The number of women in parliament has not risen much from the last election, 64 t0 68, though the there are some interesting changes in numbers.
The Conservatives have gone from 14 women to 23 making the female Conservative caucus the largest in this parliament. Conservative women candidates did somewhat worse than men in getting elected. The Conservatives has risen from 11.3% to 16.1%, though still very low.
The Bloc elected elected less women this time around sending 15 to Ottawa instead of 18. Though they ran only ran 21 women - roughly in proportion to the number of MPs they elected.
The NDP increased their total MPs, but the number of women remained static at 12. Female candidates did as a well as men in getting elected. In 2006 the caucus was over 40% female, now it is 1/3.
The worst results for women were with the Liberals. They ran the most female candidates in this election but they had less success than the men running for parliament. The total number of women in the Liberal caucus dropped by three, but as a portion of the caucus it is a bit better.
BC elected 11 women out of 36 MPs, currently the best result in Canada. Quebec was the leader in 2006, but has now fallen behind
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Where to with the Senate?
Harper has come out of the blocks today with a statement on the future of the senate - it has to either be made democratic or it has to be abolished, which is not his preference. Will Jack Layton come out and call for an end to the Senate and back such a change?
More musings about the federal election
The Conservative vote fell by 170 000 votes in the election. Yes, the party's percentage of the popular vote went up, but the total number of votes did fall.
The NDP's total vote as fell, in their case by about 70 000 votes.
There were 850 000 fewer Liberal voters in this election - 19% of people that voted in Liberal in 2006 did not do so in 2008.
This should give people an idea of how low the voter turn out was in this election. It is also one of the reasons the polls were rather far off at the end of the campaign. No one is building into their reporting models any realistic measure of party support based on the likelihood of people voting. There were hints at this in some of the polling data, but it did not come near the headlines.
About 1 500 000 less people voted in this election than would have been expected based on the previous elections.
The more I look at the analysis I read by Werner Antwieler at UBC about voter actions in elections, the more I can see people staying loyal to a party and the less it is all about swing from one party to a different one. I suspect what really happened in this election is that a lot of Liberal voters stayed home.
The question for the Liberals is if they can get their supporters to come back and vote next time. The suggestion that the NDP and Liberals merge in someway does not make sense. The resulting merged party will get fewer votes than the two seperate ones did. If merging made sense, the right would have done much better after the merger of the parties.
What must be addressed by politicians in Canada is why the public is not voting. Most people are not voting because they are disechanted by their proferred party and are not going to vote for anyone else. Negative campaigning works in the short term but leads to nation of people that hate the parties and political parties.
Given that most people are moderately tied to a given party on the spectrum, it would make more sense to get out a positive message to your supporters instead of rubishing the other parties. But this is not how the boys in the backrooms think who seem to have more in common with King Pyrrhus than anyone else. Politics are being harmed by the insular navel gazing advisors all of the parties have. None of them are willing to the take the risk and try anything new. All of them put too much faith in the data from the pollsters. All them would prefer to win than be right.
One reason I like STV so much is because it naturally favours positive campaigning over negative campaigning. To be effective in STV you need to give voters a reason to vote for you high on the ballot, odds are your victory will depend on being supported by people from other parts of the political spectrum. In First Past the Post you just need to beat your opponents down far enough to win, if 65% of the people are against you, it does not matter. In STV it does matter.
At the end of the day, I would prefer to lose but have been positive with a vision than win by slagging other people. The last national leader that really managed to do this was Preston Manning.
The more I look back on the Reform party and Preston Manning, the more I see that he really wanted to do it differently, that he really wanted to offer competing visions and letting the public decide. I was very anti Reform party for much of the 1990s and allowed partisan issues to blind me to the truly unique change he was trying bring to politics.
The NDP's total vote as fell, in their case by about 70 000 votes.
There were 850 000 fewer Liberal voters in this election - 19% of people that voted in Liberal in 2006 did not do so in 2008.
This should give people an idea of how low the voter turn out was in this election. It is also one of the reasons the polls were rather far off at the end of the campaign. No one is building into their reporting models any realistic measure of party support based on the likelihood of people voting. There were hints at this in some of the polling data, but it did not come near the headlines.
About 1 500 000 less people voted in this election than would have been expected based on the previous elections.
The more I look at the analysis I read by Werner Antwieler at UBC about voter actions in elections, the more I can see people staying loyal to a party and the less it is all about swing from one party to a different one. I suspect what really happened in this election is that a lot of Liberal voters stayed home.
The question for the Liberals is if they can get their supporters to come back and vote next time. The suggestion that the NDP and Liberals merge in someway does not make sense. The resulting merged party will get fewer votes than the two seperate ones did. If merging made sense, the right would have done much better after the merger of the parties.
What must be addressed by politicians in Canada is why the public is not voting. Most people are not voting because they are disechanted by their proferred party and are not going to vote for anyone else. Negative campaigning works in the short term but leads to nation of people that hate the parties and political parties.
Given that most people are moderately tied to a given party on the spectrum, it would make more sense to get out a positive message to your supporters instead of rubishing the other parties. But this is not how the boys in the backrooms think who seem to have more in common with King Pyrrhus than anyone else. Politics are being harmed by the insular navel gazing advisors all of the parties have. None of them are willing to the take the risk and try anything new. All of them put too much faith in the data from the pollsters. All them would prefer to win than be right.
One reason I like STV so much is because it naturally favours positive campaigning over negative campaigning. To be effective in STV you need to give voters a reason to vote for you high on the ballot, odds are your victory will depend on being supported by people from other parts of the political spectrum. In First Past the Post you just need to beat your opponents down far enough to win, if 65% of the people are against you, it does not matter. In STV it does matter.
At the end of the day, I would prefer to lose but have been positive with a vision than win by slagging other people. The last national leader that really managed to do this was Preston Manning.
The more I look back on the Reform party and Preston Manning, the more I see that he really wanted to do it differently, that he really wanted to offer competing visions and letting the public decide. I was very anti Reform party for much of the 1990s and allowed partisan issues to blind me to the truly unique change he was trying bring to politics.
Observations on the Election
Winners on the day -
Jack Layton - the NDP gained seats and it elected an MP in Newfoundland, Quebec and Alberta for representation in 8 of 10 provinces. The downside is that the party only marginally increased its support across the nation and still finished quite a way behind its best result in 1988. The NDP is now sitting on 22 safe seats, really the highest level for them in decades, possibly ever.
Jack Layton's desire to be the leader of the official opposition is still far off from reality. The NDP was only competive in 50 to 60 ridings across the country. The NDP may finally be a party with representation in all of Canada, but it needs to be competitve in at least 100 to 150 to become the official oppisition.
If you count all the seats where the NDP won, came second or a strong third, you only get to 109 ridings which is a rise from 86 after the 2006 election.
Stephen Harper - yes they missed the majority, but they are up enough in seats to be able to govern safely for quite awhile. The party also did well in the popular vote, better than all the pollsters had them at. They finished with 37.64% of the vote which is only marginally less than the Liberals got in 1997 and more than Paul Martin got in 2004.
While the result was not what the PM wanted, the results show some strong positive trends for the party. At the end of the election the Conservatives safely won in 123 ridings, closely won in 20 more and were within reach in a further 26. There is a strongly emerging block of Conservatives seats in Canada based on a secure 70 in the west and 30 in Ontario. These are also the areas that are going to gain seats in the next redistribution.
Did Not Win of Lose
Gilles Duceppe and the Bloc maanged to recover from some bad polling numbers to return to Ottawa more or less as the same party that was elected in 2006.
Losers
Stephane Dion and the Liberals had a historic low vote in the election. They did manage to break 25%, but not by a lot. They could have done a lot worse on election day but were saved by some close results, in fact the Liberals had almost as many narrow wins as the Conservatives did even though they 66 seats less. Almost 1/4 of the Liberals MPs were only narrow winners.
The Liberals have to be concerned about the collapse of the support for the party. In the west and parts of Quebec the Liberals finished at less than 10% of the vote. In BC, long the brightest place for the Liberals in the west, the five seats they did win masks the very close results of most of them and the very dismal results in the rest of the province. Of the 104 seats in Canada from Northern Ontario and west, the Liberals won 9 of them and were competive in only a handful more. You can not be government if you are not able to win seats in 1/3 of the country.
Elizabeth May and the Greens had a really bad night. The party not only did not manage to win any seats, their stars all did badly. Elizabeth May came a distant second. Adriane Carr came fourth in Vancouver Centre though got a reasonable number of votes. Blair Wilson came distant third. The party came seond in a total of five ridings, three of them in Alberta Conservative turkey shoot country. Mike Nagy in Guelph came third with over 20% of the vote and is the only close third place finisher.
Overall the party vote did not quite manage to reach 7%, a much lower percentage than almost any of the polls where saying and not a dramatic improvement over what Jim Harris did in 2004 and 2006 as leader. The only upside I can see is that in BC the Greens over took the Liberals in 10 ridings
Other Observations:
The number of ridings in which a candidate got more than 30 000 votes is up again. 4 in BC, 14 in Alberta, 9 in Ontario including one that lost, 4 in Quebec and one in Newfoundland. By party 29 Conservatives, 3 Bloc, one New Democrat and one Liberal that lost.
Voter turn out is down again, though not by a lot and the way the voter's list is now maintained, it is hard to tell what the actual turn out is.
In the next election, the 60 seats most likely to be in play are held 1/3 by the Liberals and Conservatives each, 1/4 by the NDP and 1/10 by the Bloc. This means the Liberals have a much steeper hill to climb to come back than most would expect.
Should the 22 new seats be added as proposed, most of them will end up in areas that favour the Conservatives. The ten proposed seats in Ontario will be in that 905 area that was almost swept by them this time. In BC the six new seats will go one on the island, one in the Okanagan and four in the 'burbs of the lower mainland. All of them are areas that voted Conservative this time. Alberta, their six new seats are clearly going to be Conservative.
If the next election is run on 330 seats, the Conservatives go into the election with about 138 safe seats.
Jack Layton - the NDP gained seats and it elected an MP in Newfoundland, Quebec and Alberta for representation in 8 of 10 provinces. The downside is that the party only marginally increased its support across the nation and still finished quite a way behind its best result in 1988. The NDP is now sitting on 22 safe seats, really the highest level for them in decades, possibly ever.
Jack Layton's desire to be the leader of the official opposition is still far off from reality. The NDP was only competive in 50 to 60 ridings across the country. The NDP may finally be a party with representation in all of Canada, but it needs to be competitve in at least 100 to 150 to become the official oppisition.
If you count all the seats where the NDP won, came second or a strong third, you only get to 109 ridings which is a rise from 86 after the 2006 election.
Stephen Harper - yes they missed the majority, but they are up enough in seats to be able to govern safely for quite awhile. The party also did well in the popular vote, better than all the pollsters had them at. They finished with 37.64% of the vote which is only marginally less than the Liberals got in 1997 and more than Paul Martin got in 2004.
While the result was not what the PM wanted, the results show some strong positive trends for the party. At the end of the election the Conservatives safely won in 123 ridings, closely won in 20 more and were within reach in a further 26. There is a strongly emerging block of Conservatives seats in Canada based on a secure 70 in the west and 30 in Ontario. These are also the areas that are going to gain seats in the next redistribution.
Did Not Win of Lose
Gilles Duceppe and the Bloc maanged to recover from some bad polling numbers to return to Ottawa more or less as the same party that was elected in 2006.
Losers
Stephane Dion and the Liberals had a historic low vote in the election. They did manage to break 25%, but not by a lot. They could have done a lot worse on election day but were saved by some close results, in fact the Liberals had almost as many narrow wins as the Conservatives did even though they 66 seats less. Almost 1/4 of the Liberals MPs were only narrow winners.
The Liberals have to be concerned about the collapse of the support for the party. In the west and parts of Quebec the Liberals finished at less than 10% of the vote. In BC, long the brightest place for the Liberals in the west, the five seats they did win masks the very close results of most of them and the very dismal results in the rest of the province. Of the 104 seats in Canada from Northern Ontario and west, the Liberals won 9 of them and were competive in only a handful more. You can not be government if you are not able to win seats in 1/3 of the country.
Elizabeth May and the Greens had a really bad night. The party not only did not manage to win any seats, their stars all did badly. Elizabeth May came a distant second. Adriane Carr came fourth in Vancouver Centre though got a reasonable number of votes. Blair Wilson came distant third. The party came seond in a total of five ridings, three of them in Alberta Conservative turkey shoot country. Mike Nagy in Guelph came third with over 20% of the vote and is the only close third place finisher.
Overall the party vote did not quite manage to reach 7%, a much lower percentage than almost any of the polls where saying and not a dramatic improvement over what Jim Harris did in 2004 and 2006 as leader. The only upside I can see is that in BC the Greens over took the Liberals in 10 ridings
Other Observations:
The number of ridings in which a candidate got more than 30 000 votes is up again. 4 in BC, 14 in Alberta, 9 in Ontario including one that lost, 4 in Quebec and one in Newfoundland. By party 29 Conservatives, 3 Bloc, one New Democrat and one Liberal that lost.
Voter turn out is down again, though not by a lot and the way the voter's list is now maintained, it is hard to tell what the actual turn out is.
In the next election, the 60 seats most likely to be in play are held 1/3 by the Liberals and Conservatives each, 1/4 by the NDP and 1/10 by the Bloc. This means the Liberals have a much steeper hill to climb to come back than most would expect.
Should the 22 new seats be added as proposed, most of them will end up in areas that favour the Conservatives. The ten proposed seats in Ontario will be in that 905 area that was almost swept by them this time. In BC the six new seats will go one on the island, one in the Okanagan and four in the 'burbs of the lower mainland. All of them are areas that voted Conservative this time. Alberta, their six new seats are clearly going to be Conservative.
If the next election is run on 330 seats, the Conservatives go into the election with about 138 safe seats.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)