What Conservative Majority?

[Gaffey Duck]

(My response to claim from a freeptarded local newspaper editor that a POPULAR MAJORITY of Canadians voted Conservative.)

In the Saturday, October 9 editorial, “Compromise is Good”, the editor states "It seems Canada finds itself at a crossroads of sort (sic) regarding its federal leaders. While the Liberals cling to a minority government, numbers show that the majority of the electorate actually voted Conservative." This statement is completely untrue and has no basis whatsoever in reality: For not only did the Conservatives not win a majority of the popular vote (which nobody has done since Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative landslide in 1984), but they also failed to win either a majority government or even a mere plurality of the popular vote. Instead, the Tories won 29.6% of the popular vote and 99 seats, 7.1% lower than the Liberals’ 36.7% plurality and 135 seats, only 4.11% higher than the Canadian Alliance’s 2000 showing, and 8.08% lower than the combined PC and Alliance showing in 2000. In other words, 69.6%% of Canadians supported political parties to the left of Stephen Harper’s Tories, and a further 33% of Canadians, representing a larger bloc than those who voted Tory, supported parties to the left of Paul Martin’s Liberals, namely the NDP (15.7%, +7.19 from 2000, 19 seats), the Bloc Québécois (12.4%, +1.68 from 2000, 54 seats), the Greens (4.3%, +3.92 from 2000, no seats), and a number of fringe parties (0.6%). Thus, the three main parties of the left increased their vote share by a combined 12.79 points, a far more impressive performance than the vote-haemorrhaging suffered by both the Liberals in the centre and the Tories on the right. In contrast, only 0.3% supported the far-right Christian Heritage Party, while 0.5% preferred independent candidates, including former Conservative MP Chuck Cadman, who was elected in B.C. As an interesting aside, the Bloc Québécois and the Tories, who won the combined support of 42% of the electorate and 153 seats, are working to take down a government, albeit each for different reasons currently being supported by the Liberals, the NDP, and Mr. Cadman, who combined for 52.5% of the popular vote and 154 seats (155 minus the Liberal Speaker, who is only permitted to vote to break ties).

While the claim that a majority of Canadians voted Conservative is a particularly serious gaffe, it is wholly consistent with the inability (or perhaps outright unwillingness) of many in Canada’s media and political circles to distinguish between parties who benefited from the inherent unfairness of Canada’s electoral system, such as the Liberals, the Tories, and the Bloc Québécois, and parties who truly did surge in popular support but failed to make significant inroads in Parliament, such as the NDP and the Greens. This tendency of our first-past-the-post electoral system to favour parties that are either large or regionalised at the expense of smaller parties with national support indicates that it is long past time that we reform the way in which we choose our parliament. Such reforms could ensure that each party has a share of seats equal to its share of the popular vote, as is done in New Zealand and in most of continental Europe. While many may claim that a proportional system will create a class of representatives who are not accountable to a specific constituency, it is important to realise that ridings don’t exist in bubbles (a federal policy that may help people in Cornwall, for instance, may be equally devastating to people in downtown Toronto or in rural Saskatchewan) and that the federal government as a whole collectively represents and works for the entire Canadian electorate. It is now 2004, and change is long overdue! We must modernise our electoral system as part of an effort to create a political environment that encourages Canadians to get involved in and become excited about civic life.

[porphyrian]

1. It's sort of like the "moral majority..."

...it's neither.