, that on the federal level the NDP and Liberals are competing for the same audience, and there's a lot of tactical voting between them, because their strong districts tend to be mutually exclusive. It's quite different in BC provincial politics, where the NDP and Liberals are the two main parties and form a dichotomy. The BC provincial Liberals are rather conservative, and I suspect the provincial NDP attract a lot of federal Liberals. (The provincial parties and the federal parties of the same names are now entirely separate legal entities, and there's no obligation for a politician to support the same party on both levels. Tom Mulcair, the NDP national leader, was for a long time active in the Quebec provincial Liberals, because there essentially is no provincial NDP there.)
Edited 2015-10-20 16:59 (UTC)

[identity profile] randy-byers.livejournal.com 2015-10-20 05:10 pm (UTC)(link)
Fascinating stuff. Many thanks!

[identity profile] kevin-standlee.livejournal.com 2015-10-21 12:19 am (UTC)(link)
Thanks for the primer. For all that I'm an "honorary Canadian" for my involvement in Canadian fannish affairs, I'm not all that up to date on Canadian politics, save by what you and [livejournal.com profile] james_nicoll talk about.