Politics · Federal General Election 2008 · Canada
Introduction
Polls across Canada were open on 2008-10-14-Monday for a federal general election. The result was a minority victory for the Conservative Party. Until Canada catches up with the world's electoral best practices of the 20th Century (such as proportional representation: see below), a minority is probably the best we could have hoped for.
This is the third minority result in as many elections. Canada has elected no majority governments in the 21st Century. Hopefully the continuation of this trend will increase pressure on the major parties to support national electoral reform. For the third election in a row, the Green Party was alone amongst the parties fielding national slates to be shut out of Parliament, despite showing significant growth in popularity from the 2006 election. More than 940 000 Canadians voted Green in 2008, almost a fifth the number of votes the Conservative party garnered. Under many proportional representation models, such popular support would give the Greens many more than enough MPs to have official party status in the House of Commons.
The stark disconnect between the popular support and seats in the House of Commons between 2006 and 2008 highlights a problem with the current 'first past the post' electoral mechanism in Canada: the Bloc Québécois lost 4.86% of its support and lost 1.96% of its seats; the Conservative party were up a slight 3.75% in the popular vote but a startling 15.32% in seat count; the Green party's support grew the fastest of the major parties, by 51.74%, approaching a million votes, but are still shut out of Parliament; the Liberal party lost 13.20% of the popular vote but got hit with a disproportionately large loss of 26.21% in their number of seats; and the New Democratic party turned a modest 4.12% gain into an astonishing 27.59% improvement in their seat count.
Actual Results vs. a Proportional Model
Allocation of seats in the House of Commons, based on the election results:
Allocation of seats in the House of Commons as it would be:
The model shown is an assignment of available House of Commons seats per the Sainte-Laguë method with a cut-off of 2%, i.e., parties that received less than 2% of the popular vote are not assigned seats in the House; these fractions of seats (e.g., four hundredths of a seat) that cannot readily be assigned to fringe parties are allocated amongst the major parties. The 2% cut-off was selected to match the threshold for public funding of political parties. While Sainte-Laguë method is used by some modern democracies, its use here is simply to illustrate how different the outcome of the election might be in the House, not to suggest that this is necessarily the best method for Canada. Other proportional methodologies may yield slightly different results (see research at Elections Canada or the Canadian Library of Parliament, or an example in New Zealand).
This model highlights the diminished House of Commons clout of a party with limited regional appeal (e.g., the BQ), and the increase in representation for alternative national parties (e.g., the Green Party, elevated to Official Party status) which have significant support that is diffusely spread across electoral districts and hence does not lead to the election of any candidates in particular ridings in the first-past-the-post system. Because electoral districts in Canada have at most 0.48% of the electors, and candidates run in only one district, it is highly unlikely (practically impossible) that any un-affiliated candidate could accumulate enough votes to meet the 2% threshold.
See also similar illustrations based on the 2000, 2004, 2006, and 2011 elections.
| Party | Colour | Actual Votes | Actual Seats | Actual Seats Fraction | Actual Official Party? | Prop. Seats | Prop. Seats Diff | Prop. Official Party? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Animal Alliance Environment Voters | <0.01% | 0 | 0 | No | 0 | 0 | No | |
| Bloc Québécois | |
9.97% | 50 | 16.23% | Yes | 31 | -19 | Yes |
| Canadian Action | 0.03% | 0 | 0 | No | 0 | 0 | No | |
| Christian Heritage | 0.19% | 0 | 0 | No | 0 | 0 | No | |
| Communist | 0.03% | 0 | 0 | No | 0 | 0 | No | |
| Conservative | |
37.63% | 143 | 46.43% | Yes | 117 | -26 | Yes |
| First Peoples National | 0.01% | 0 | 0 | No | 0 | 0 | No | |
| Green | |
6.80% | 0 | 0 | No | 21 | +21 | Yes |
| Liberal | |
26.24% | 76 | 24.68% | Yes | 82 | +6 | Yes |
| Libertarian | 0.05% | 0 | 0 | No | 0 | 0 | No | |
| Marxist-Leninist | 0.06% | 0 | 0 | No | 0 | 0 | No | |
| New Democratic | |
18.20% | 37 | 12.01% | Yes | 57 | +20 | Yes |
| neorhino.ca | 0.02% | 0 | 0 | No | 0 | 0 | No | |
| Newfoundland Labrador First | 0.01% | 0 | 0 | No | 0 | 0 | No | |
| Progressive Canadian | 0.04% | 0 | 0 | No | 0 | 0 | No | |
| People's Political Power | <0.01% | 0 | 0 | No | 0 | 0 | No | |
| Radical Marijuana | 0.02% | 0 | 0 | No | 0 | 0 | No | |
| Western Block | <0.01% | 0 | 0 | No | 0 | 0 | No | |
| Work Less | <0.01% | 0 | 0 | No | 0 | 0 | No | |
| No Affiliation | |
0.69% | 2 | 0.70% | No | 0 | -2 | No |
Note: Official party status is granted to parties that secure at least 12 seats. It confers certain standing in parliamentary procedure and funding for parliamentary staff.
Source: Elections Canada Preliminary Results; 13 832 972 ballots cast by the pool of 23 401 064 registered electors, with 69 601 of 69 630 polls reporting (99.96%) for a turnout of 59.11% (59.14% upon extrapolating for unreported polls), before counting election-day registrations in the pool of electors.
