PoliticsCanada: Election Results: Conservs get majority, NDP official opposition, Libs now a rump, Bloc decimated, Greens in by 1 seat

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Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's
CBC News (May3,2k11)

refWrite editorial comment:  As of yesterday's federal elections, Canada now has a majority government, a majority if we count not the popular vote, but if we count instead the number of seats won in the Parliament's House of Commons, party by party.  There were four parties in the last Parliament, now augmented by a fifth party, the Green Party of Canada, which won 1 seat (the Saanich - Gulf Islands riding in the province of British Columbia).

A majority government, won by the Conservative Party of Canada under Prime Minister Stephen Harper yesterdat, will bring stability and will secure a full four year term -- unless the Prime Minister decides to call one sooner.  PM Harper will probably not pull the plug early, since he has been granted in his past winning election campaigns (2006, 2008) only minority governments which served at the whim of the other three parties -- all three having been leftist.  What's especially interesting is that yesterday Jack Layton's New Democratic Party, arguably the most leftist and socialist of the three, now four, opposition parties (which together received a majority of the popular vote) has become the 2nd-place party in regard to seats in the Commons, thus becoming what we call "the official opposition."  He accomplished this, as predicted here, by cutting the previous 2nd place party, the Liberals, down to a rump (falling from 76 in 2008 to 34 today.  Even more interesting was the movement of Lib voters away from that party in Québec where they landed on the doorstep of the NDP,  and Ontario where they fled a feared national victory of the NDP and so headed strait into the arms of the Conservs.

The CBC chart to the left shows how the NDP which was in 4th place before this election, in a sudden upsurge attracted the leftwing votes of the Liberals and decimated the ranks of the previously 3rd place Bloc Québecois, a separatist party which dropped from 49 seats in 2008 to yesterdays win of only 4 seats.

Ironically, the NDP's decimation of the Bloc brawt the newly-elected Québec NDPers into their new party and new caucus in the Commons, while at the same time the NDP lost some of its  veteran parliamentary members from Ontario.  To put the situations in the most mild terms, the influx of ex-BQers who speak French, mostly coupled with the outflow of English-speaking NDPers in its Ontario parliamentary ranks, has created a cuturally schizophrenic new New Democratic Party over which Jack Layton must preside; he will undoubtedly face a clash among his forces -- those who will push for Québec interests and its so-called "special status within Canada" (based on language difference), and those English-speaking NDP parliamentarians who will resist this push and work from the concept of equality as against special privilege (for Québec).   There are at least some strong sympathies among apparently ex-BQ voters in the freshman cohort of the new New Democrat caucus in the Commons, Québec freshmen described by some TV commentators as "autonomists" -- they want an autonomous Québec within Canada.  Old-style NPers, on the other hand, may balk at the anticipated demands from the soft-separatism of the new Québec NDPers.

The anticpated tension within the NDP will not occur utterly without precedent in Canadian political history.  A prime example may well be the case of the r+twing Social Credit Party (Socred) that began in the province of Alberta, where it had developed out of ideas for economic reform originating with the English engineer C. H. Douglas (1879-1952).  In depression-conditioned Alberta, Social Credit in 1935 fielded 46 candidates and won 17 seats in the federal House of Commons. It also formed the Alberta provincial govt  (1935-1943) of William Aberhart the radio evangelist, with a largely Protestant Christian base but was already abandoning its originator's "funny money" policy. The national federal Social Credit Party of Canada was founded in 1944.  After electing a small caucus to the Federal Parliament, in due time some Québec populists found sufficient agreement with points of policy advocated by the anglophone Social Crediters, to unleash themselves among the largely Catholic and French-speaking population in Québec where they to elected francophone Social Crediters to form a wing of Social Credit in Canada's House of Commons.  Réal Caouette became the leading figure in Québec's version of créditisme, once he had been first elected to the federal Parliament in 1946.  In 1959, Robert Thompson become national leader of the Socreds and was well spoken-of  by all parliamentary party leaders.

In the 1962 election, Social Credit won 26 seats in Quebec. Caouette himself returned to Parliament as the MP for Villeneuve, a riding he held for the rest of his life (though it was renamed Témiscamingue in 1966). The party won only four seats in the rest of Canada, forcing Thompson to appoint Caouette as the party's deputy leader. Holding the balance of power in the House of Commons, Social Credit helped bring down the Progressive Conservative minority government of John Diefenbaker. However in the 1963 election, Social Credit was reduced to 24 seats nationwide.

Caouette fought for bilingualism in the House of Commons, winning a symbolic victory when he got the Parliament's restaurant to produce bilingual menus.^[1] In this, he anticipated the official bilingualism policy that would later be put into effect by Pierre Trudeau.

Caouette believed that since the party was most successful in Quebec, he should be leader of the party instead of Thompson. As well, Caoeutte and his followers remained true believers in the social credit monetary theories of C.H. Douglas while Thompson and the Social Credit Party of Alberta had largely abandoned the theory. Thompson refused to step aside, leading Caouette to leave the party, along with the rest of Quebec wing in 1963, to establish the Ralliement des créditistes as its own political party, independent of Social Credit.

Main article: Social Credit Party of Canada split, 1963

In the 1965 election, Caouette's Ralliement won nine seats, while Social Credit led by Thompson won five seats. In the 1968 election, Caouette's party won 14 seats while Social Credit won none.  (Wikipedia)

Any argument from historical analogy can only hold in certain respects regarding a current event and its suggested historical antecedant / analogue.  My main point, of course, is simply that Jack Layton has a difficult job on his hands.  My secondary point is that the cultural milieux of Québec gives Mr Layton little ground for relishing the youth, inexperience, and in some cases lack of fluency in French of his new caucus members from Québec -- where his numbers skyrocketed from 1 to 58 (58 out of a total of 102 in the full caucus).   Mr Layton's caucus size, minus its 58 Québec numbers, is 44, which may be the statistical marker of a sociological faultline that even the amazing Jack Layton can't talk away.

-- Politicarp

Harper: Majority win 

turns page on uncertainties

Layton seizes Opposition; Duceppe, Ignatieff defeated as parties devastated

by Mark Gollom and Andrew Davidson, CBC News 

Posted: May 2, 2011 9:19 PM ET

Last Updated: May 3, 2011 12:29 PM ET 
Read 3271comments

Canadians can now "turn the page on the uncertainties and repeat elections of the past seven years," Stephen Harper said Monday night as voters delivered the Conservative leader his first majority government and brought a dramatic and unpredicted realignment to the country's political landscape.

The re-elected prime minister told the country that government affairs will begin "as early as tomorrow" with a plan for creating jobs and growth without increasing taxes, immediate help for families and seniors and eliminating the deficit while maintaining health-care transfers to provinces and territories.

"And friends I have to say it — a strong, stable, national Conservative majority government," Harper told a cheering crowd in Calgary, a reference to his oft-repeated refrain during the campaign.

Meanwhile, NDP Leader Jack Layton will now become Official Opposition leader and replace Michael Ignatieff, who himself was defeated in his own Toronto riding. Ignatieff took responsibility for the Liberals' historic electoral loss. Ignatieff's Liberals — often touted as Canada's "natural governing party" — placed a distant third behind Layton's party.

With 99 per cent of polls reporting, the Conservatives won 167 seats, followed by the NDP with 102, Liberals with 34 and the Bloc Québécois with four and the Green Party with one. A party needs to capture 155 seats to win a majority in the House of Commons.

Despite his majority victory, Harper pledged to work with other parties and praised their efforts over five weeks.

PoliticsCanada: Election: Forecast, while we await today's election results

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Pie-graph (below) by Autostraddle (May2,2k11), a Lesbian cultural blog furiously declaring that haters/critiquers of Prime Minister Stephen Harper include "all Canadian women."  Hopefully the remark is only tongue-in-cheek, as the "Girls-on-Girls" faction (as they characterize themselves) is at least astute enuff to show how Globe & Mail has endorsed Mr Harper for a third term (along with National Post, and UK's Economist); while Toronto Star has shifted from the Liberals to the most-socialist party, Jack Layton's New Democrats, skipping over the most-enviro radical party, Greens.

The Bloc Quebecois have been endorsed by Le Devoir. They currently have 5.8% support, which is down from 10.1% at the beginning of the campaign period. The Bloc really only happens in Quebec, and with a lot of that support shifting towards the NDP, this drop isn’t really a surprise.

Bloc support is rather exclusively found in Québec, the only province where this Federal separatist party is on the ballot.  The quoted "10.1%" nationally translates into 38.1% of the vote in Québec.  "...[V]oters have flocked to the NDP, principally at the cost of the Liberals and Bloc Québécois," says G&M:

“The separatist BQ on Monday will be dealt a resounding rebuke from Quebeckers registering their worst showing in BQ history,” pollster Nik Nanos predicted.

The precedent of 2008 suggests that, while Mr. Harper will win a strong minority government, he will not obtain the majority of seats without which, he has repeatedly warned, his government will be unseated by the other parties in a matter of weeks.

But Mr. Nanos observed that in 1997, “with similar results, Jean Chrétien [a previous          Liberal Prime Minister of Canada] did manage to form a majority government.”

He did it by sweeping ridings across Ontario thanks to a divide on the right between the Reform and Progressive Conservative parties.

Whether the NDP surge in this election splits the votes on the left, allowing the Conservatives to capture a clutch of ridings in Ontario and win their majority, is unknowable.

“It all boils down to the distribution of support,” Mr. Nanos observed. 

I'll be up late, I guess, watching these fascinating results of an election campaign that started slow and gathered steam as the NDP sucked up Green, Bloc, and Liberal votes (other Lib votes have drained off to the Conservs).  Meantime, the Conservatives have been moving from a minority-only govt to an increased number of parliamentary seats (still however in a minority status) with Harper begging voters for a majority .... and he just may get it in today's vote.  


Nevertheless, there remains the possiblity that, tho coming in only 2nd and 3rd, the socialists and Liberal rump will nevertheless unite to bring down Harper's third-term winners (short of a majority), by means of another no-confidence vote "in a matter of weeks." The two parties, once vying for second place, had promised each other they woud never form a coalition to govern Canada together.  But they had already formed a negative coalition, along with the Bloc, to bring down the Harper Conservative govt, necessitating the present election before completion of a full-term.  


Again, the Bloc's role is ironic in that now they are again playing the language card with considerable vehemence:

“We will fight right to the last minute to get out the vote,” Mr. Duceppe said in a speech that branded the New Democrats as contemptuous of Quebec. He dwelled on the fact that some NDP candidates in Quebec struggle in French and have barely set foot in the ridings where they are running. “This nation [Québec] has a language, the language is French, and we are proud of it,” he said. “How can we accept that people who don’t even speak our language are asking for our confidence?  It is contempt.” (National Post)

And it is a humiliation to Duceppe and the separatist Bloc in the Federal Parliament, because so many francophones have shifted away from the BQ to the English-language based NDP.


-- Politicarp


Seat projections made on April 30 as published in Globe & Mail, Toronto, on May 1:

PoliticsCanada: 2nd & 3rd parties switch: Conservs still in lead, but chance of majority very shakey

Reuters (Apri30,2k11)

Pollsters have calibrated the prospects of Canada's Conservative Party, now the governing party based on a leading minority status in the House of Commons, the party having inched back into a 38% status 3 days before the May 2 national elections.  This leaves them 2 percentage points short of the 40% threshold that ordinarily results in a majority of seats in the Commons, and thus into stable full term governance.  The Conservs had dipped to 36.4% yesterday.

These minute fluctuations come after an amazing upsurge of voters turning to the New Democrat Party, which had held a perennial 3rd place status in the total national vote and in the Commons.  One outstanding proposal tending toward greater electoral justice in the Canadian federation has been its present leader's advocacy of proportional representation; but another stand registers as on the deficit side of the goal toward stable democracy that has long been advocated by the Conservs -- namely, an elected Senate (instead of simply enduring forever the serious flaw in the repatriated Constitution that provides only for Senators by appointment of the Prime Minister).  The NDP erroneously wants to steer the country into instability by abolishing the Senate.  Still, there's the NDP's advocacy of PropRep; in refWrite's opinion, that's an advance beyond present Constitutional arrangements.

The main surprise of election trends is neither the statistical path in the polling thru-out the campaign toward a minority Conserv govt again (it woud be the third such, each time headed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper), nor the upsurge of the NDP (which is more clearly socialist than the other two left parties in the Commons), as startling as that NDP upsurge has been in the polls. But the real shocker is the now obvious degeneration of voter support for the Liberal Party at the federal level.  Two Liberal leaders now have, in succession, failed to capture the imagination of voters sufficiently to carry their party into even a minority-governing status.  Besides the long history of fraud and other scandals attached to the Liberals before the latest phase of that party's leadership by eggheads (Stéphane Dion and presently Michael Ignatieff), motivated by grandiose Green schemes, ever increasing spending and national debt (etc), there has been the recent gaffe by Iggy where he at least attempted to balance his promises of spending splurges with a resolute proposal to increase sales taxes.  He thus set himself off from Jack Layton, the NDP leader, who insists no increase in sales taxes.  The amazing thing is that Layton woud instead increase taxes on "the rich" -- and thus on those among them are the main source of job creation.

Were we only to concentrate on one factor like economic policy, we can now risk saying with reference to the latest polls that voters are leaving the Liberals in large part for New Democrats, and the country is polarizing into a clearer left vs r+t split.  But some nuances of such a judgment and forecast are necessary.  One of them being that the Liberals have always had centrist and mild-r+t tendencies among its "big tent" membership and parliamentary representatives.   Some voters for Liberal candidates are moderates or left-of-center on fiscal policy, but social conservatives on family, r+t to l+f, sexuality/marriage, transgender use of women's washrooms in public places, etc.   These voters may be trending to switch support to the Conservs, who are not the raving ideologues the left parties try to paint them to be -- the main concern of the Conservs has been to stabilize the economy, encourage investment within Canada, job creation, ease the tax burden on all wage-earners, stop the rise in government indebtedness, and actually pay down the debt to free up the oncoming generations.

In  closing, I can only note that the Green Party has not yet found a seat in Parliament.  It's 900,000 segment of the voters in the last federal election was denied representation in the Commons (Canada's constitutional flaw) due to the dispersal of its voters across the country; on the other hand, the Bloc Québecois whose voters are much more densely concentrated in one province and who had less than Greens in total votes gained over 50 seats federally for their separatist cause.  Ironically, the rise of the NDP which peaked this time around at 31.2%, and now has slipped a bit to 29.6%. The separatist Bloc Québecois, on the other hand, does not gain from the federalist Liberals in Québec where Libs are losing voters to the NDP (up to a whopping 39% there!, leading the field) and to a lesser extent to the Conservs.  It's possible that the expected 2nd (NDP) and 3rd (Libs) parties in the federal Commons will unite to try to deny the expected 1st place Conservs the role of forming the new government, altho in the electoral campaigns the NDP and Libs both parties swore each woud never enter a coalition govt with the other.  In 3 days time we'll know where all these mysteries take us.  Long live Canada!

PoliticsCanada: Conservs: Conservative party trends toward majority, Ontario swing expected

Postmedia News via Montreal Gazette  (Mar1,2k11)

Harper Conservatives closing in 

on majority support: poll

 

 

by Mark Kennedy

Postmedia via Montreal Gazette (Mar1,2k11)



OTTAWA — Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservatives have opened up a wide lead against their political rivals in public favour and would be close to winning a majority if an election occurred now, a new poll has found.

The national survey, conducted exclusively for Postmedia News and Global National, found that the Tories are now supported by 43 per cent of decided voters — up by four points from early February.


Read more: http://www.canada.com/news/Harper+Conservatives+closing+majority+support+poll/4367918/story.html#ixzz1FSyyt7eW


-- Postmedia, Reuters stuff via Montreal Gazette posted by Politicarp