Politics · Federal General Election 2011 · Canada
Introduction
Polls across Canada were open on 2011-05-02-Monday for a federal general election. The result was a majority victory for the Conservative Party in the House of Commons, based on a two-point gain in the popular vote.
This majority result may suggest to Canadians that the three minority results in recent elections were anomalous, rather than representative of a fundamental change in Canadian politics. A slight uptick in voter turnout, and the significant swings in popular support may signal frustration with recent minority governments. The changes from 2008 to 2011 are much more significant than were the changes from 2006 to 2008.
The Green Party saw a sharp decline in its overall electoral support on the national scale (6.8% to 3.9%), but scored a major first in the election of its leader, Elizabeth May, to the House of Commons. May is the first Green Party member elected to Canada's lower house. Although its popular fortunes declined, the Greens would would nevertheless have enough MPs to have official party status in the House of Commons under many proportional representation models.
The stark disconnect between the popular support and seats in the House of Commons in recent elections highlights a problem with the current 'first past the post' electoral mechanism in Canada: the Bloc Québécois lost 39.4% of its support but lost 92.0% of its seats; the Conservative party were up only 5.3% in the popular vote but somehow 16.8% in seat count, crossing into majority territory; the Green party's support slipped even more than that of the Bloc Québécois, and yet it gained a seat; the Liberal party lost 28.0% of the popular vote but got hit with a disproportionately large loss of 55.3% in their number of seats; and the New Democratic party turned a solid 68.3% gain into an whopping 176% improvement in their seat count, claiming the official opposition role from the Liberals.
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 0.5% 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 2008 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 | |
6.04% | 4 | 1.30% | No | 19 | +15 | Yes |
| Canadian Action | 0.01% | 0 | 0 | No | 0 | 0 | No | |
| Christian Heritage | 0.13% | 0 | 0 | No | 0 | 0 | No | |
| Communist | 0.02% | 0 | 0 | No | 0 | 0 | No | |
| Conservative | |
39.62% | 167 | 54.22% | Yes | 123 | -44 | Yes |
| First Peoples National | <0.01% | 0 | 0 | No | 0 | 0 | No | |
| Green | |
3.91% | 1 | 0.32% | No | 12 | +11 | Yes |
| Liberal | |
18.91% | 34 | 11.04% | Yes | 59 | +25 | Yes |
| Libertarian | 0.04% | 0 | 0 | No | 0 | 0 | No | |
| Marxist-Leninist | 0.07% | 0 | 0 | No | 0 | 0 | No | |
| New Democratic | |
30.63% | 102 | 33.12% | Yes | 95 | -7 | Yes |
| Progressive Canadian | 0.04% | 0 | 0 | No | 0 | 0 | No | |
| Pirate | 0.02% | 0 | 0 | No | 0 | 0 | No | |
| Radical Marijuana | 0.01% | 0 | 0 | No | 0 | 0 | No | |
| Rhinoceros | 0.03% | 0 | 0 | No | 0 | 0 | No | |
| United | <0.01% | 0 | 0 | No | 0 | 0 | No | |
| Western Block | 0.01% | 0 | 0 | No | 0 | 0 | No | |
| No Affiliation |  |
0.49% | 0 | 0 | No | 0 | 0 | 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; 14 720 580 ballots cast by the pool of 23 971 740 registered electors, with 71 486 of 71 513 polls reporting (99.96%) for a turnout of 61.41% (61.43% upon extrapolating for unreported polls), before counting election-day registrations in the pool of electors.
