Post-Electoral Blues….And Reds

So, it’s over, and according to the Elections.ca website, here are the final seat numbers and vote percentages:

I note in passing that all of this information is now missing from the Globe and Mail and CBC websites. You can find it by searching, but at no place on either are you informed that this is the final tally, and so it is officially the case that the Liberals won a plurality, but not a majority of the seats in Parliament. Not at all important, of course in a Westminster Parliamentary system. Actually, I wonder if anyone at either org realizes this is the Canadian form of government. Whatever……

The Globe has a story titled ‘Six Charts that Reveal the Story of the 2025 Election’. I love it when the Globe does charts. One of said charts is ‘An electoral map with much less orange’. Oh, you mean the NDP went from 24 to 7 seats? Thanks, Globe.

In my humble opinion, there is one truly remarkable thing about this electoral outcome, and the Globe’s last chart includes it, even though it requires no chart to uncover or explain it. A simple arithmetic fact is that the two major parties, the Liberals and Conservatives, nominated candidates for Parliament that together garnered 84% of all the votes cast. That this is a historically rare event is confirmed by the note below the Globe’s chart, which says the last time two parties combined to get more than 80% of all votes was in the election of 1930. So, 95 years ago. Remarkable, then.

This leads to what I see as the other key fact about this electoral outcome, one which neither CBC or the G&M seem to find of interest. The Liberals need three votes in Parliament from non-Liberal MPs to pass any legislation. Where will they get them? There are only two candidates, the MPs of the Bloc Quebecois, who lost 1/3 of their MPs in this election, or the MPs of the NDP, who went from 24 to 7 MPs, a loss of more than two-thirds, inducing their Leader to resign. What would be the consequences of a political alliance between the Liberals and members of a party which is effectively devoted to being separated from Canada? The Bloc’s leader said during the Leaders’s English debate that he had no interest in being Prime Minister of Canada.

Alternatively, an alliance with the barely-breathing NDP would prompt endless calls of ‘oh, here we go again’ from the Conservatives. I doubt Carney wants that, so – what does he do?

I dunno, stay tuned. (I can’t wait for The Globe to lay it out for us in six charts…..or maybe seven.)

The other somewhat interesting fact that the Globe does actually report is that turnout was 68.6% of registered voters, higher than the 2021 number of 62.8%, but a long way from the 79.4% of 1959. In reference to my last post, something is damping down Canadians’ personal interest in voting. Don’t know what.

There will be a lot more to write about in the coming weeks, to be sure, but I will close this initial piece with a nod to polling. Below is a screenshot I took of the Federal Election webpage of 338canada.com on the morning of Election Day, April 28, so you can see what they were projecting based on their aggregation of polling info available that morning.

As you can see, they projected the Liberals to win between 144 and 222 seats, which is a wide range of possibilities, with a ‘point estimate’ of 186, while they projected the Conservatives to get between 90 and 164 seats, with a point estimate of 124. Thus, they overestimated the share for the Liberals and underestimated it for the Conservatives. Not by a lot, but by enough that they did not foresee the Liberals’ minority status. In fact, they also projected a 65% chance of a Liberal majority government, and only a 20% chance for the Liberal plurality that we actually got. They got the collapse of the other two parties pretty much right on.

If one looks back at the path that the polling took just prior to the election, it seems that the Conservatives were climbing and the Liberals falling. Who knows, if the election campaign had lasted another two weeks, maybe we would all be talking about the Conservatives forming a minority government, trying to figure out how to work with the Bloc.

Stay tuned.