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Post by Old Badger on Oct 18, 2019 10:32:09 GMT -5
Monday is election day in Canada, and polls released this week show a virtual dead heat between the ruling Liberal Party led by PM Justin Trudeau and the Conservative Party under Andrew Sheer, each with around 30 percent of the vote. In third place are the New Democrats, the social democratic party that's long been Canada's third force, sometimes winning provincial elections but never a national one; they're at a surprisingly high 20 percent; it's led by a Sikh, Jagmeet Singh. The Bloc Quebecois and the Greens garner a bit under 10 percent each, and the far-right Peoples Party of Canada around 3 percent. This portends a minority government. (This week Pres. Obama endorsed Trudeau, a rare instance of an American President or ex- taking a position.) Currently, the party breakdown is as follows:
Liberals - 177
Conservatives - 95
NDP - 39
BQ - 10
Greens - 2
PPC - 1
CCF - 1 (Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, an agrarian social-democratic party)
Independent - 8
Vacant - 5
Since the Speaker does not vote, there are 337 voting Members, meaning it takes 169 to form a majority. The Liberals are expected to lose their current 8-seat majority, but still may wind up with control of the government, perhaps backed by minor parties (NDP? Greens?) but without a formal coalition, since these rarely form in Canada. Alternatively, the Conservatives could emerge, perhaps with the BQ in support, as has happened before. And Independents could be the crucial "swing voters". Minority governments are not novel in Canada, though they tend to be relatively short-lived, for obvious reasons. More on Monday night.
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Post by Old Badger on Oct 21, 2019 22:13:58 GMT -5
Canadian election results have been coming in for hours, and CBC has called the election for the Liberals, though with a minority government. It takes 170 to reach a majority. At the moment, the standings look like this: Liberals: 110 elected, 48 leading = 158 Conservatives: 93 elected, 26 leading = 119 Bloc Québécois: 24 elected, 10 leading = 34 New Democrats: 9 elected, 16 leading = 25 Greens: 1 elected, 2 leading = 3 A quick summary: "The Liberals suffered losses in every region of the country — especially at the hands of the Bloc Québécois in Quebec — but not enough to cost Justin Trudeau his government. Ontario was key for the Liberals. The vote held up there and nearly half of the caucus is likely to come from the province. With the Liberals dropping, the Conservatives made some small inroads (though they also lost in Quebec) and will win more seats than they had in 2015, but fell well short of their best hopes. They gained at the expense of both the Liberals and NDP in the Prairies, but otherwise the New Democrats largely held their own. The exception was again Quebec, where NDP incumbents had the toughest task — the party is only going to retain a minimal presence in the province." linkOne especially good piece of news: The founder and leader of the far-right People's Party, and its only MP, lost his seat tonight to a Tory. |
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Post by Old Badger on Oct 22, 2019 10:18:03 GMT -5
So, all but one seat has been decided now, and it looks like this:
Liberals: 156 elected, 1 leading = 157 (in Kitchener, Ontario, a Liberal leads a Conservative incumbent by 273 votes with 5 polling stations still to report)
Conservatives: 121
Bloc Québécois: 32
NDP: 24
Greens: 3
Independent: 1
The Conservatives actually got a higher share of the popular vote (34.4 percent) than the Liberals (33.1), largely because of massive wins in Alberta (69.2 vs. 13.7 percent) and Saskatchewan (64.3 vs. 11.6 percent). The Tories also got smaller pluralities in Manitoba and British Columbia. The Liberals had pluralities in all of the other provinces, plus the northern territories. The Liberals lost 15 of their previously-held 30 seats in the four western provinces, and now have none in Alberta and Saskatchewan (not for the first time). Much of this has to do with the government's passage of legislation making it more difficult to build oil and gas pipelines, negatively affecting a major industry in those two provinces. The more modest losses in the rest of Canada stem in part from a scandal earlier this year in which a former Justice Minister told Parliament that she had been pressured not to prosecute a Quebec-based construction company accused of paying bribes to win a contract in Libya. A former Cabinet member who quit the Liberal Party over this affair to run as an independent was beaten handily by a former Olympic medal-winning Liberal candidate, so just how much the scandal hurt is hard to judge.
Although the Liberals lost about 20 seats and their majority, as well as the plurality of popular votes, they still won the election in the sense that they will continue to run the government. The Conservatives, by contrast, picked up about 26 seats and took a plurality of the vote, but they failed to win enough to form a government, meaning that their gains still constituted a loss. A less ambiguous winner was the Bloc Québécois, which had been down to 4 seats after the 2011 elections, bounced back to 10 in 2015, and exploded to 32 this year. Still, the Liberals won 35 seats in the province and a slightly bigger share of the vote than the BQ. At the margin, the Greens added a seat. The biggest loser was the NDP, which lost 15 seats, more than a third of its previous number.
BTW, I've been following Canadian elections since the 1960s, most intensively when I lived in the Detroit area and could watch the news from that country from Windsor, Ont., just across the river. I also used to watch Question Period in the House of Commons, replayed at night on the Ontario public TV network. My admittedly toe-deep knowledge of some of the more obscure issues at the time served to get me into events nominally for Canadians at international conferences--they were amazed that any American was paying enough attention to at least know some of the terminology, so often proclaimed me an honorary compatriot, and therefore eligible for service at the free or cash bar. ;-)
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