Canadian Politics

Yeah, they’ve shot themselves in the foot badly. A weaker minority is their most likely option.

Yeah, it was a bad call. And the media straight up ignored that the Conservatives and NDP were chomping at the bit for an election before the vaccine roll out got rolling.

At least JWR will be out of the House as of tonight...

I think Trudeau will pull through with a minority again, O'Toole ran a terrible campaign.

I expect a Liberal minority again too. We'll know soon enough.

I will say the idea of the hubris of starting an election to me is funny. It's a minority government. It can end in only two ways.

A) You trigger election when you think the opposition is weak

B) The opposition makes you fail a no confidence vote when they think you're weak.

Like, Trudeau's only two choices were "Start an Election when it's to my advantage or let the Conservatives do it when its in theirs" so obviously he made his only choice. So it was bound to happen. And I think to Trudeau, another minority, even if it's a weaker one, is a win coz he bought himself a year and half to two years he'd not have had otherwise.

I begrudge him starting an election and having fuck all to say.

Edited by Ghilz on Sep 20th 2021 at 6:00:46 AM

CBC at 10h24 confirms a Liberal Win. Not sure if Minority or Majority. (Lean towards the former)

Edited by Ghilz on Sep 20th 2021 at 7:25:55 AM

Here's some news covering the elections:

CBC now confirms it's a Liberal Minority. Currently the Liberals are at 155 projected seats. They had 157 last election.

Edited by Ghilz on Sep 20th 2021 at 8:15:24 AM

Status quo. As expected.

Back at 157 so yeah, literally no change for the Liberals.

We're looking at about 10 seats changing, in pure numbers.

Edited by Ghilz on Sep 20th 2021 at 9:08:34 AM

Well that sounds like it was a colossal waste of time.

Can't wait to see how this goes.

I am not sure that I understand how the seat numbers are developing in Canada. I've seen folks saying that the Liberals gained one or two seats, the Conservatives a few seats more and same for the NDP. Does this mean that a third group of parties has lost seats, or has the House grown bigger?

I also notice that once again it seems like the Conservatives won 2% more than the Liberals but end up with the second-highest number of seats.

538 noted that unlike in the US, Canada's electoral ridings favor the left-leaning party a bit because Conservative voters tend to cluster up in the same districts and thus represent excessive votes needed to win them — in the 2019 election every district whose winner won more than, like, 70% of the vote were Conservatives.

So before the election there were a few independants and a few free seats from MPs who had left

As of this writing, the Liberals gained 1 seat from where the were before the election

Conservatives didn't win or lose seats, however they had lost 2 seats since the 2019 election due to people leaving the party or politics.

Bloc Quebecois gained 2 seats from where they were.

NDP Gained one seat

Green stayed even, but during the last session they lost 1 seat from the 3 they had, ending at 2, and getting reelected with 2.

At dissolution there were 5 independants (4 people who left/got kicked from their party, one elected as an indy). None of them got reelected.

This is correct. The conservatives are ridiculously strong in Alberta, and very strong in the prairies and some parts of Quebec (around Quebec City mostly). It's how they get the popular vote. However they dont do as well in Ontario and most of Quebec (Especially around Montreal), and it's impossible to get a majority of seats without Ontario and big chunks of Quebec.

Edited by Ghilz on Sep 21st 2021 at 8:57:35 AM

Yeah, it seems that ‘gains’ are largely coming from parties reclaiming seats that they ‘lost’ when a member of their party left/resigned/died/was expelled.

Edited by Silasw on Sep 21st 2021 at 4:56:09 PM

Montreal and Ontario are basically bastions for the Liberals. The rest of Quebec generally votes Bloc (though there was one time in Jack Layton's final election run before he died of cancer where Quebec almost entirely voted NDP, which nearly killed the Bloc).

It's looking like the net change in seats is:
LIB: +3
CON: 0
BQ: +2
NDP: +1
GRN: 0
PPC: 0 (zero plus zero is still zero)
Other: -6
From what I can glean, going into this election there were 5 independent MPs (most of whom were elected as one of the above parties in 2019, but left or were kicked out later) and one vacant seat.

In non- topics, my riding was one of the few that flipped this year. The Conservative incumbent eked out a win in a narrow three-way race in 2019, but wasn't so lucky this time and was bumped by the NDP candidate.

Edited by Blueeyedrat on Sep 21st 2021 at 9:07:57 AM

So the only thing that was accomplished was that non-affiliated took a side?

Relative to the previous election, the Conservatives are down 2 seats, the Greens are down 1, and there’s no longer an Independent (Jody Wilson-Raybould didn’t run this time). The Liberals and NDP are each up 1, and the Bloc are up 2. Net change of 4 seats.

The total number of seats that have changed is more than that, though, due to parties losing seats in some areas and gaining them in others. Broadly, the Conservatives gained a handful of seats from the Liberals in the Atlantic provinces, and lost a handful to the Liberals and NDP in Edmonton, Calgary, and Vancouver.

The Greens lost their seat in Nanaimo, BC but gained a new one in Waterloo, ON, where the Liberal candidate had to withdraw. They’re down one seat because on Jenica Atwin crossing the floor to the Liberals earlier (she seems to have just barely hung onto her seat).

Edited by Galadriel on Sep 21st 2021 at 10:03:52 AM

It's worth pointing out they are just going to start counting the mail ins (880000 of them) so it's possible some seat may yet flip in the coming days.

Bernier's PPC apparently pulled enough votes from the Conservatives to cost them a few seats in Ontario. It'll be interesting to see what happens from that. If the Conservative attempt to deal with their new right wing rivals.

24 Seats, if correct, is insane. The Tories must be mad.

Edited by Ghilz on Sep 21st 2021 at 10:10:12 AM

24 seats is assuming that every single person who voted PPC would have voted Conservative in the absence of the PPC. That’s a bad assumption. Many may just have stayed home.

That can be easily tested by comparing the number of votes the PPC has per riding to the amount of voters the Tories had per riding (and perhaps also the turnout per riding). I dunno, is there an Excel file counting all votes by party x riding?

If the numbers are largely uncorrelated that would imply that PPC mostly turned out nonvoters. If they strongly correlate, conversely, it would imply that they drew from the Tory voter pool.

And some early numbers suggested the PPC was taking a lot of votes from the Greens. Not that surprising, GPC is Center-Right on many issues.

Really? Which ones? I don’t know if anything’s changed with the party platform in recent years, but May’s always been a lefty.

I think it’s less a policy matter than that the Greens, as a minor party, draw some anti-establishment types who want to cast a protest vote, and so do the PPC.

PPC is anti-vac isn’t it? I could see it drawing in the hippie anti-vac vote from the Green Party.

I've also heard anecdotes about NDP voters flipping PPC (potentially folks who just really don't want to get vaccinated?), but have had yet to see any analysis backing it up, so grain of salt.

I hope that the PPC's vote gains don't mean that the Cons are going to push further right, especially now that they have some semblance of a climate plan. That's not to say it's a good one, but it's the best one I've seen from them so far, and they'll be in power again eventually - I'd hate to see what little progress has been made wiped out. It remains to be seen whether the PPC will keep the gains they've made once the pandemic has passed, anyway.

Edited by Pseudopartition on Sep 22nd 2021 at 8:47:31 AM