Thanks Greens !!!

@nicky:

That is a good study. However, I agree with Freedom 55 that we can't assume Green voters were New Dems. I have always assumed they were either disgruntled Tories or Libs.

For sure though, they got 471 votes in Winnipeg North, and we got Kevin Lamoureux. Ugh!

They don't

Nobody caused anything, other than voters who made their decisions.   That is what democracy is about.

Just got back, two days before the election, from a long overdue visite to friends and relatives in Germany. It was amazing to see the awareness most germans seem to have with regard to environmental problems when compared to most Canadians. And a willingness to work on reducing their environmental footprint.

The greens might have lost some support, but in my view that has more to do with the fact that environmental issues in Canada have been pushed back into the dark ages.  In the end the environment will trump financial concerns, and the greens will be back in the sunshine. I visited a small village in the Black forest, Unterlenghenhardt, where close to 60 percent of the voters voted for the greens. Would be nice to see that happening here.

I am glad May got in.

nicky wrote:

 But the most significant impact of the Greens may have been assuring Harper of his majority. Here is a list of seats which the Conservatives won by margins less than the Green vote (which is in brackets.)

You know, I hated this kind of reasoning when Liberals used it against us, and I hate it even more when we use it against the Greens. A vote for the Greens is a vote for the Greens - period.  If we didn't win those seats, it's because we didn't EARN enough votes to win them.

Yes, I know our FPTP electoral system is f*cked and needs to be fixed, but that is absolutely not a valid excuse for engaging in Liberal-style vote-entitlement admonitions! 

Interesting, but we can't make the assumption that Green voters would have just voted for some other non-Conservative.

Also worth noting:  I was browsing the history of Winnipeg North in wikipedia.  Apparently, Rebecca Blaikie in 2011 got several thousand votes less than Judy W-L even in her worst showings in this riding.  In fact, if you go even further back, both David Orlikow (NDP), Rey Pagtakhan (Liberal), Murray Smith (Tory) and Alistair Stewart (CCF) all on occaision won more votes individually than both Blaikie and Lamoureaux in 2011 combined.  When David Orlikow lost his seat, he still won 5000 more votes than Rebecca Blaikie won in 2011.  In light of the fact that the NDP won several thousand fewer votes than in previous elections, doesn't it seem a little absurd to be blaming the Green Party for the NDP's loss because they managed to win just a few hundred votes?

genstrike wrote:

Also worth noting:  I was browsing the history of Winnipeg North in wikipedia.  Apparently, Rebecca Blaikie in 2011 got several thousand votes less than Judy W-L even in her worst showings in this riding.  In fact, if you go even further back, both David Orlikow (NDP), Rey Pagtakhan (Liberal), Murray Smith (Tory) and Alistair Stewart (CCF) all on occaision won more votes individually than both Blaikie and Lamoureaux in 2011 combined.  When David Orlikow lost his seat, he still won 5000 more votes than Rebecca Blaikie won in 2011.  In light of the fact that the NDP won several thousand fewer votes than in previous elections, doesn't it seem a little absurd to be blaming the Green Party for the NDP's loss because they managed to win just a few hundred votes?

What has been the population trend for Winnipeg North over this time? This could mean one of 2 things. It could mean that voter turnout is declining in Winnipeg North. Or, if the population is declining, it would stand to reason that the number of ballots cast would decline as well.

I fully agree with those who admonish people here for the assumption that a Green vote is a vote taken from the left. That said, the opening post does illustrate the impact the CBC's Vote Compass might have had by steering nearly all NDP voters towards the Green camp.

Quote:

Elizabeth May was on Power and Politics today claiming that the only reason the Green vote fell from 6.8% to 3.8% was that she was excluded from the debates.

The reason I can't get excited or congratulatory over her win is because she's so incredibly fucking dishonest.

Gee, Elizabeth, are you pretty sure that running an intensive LOCAL campaign, rather than a NATIONAL campaign wasn't maybe part of it? Y'know, focussing solely on SGI, exactly as you said you would, rather than reaching out to the whole country?

Why is it so hard for her to just be honest? No spin. No finger pointing. No whining. Just honesty, for once.

The Green Party anthem should be "Nobody likes me | Everybody hates me | Think I'll go eat worms".  The way they've been cruelly mistreated since day one is a shame.  A lowdown, dirty shame.

Meanwhile, if nobody is jamming a camera in her face, she might have considered actually knocking on some doors.  You don't need the media's help for that one.  And really, on one of her eight days (so I'm told) campaigning outside her riding, what should the media have asked?  How's that complete and total focus on SGI going??  That's not really all that relevant outside of SGI.

well, the Greens are going nowhere in Canada anyway.

observer521 wrote:

well, the Greens are going nowhere in Canada anyway.

This potato has been over fertilized, black rot is already setting in.

I do not believe you can catagorize the average green voter.  In my area the EDA members and voters I've gotten to know well  are  a mixture of previously apolitical people, red tories, dippers who put the environment first, light libertarians who want pot and euthenasia legalized.  The thing I don't see is proclaimed ex liberals.  I think I'll see a few join now.

When it comes down to it both Libs and Greens cost NDP seats, Greens and NDP cost Lib seats, In theory Libs and NDP cost Green seats, suck it up.  The system is flawed and until everyone decides to play nice and pull candidates, or until the Libs embrace real electoral reform we have a problem. 

I do not like this sense of entitlement when people claim their votes were stolen.  The NDP managed to win a quite a number of seats with caracitures of real Candidates who were not qualified.  Had they run good qualifed active candidates in all ridings they would have won even more seats and I'm good with that , but don't blame the Greens when at least part of the issue was weak local campaigns, you can't expect Jack to carry the entire load.  In 905 especially the NDP ran many campaigns weaker than ours and at the door voters noticed and mentioned the fact.

genstrike wrote:

[...]

I don't think it is possible for a riding to lose 50% of its population through redistribution.  Usually, aren't riding populations kept relatively constant during redistributions to ensure that everyone (outside of a few quirks like PEI) has more or less the same population:MP ratio?

Sorry if I am mansplaining, but since you asked... no, not really, the factors deciding the size of ridings don't really function that way.

There is one rule that says that no province can ever have fewer seats in the Commons than it has in the Senate -- so it uses a 1867 yardstick to measure everything (and has more impact on cases like the one you mentioned [PEI, but this also comes clearly into play for New Brunswick] granting them an absolutely guaranteed number of seats - regardless of what their relative population is). While I don't recommend wikipedia as a source for a lot of things, in this case they report the facts pretty accurately, and there is a good table in their article on the Senate spelling out how this affects "rep by population" in terms of the Senate, and, by extension, the spill-over effect is to distort representation in the Commons.

There is another rule, the "grandfather clause" that states that no province can have fewer MPs than it did in the 1985 Parliament (this is part of the negotiations leading up to the failed Meech Lake Accord... the part that stuck, thank you Mr. Mulroney). Yet another wikipedia article and chart nicely spells this out). So before any distribution on the basis of population takes hold, this has to be taken into account. [to muddy the waters further, the Territories have no explicit guarantees under this and are allocated one seat each only]

The combination of these two rules means that there are, at present, 27 seats that are now guaranteed to provinces regardless of how their proportion of the total national population stagnates or declines. (Complicating the matter is that the Constitution Act only requires a total of 295 seats in the Commons). The actual formula used to determine how seats are to be distributed is:

[The total population of the country] divided by [279 (the number of provincial seats in 1985 [territories don't count])] equals [base number of seats for each province]  plus [seats governed by either of the special clauses] equals [actual number of seats]

As time goes by, and demographic shifts see the populations in BC, Ontario and Alberta increase relative to the rest of the country, the more distorting this formula is.

Or to put it more simply (an example often helps) under the enshrined forumla the average riding in my province (Alberta) has 117,513 people residing in it, the averge riding in your province (Manitoba) has 82,029 people residing in it. I leave it up to you to decide if that is "more or less the population:MP ratio". Oh, and finally, the courts have decided that it is acceptable, within the confines of any province, for there to be a discrepancy of up to 25% between urban and rural ridings... this is the explanation of why the ACTUAL population ratio in my riding was (in 2008, last time there are figures available, it has gone up)  124,197:1

So my answer to the question you posed (that I quote above) is no, not really.

bagkitty wrote:

...big long thing...

Regardless, Rebecca Blaikie won a few thousand votes less in 2011 than Judy W-L has won in recent elections - and with the lowest NDP vote outside of by-elections in that riding in many decades.  It's dumb to blame the Greens for costing her that seat if Blaikie/the NDP did that poorly.

Nicky - I'd suggest to you we've already seen most of the green vote that will vote NDP has already gone to NDP (Hence the green vote falling from 6.8 to 3.8 this election) and the remaining votes you are seeing here are actual green (probably small c green) voters.

It's possible you can go over ridings conservatives lost to NDP/Bloc/Lib by the margin of the green vote and claim it was conservatives splitting off to the green vote that cost the conservatives that seat.  Very unsure if any of the remaining collapsed green vote would ever consider a NDP vote.

This argument continues to be completely F*CKING tiresome.  You have a majority conservative government because the liberals completely collapsed and there was no way the NDP could have picked up all the slack and fended off the conservatives.  It has zero to do with those who vote Green because they want a Green voice in the Canadian government.  The liberals collapsed because they didn't bother listening in 2004, 2006 and 2008 when voters were telling them to change and gave them every opportunity to do so.

Sean in Ottawa has a good point.  When the talk turned to the possibility of a Layton lead minority government many Green voters may have recognized it as a true opportunity for electoral reform.  It was never going to be possible with the liberals and even the NDP with a single vote from Elizabeth may not have been able to figure out how to introduce the change so that it would receive the cooperation of the conservatives or the few BQ MPs.  The conservatives most likely would have fought to prevent PR from ever seeing the light of day.  However it represented the best chance PR ever had in this country.  It'll have to wait. Those Green supporters who may have changed their vote based on this would also have based it on the possibility that Elizabeth would not win in SGI.  That dynamic has changed and those votes may return to the Greens in the next election. 

Canada will never become literally a two party system.  The liberals may never recover and eventually join the old PC party as a permanent part of Canadian political history.  The NDP will never be able to attract enough progressive conservative voters and thinkers to balance the Harper conservatives.  That presents an opportunity for the Greens to become the third party over the next two elections.  Should the next election produce a conservative minority then it is certainly possible for electoral reform to become reality.  Jack Layton cannot avoid this in a minority situation and neither will the Greens. 

Token juvenile insults like those in some above posts aside, I recognize that many people here don't like Greens and certainly many Green posters here have proven that partisan politics contaminates our party as it does the others.  I respect those that don't like my politics and would respectfully submit  that a future government with NO liberal party and one with Greens and New Democrats gives Canada a much better chance in the future even if it is a conservative minority.  An NDP minority with Greens to provide support where we have common ideals would be even better. 

I hope it's not my viewpoint that mimeguy finds contaminated.

Recall that the Cons. did try a couple of times, assuming they were genuine and would have gone through with it, I doubt they would now, to do the Senate reform thing, which could have amounted to Greens in.

Is it remembered that a sporting Jack Layton actually mentioned the Greens during the debate, the million votes was it? Is that why mimeguy believes some Greens were moved to vote NDP?

Perhaps the Greens can play the role that the Lib Dems did in the UK...prior to their doing a 180 and propping up the ultra-rightwing Cameron government.  

the greens went up last election  because we moved 250,000 votes last time mostly from the ndp

the ndp went up this time because jack layton said he would reopen the constitution as  instructed

something all the other partys are too smart or too dumb to ever do...you pick

it will be the end of the ndp in the long run

then with the help of the four guys who run the polls and create spin  and answer to the half billion dollars  harper put into media last year

they showed what media ignored on purpose .....a federal party would reopen the constitution something a quebec party had tried to do for how many years?

and of course created this faked harpers/layton "orange crush" ...the two year old joint plan

then those we had moved green last time  then got caught up in it as designed and went back ndp

because they are it seems... yes ... "stupid potheads" 

its a long story but most of you obviously do not follow too well and would probaly just think other wise any way

but to us it showed layton would even see a destroyed old canada just  to beat the lberals

to me he will be remembered as a traitor of  the highest order

and I long for his demise

soon though like potheads they will soon see jack for what he really is..nothing of substance

and any that think the greens are conservatives ..well..you are so far off the mark its silly

put that in your pipes and smoke it

cheers

So you stopped in to confirm the "Tories with composters" meme?

Kewl. 

And much appreciated. It's very much what I think is true of Green voters over thirty. The younger crowd is more diverse, and more likely to consider the NDP.