Tallying the Conservative win in 14 ridings: 6,201 reasons to be frustrated

Are Matt and Ryan implying that if more people had voted Harper would not have got his majority? Because the facts are equally consistent with the theory that too many people voted - 6, 201 to be exact.

Perhaps if the voter turnout had not been marginally higher this time than in 2008, we'd be looking at an NDP minority government!

After all, there's no reason to assume that the non-voters are any more "progressive" than the voters are.

This article should be titled: "Tallying the Conservative win in 14 ridings: 6,201 reasons to celebrate!"

The Canadian people made a clear and wise decision on May 2. Stephen Harper has done a great job for the last 5 years, Canadians are now more positive about the economy than any other G8 country, I see no reason why the quality of his leadership will do anything but improve. Hats off for proven economic excellence.

Well Jill1990 that is just it; 40% or less of Canadians who voted got the results they wanted - 60% did not. So you are literally celebrating a minority imposing its will on the majority. The Canadian economy is doing slightly better for now in part because the Canadian state did not let the banks go on the free-for-all that other nations-states allowed their banks to do, something the Conservatives and the Paul Martin-faction of the Liberal party wanted to do but could not because of their minority status. Had Harper's Conservatives won this majority several years ago, we could have been much closer to that free market freefall that so many others had. Proven economic excellence? Pretty much still riding on the coattails of what Paul Martin did (not that it really benefitted all Canadians either).

As for the original article I take issue with concerns about vote-splitting. How the heck did the NDP lose Elmwood-Transcona? Anybody who knows that area that almost nobody there benefits from Conservative politicies. Tory economics gives some help to those who make over $60 K but really, really helps those who make over $225 K, neither of which applies to the vast majority of those in that riding. How did the NDP blow what has been a longtime safe seat?

Jill1990:

Tsk!

And, as the old saying goes, "If wishes were horses, beggars would ride." Election's over. Time to move on to more important challenges ahead.

Merging Liberals and NDP might be a good place to start.

Even better, how about empowering citizens to bring legal challenges to all levels of government, forcing action on climate change. See, for example, this story: Mary C. Wood, creator of road map for citizens to bring lawsuits against government. (Mary C. Wood is a law professor at the University of Oregon whose work on Atmospheric Trust Litigation is the framework for a recent flood of lawsuits by children and teens against the U.S. government).

The only more futile strategy for effecting social change than parliamentarism is to try and use the courts. Instead of being mobilized to participate in the struggle we are all reduced to spectators and fundraisers in a war of words, the outcome of which is decided by a government-appointed judge whose career depends on how well he or she protects the status quo.

Far better to use the money to get people out and organizing marches, public meetings, poster campaigns, and mass civil disobedience actions.

I suspect that neither the NDP nor the Liberals (nor the voters that support them) are really interested in a full-fledged merger at this point.  However, this article clearly demonstrates what it would take for these parties to be as strategic as the Conservatives in using the hypersensitivity of the First Past the Post (or Winner Take All) system to leverage an outcome which they would prefer to what happened in last week's election.

In particular, instead of a merger, the NDP and Liberals could opt for a strategic alliance in roughly 20 ridings - in 10 of them, the Liberals would stand a candidate and the NDP would not, and vice versa in another 10 ridings.  These ridings should be selected in places where a close race is expected between the two front runners and where one of the Liberals and the NDP has a significant lead over the other.  From the examples above, Labrador is a good example - the Conservatives and the Liberals were essentially neck-and-neck, but the NDP had only half as many votes.  If the NDP had withdrawn their candidate, odds are that the Liberal candidate would have won handily.

The advantage of a strategic alliance over a merger is obvious - each party could retain their own party identity and could therefore appeal to their own segment of the voter base in the vast majority of ridings across Canada without risking alienating rightish Liberals and leftish NDPers.  By making an explicit agreement in advance of the election, they would offer voters in swing ridings a clear choice between two governing outcomes.  The biggest question is whether these parties could overcome their mutual animosity enough to choose an approach which is mutually beneficial.

Not a good example at all. In 2008, the Liberal won the Labrador riding handily with over 70% of the vote. The NDP was second, with 18%, and the Conservative a distant 3rd at 8%. If the NDP had withdrawn, based on that history, then it would make just as much sense to withdraw from every other riding the Liberals had won in 2008.

And where would we be today?

The 2011 election has definitively proven the falsity and futility of strategic voting arrangements such as you propose.

M. Spector - I take your point, and perhaps reached too hastily for this example since the numbers were readily at hand in the original post.  Of course, we should remember that in 2008 Danny Williams had called for a boycott of the Conservatives and that this had had a dramatic effect on the 'normal' distribution of votes in Newfoundland.  In any serious discussion between the NDP and the Liberals, the impact of this would be taken into account together with recent polling data in an attempt to figure out where the critical swing ridings would be.  Also, there's no doubt that this recent election shows that fundamental shifts such as the swing from the Bloc to the NDP can have a significant impact on strategic calculations, but that doesn't mean that the parties shouldn't make their best estimates of what might happen and how they could optimize their chances for a more desirable outcome.  My main point is that such an analysis and arrangement might well have improved the outcomes for those parties even without a merger.

Yeah, well, the parties' "best estimates" of what was going to happen in the 2011 election proved to be worthless.

The idea that the NDP should have been telling its members in any riding to vote Liberal is, in hindsight, ludicrous.

Voting isn't just about keeping "bad" parties out; it's about putting "good" parties in.

I can't remember the last time I heard an NDP MP or read an NDP document saying the party would cancel NAFTA if they were elected.

Re: a much earlier post by M Spector. Street mobilizing can work in a certain context but I see no reason to say why others cannot file lawsuits at the same time. If done correctly (something the Left in Canadan often cannot do) a lawsuit campaign can further illustrate, make more transparent how the Legal system is entrenched in class. True, this has not happened much before but much of the street mobilization of the 80's went nowhere either because it became taken over by NDP speedbumpers. Underlying any course of action is the Left's need to renew its own mind, its own intelligence.

This is true, but that only works when you lose in court!

In any event, fwhite's proposal for legal action (to which I was responding) was supposed to be a strategy for "forcing action on climate change" - not exposing the class bias of the legal system!

Well the Monsanto lawsuit involving that farmer being fault for seed drift could have been handled better at the Supreme Court. If they at the final hearing made it about responsibility for the seed drift rather than the legality of GMO (which Parliament had already ruled on) there could have been different results or at the very least much more clarity, more transparency on the role of the Supreme Court in imposing corporate rule.

Yes, I concede fwhite's proposal was regarding climate change and yet  I think if done properly it could expose how much the courts are entrenched in corporate, ruling class lawy. How likely it would be be handled, I am far less confident.

A big tent party would work; of course mechanisms for setting the agenda would be severely stressed given the disparity between the ideology of the Liberals and NDP.This kind of vast disparity did not stop the Reform and Conservatives from joing forces, and quickly.

Hopefully Harper will not be forced to pay off his faithfull at our expense!

The real problem is delusional party leaders. Iggy lived his delusion and ended up on the ash heap with his party! Will it be Laytons turn next to waste four  more years for the majority of us.

The Reform Party and the Conservatives didn't join forces and form a "big tent" party. The Progressive Conservative party was essentially taken over by the Reform Party.

One reason why Harper has had so much trouble getting a majority of the seats in Parliament is that the Conservative Party has such a narrow ideological focus. Only the undemocratic FPTP electoral system allows them a phony majority in Parliament.

@AntonyHodgson on May 10, 2011 - 12:39pm.new

In particular, instead of a merger, the NDP and Liberals could opt for a strategic alliance in roughly 20 ridings - in 10 of them, the Liberals would stand a candidate and the NDP would not, and vice versa in another 10 ridings.  These ridings should be selected in places where a close race is expected between the two front runners and where one of the Liberals and the NDP has a significant lead over the other.

This scenario is pretty-much what happened in my riding. The NDP candidate doubled their vote from 7500 to 13000 votes, but in the process bled enough votes from the Liberal incumbent that the Tory was able to come up the middle and win the seat for the Conservatives. This riding had been Liberal since at least the mid-70s. If the NDP had failed to run a candidate here, the Liberal could have kept his seat. For as long as anyone can remember, in federal politics at least, the NDP has always done no better than third-place in this riding -- the contest has always between the Liberals and the Conservatives. To fail to run a candidate here would not have hurt the NDP much.

Another dozen or so such instances and the Tories could have been denied their majority.  I am literally beyond angry at this -- it was imperative to stop this government.

However, instead of serving the greater national interest, both Liberals and NDP alike put their own partisan political interests ahead of the national interest, with the lamentable results we're all going to have to endure for the next 4-5 years.  I put the blame squarely on Jack Layton's shoulders for the fact that we now have a Tory MP in this riding.

How exactly is it in the "national interest" (whatever that means) to elect Liberals to the House of Commons?

If opposition parties aren't going to run in elections, then what use are they? Your argument boils down to a position that the NDP should resign itself to perpetual third or fourth party status, and not seek to end the Liberal-Conservative duopoly of power.

That's defeatism, pure and simple.

Sid_V has a good idea; but I fear the reality on the ground would not allow such horse trading!

The CBC's The National recently had Wendy Mesley panel two Tories, Tom Flanagan and some robot from Hill and Knowlton (Ottawa office). All they could talk about was how Quebec was not Conservative but the rest of Canada was. Maybe I caught it a minute from the start but I do not recall any mention of a 39 % majority/61 % minority. If nobody campaigns to make that notion stick, it will fall down the memory hole, just like so many other important truths.

It has been said that the victors write the history books. 2dawall has just proven that it's still happening........

In a submission to the Rabble forum last month , I commented on the need for electoral system reform as the only real solution to the undemocratic first-past-the post method in place in Canada. New Zealand put such a system in place in 1996 as a result of a referendum in 1992 which was supported by 85% of the voters. This option was reaffirmed in a second referendum in 2011 by a sizable majority. the New Zealand system entreched a proportional representation model that incudes local representation and party vote totals and it was implemented in response to the kind of situaton we have had in Canada now and on other occasions in the past. This would be be a much better alternative than trying to work around the democratic flaws in our present system by strategic voting which is only an ad hoc remedy. Electoral reform however will not in itself remedy the democratic deficit in Canada as this will  only be achieved by further constitutional reform. See my sunmission to the Rabble forum

http://www.elections.org.nz/voting/mmp/history-mmp.html

For an excellent description of the New Zealand electoral system see

http://www.elections.org.nz/voting/mmp/history-mmp.html