Surprising no one the Montreal Gazette (joins the National Post) to endorse the Sheer Tories.
For better or worse, the convention is for the current PM to see if he can keep the confidence of the House, by winning the election or forming a coalition.
I don’t have a problem with the party getting the most votes doing this. But it is more wishful thinking and PR than convention. And if the NDP demand conditions that the Liberals accept, they will indeed be spending very freely. I don’t accept the view that deficits don’t matter much, but at least some of the spending will be on national programs which I think could be helpful; investments rather than political pork. But it won’t be cheap or painless. And if not done wisely and efficiently, these pains may be chronic.
It’s not a matter of convention at all. It’s pure politics: who can put together a majority in the Commons?
Suppose on election night the Tories have 5 more seats than the Grits, but the NDP has a big enough block of seats to give either party the majority, regardless how the Greens and Bloc votes.
And the day after the election Singh and Trudeau announce a confidence and supply agreement for two years.
What would be the point in a transfer of government to the Tories, knowing that on the first vote in the House, the Liberals and NDP will defeat the Conservative government?
Le Devoir glowingly endorses JT as PM (“Vue du Québec, la réélection de Justin Trudeau est un moindre mal.”). It also says that the bloc is not dead, its only playing soft separatist politics, its the only party protecting provincial powers, and the Liberals and NDP should quit blaming it as a spoiler for their inability to present a united left.
Jesus, guys. “Scheer,” not Sheer. He’s rather an important public figure.
I guess you’re being ironic, but just so it’s clear, that’s not exactly a glowing endorsement. But this editorial is in fact more positive on Trudeau than I’d have expected. It recognizes the Liberal government’s policies are for the most part progressive and green, yet still more realistic than the NDP’s or Greens’. And it calls on the Liberals and NDP to merge, which is an interesting idea but not really one I’d support. (I have voted for the NPD in the past, and could do so again in the future, but I cannot see myself ever voting for the LPC.)
Yes, saying Trudeau is the “moindre mal” (least bad) is hardly a glowing endorsement.
No need for a medical emergency!
I think I am being consistent:
- Go ahead and let Scheer try to form a government if he has enough votes.
- However, he will fail to do so.
**Northern Piper **has a sensible take on this too.
(ie. 3. What would be the point of letting Scheer do this in the first place?)
And it would depend on the margin of difference. If it’s a close run between the Tories and Grits (similar to the 2017 BC election and the 2018 NB election), then that’s one thing. But if the Tories have a 20 seat lead in the Commons over the Grits (like Clark in 1979), then it makes more sense to say maybe Trudeau should resign, because that margin will make it that much more difficult for the Grits to pull together a majority.
That’s why I say it’s pure politics and head-counting.
Putting my sarcasm aside, it was a very earnest evaluation for what is sadly often paid commentary (Ottawa Citizen, another Post Media endorsement).
:smack:
Hey, you’re the maths guy, so I’ll take your word for it!
But what I’m getting at is that a party can have a committed base of voters across the country, but not concentrated regionally, so they always win fewer seats than their share of the national vote. The NDP is the classic case, which may be why they support PR (as a matter of uninterested, abstract political theory, of course. 
)
Sorry for being confusing. I was thinking of two different hypotheticals, but I guess I didn’t make that clear. The first hypothetical was comparing the effect of your system on two different parties, one that was highly concentrated in one province and the other widely diverse, but with similar shares of the popular vote. That’s where the 2.7% was involved, although Hypnogogic Jerk has expressed his doubt about my math skills…I don’t think just divvying up based on share of national vote without taking provinces into account will do it.
The second hypothetical was playing with the idea of the fact that our provinces have such varying population levels, and that sometimes tracks splits between regionalism and centralism.
Now that it’s the weekend and I have a bit of time, I thought a bit more about Acierocolotl’s model, and I don’t think it’s consistent with the constitutional allocation of seats by provinces. I’ve got two examples why I don’t think it works. One is drawn on real numbers from the 1993 election, and the other is just hypothetical. But both examples show that using the national vote means that the provincial representation is affected by the national vote, so the allocation of seats from a province under that model is based in part on the effect of voters in other provinces, which I don’t think is acceptable.
The first example is from the 1993 election, using the example of the Bloc Québécois. The reason I’m using it is because the BQ is the only major party that only ran in one province, so it makes the maths cleaner.
So, in 1993, the Bloc got 49.3% of the popular vote in Quebec. Under FPTP, that gave the Bloc 54 out of the 75 seats in Quebec, or 72%. Regardless whether you think that was fair or not, that allocation of seats was entirely based on the votes of québécois, so consistent with the principle of provincial representation in the Commons.
Now, if instead we used a system of PR Province-by-Province, we would want the electoral system to give the Bloc something close to 49% of the seats: 49.3% * 75 = 36.975 seats, rounds to 37. Again, that result would be consistent with the principle of provincial representation.
Thus, under either FPTP or provincial PR, the allocation of Bloc seats in the Commons is determined solely by the votes of québécois.
But if we use the national vote percentage approach, as suggested by Acierocolotl, we get a different result. There were 295 seats in the Commons in 1995. The BQ vote, as a share of the national vote, was 13.52%. That gives us this outcome: 13.52% * 295 = 39.884. Rounded up, that would give the BQ 40 seats in the Commons, 3 more than using the Quebec popular vote alone.
That result would mean that the large block of Bloc votes ( ) as a share of the national vote is giving the Bloc more seats, because of the interplay with the votes from other provinces. In other words, the allocation of seats is Quebec is being affected by how voters in other provinces voted.
The other parties in Quebec, like the Liberals or the PCs, would get correspondingly fewer seats than they would under a provincial PR system and thus are being under-represented federally, in spite of their share of the popular vote in Quebec. Again, that result would be because of the voters in other provinces.
Overall, I think this shows a real problem with trying to use the national vote, and could raise issues about the right of the voters in each province to be represented by the parties they choose, unaffcted by the voters in other provinces.
Source for the numbers I’m using: Wikipedia article on 1993 Canadian federal election.
Aw, it’s nothin’. I think I figured out what you were trying to get at, and it just helped expose the fact that what I thought was a simple solution to an easy problem was an insufficient solution to a complicated problem. Whatever we ultimately come up with is going to leave people feeling disatisfied, and the best we can hope for is to reduce the overall discontent and accept the fact that somebody is going to be grumpy.
My career path didn’t include political science. My contributions to changing the political climate are largely restricted to shouting in pubs and back-of-the-napkin math stunts.
That’s a lot of hypotheticals before. We have had minority governments running the show for awhile. They can even do it in a hostile environment, so long as votes of confidence pass. That’s Speeches from the Throne and finance bills, plus whatever else the ruling party decides is a vote of confidence. A minority government could float for quite some time in a hostile environment here.
And if the Liberals decided that the time wasn’t right for an election, they could just bust out the party whip and force enough votes to make a budget pass if they wanted.
This presumes that Singh and Trudeau can form an agreement in principle. I’m getting the impressionm Singh is no dummy so it hinges on how anxious Trudeau really is to have another kick at the PM can and how much he’s willing to give up to the orange team.
And unrelated, it sounds like shenanigans were at play to try and quell Bernier’s party. That’s not going to amount to anything right now, but it’d be amusing to me to see that party threaten the Conservatives. Suddenly, everybody will be reminded of Bernier’s ability to just up and lose secret documents. (“Is this the kind of Prime Minister you want?!” I imagine the attack ads will go.)
My second example is purely hypothetical. Let’s assume that the good folks of Prince Edward Island are angry at all the mainline parties and form their own party, the Islanders Party. They draw lots of support from the Tories, which collapses and doesn’t run any candidates. The only other party is the Liberals. (Simplification, obviously, but it makes the maths cleaner.)
There are four seats in PEI, and the Islanders Party runs a strong campaign and picks up 75% of the vote. The Liberals take 25% of the vote.
Under a FPTP system, the Islanders Party would likely pick up all four seats. Since that’s decided entirely by the voters if PEI, that doesn’t raise any issue about the constitutional allocation of seats, regardless of views about the fairness of FPTP.
If we instead were using a province-by-province PR system, the Islanders Party would presumably get 3 of the 4 seats: 75% * 4 = 3 seats.
But if we use the national popular vote, things get hinky. The 2016 census says that the PEI population was 142,907. The national population was 35,151,728. (I’ll assume that voting participation rates are the same for PEI and nationally, so will use these numbers as a proxy for voters in this hypothetical.)
How many seats would the Islanders Party get using the national popular vote? Well, 75% of 142,907 is 107,181 votes for the Islanders Party. Since the Islanders Party didn’t get any votes anywhere else in the country, we use that figure and determine that the Islanders Party got: 107,181 / 35,151,728 = 0.3% of the national vote. There are currently 338 seats in the Commons. 0.3% * 338 = 1.03 seats, which rounds to 1 seat. So by this model, the Islanders Party would get 75% of the PEI vote, but only 1 seat (25% of the seats). Presumably the Liberals would get the other 3 seats, from their list, since their share of the national vote will be much higher than that of the Islanders vote.
This hypothetical demonstrates that using the national vote, instead of the provincial vote, will mean that the voting decisions of voters in other provinces will affect the outcome in one province. That raises real issues under the principle that the provinces get representation in the Commons, based solely on god votes of each province’s residents.
Census data: Wikipedia article: Dmographics of Canada
Sure, lots of hypotheticals, but that’s why I would suggest there is no “modern convention” that governs. It depends on the political situation each time.
When St Laurent came in second in seats in 1957, but Dief wasn’t much ahead, Liberal party insiders argued St Laurent should try to work out a deal with the CCF, or the SoCreds, or the Créditistes, and stay in office. Uncle Louis said no, he thought Dief had won enough that he should get a shot at forming a government. So that precedent supports Scheer. Similarly in 1979, but Clark had a sizable plurality over PET. That also supports Scheer.
But three provincial examples show more ambiguity:
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Miller-time in Ontario in 1985: Rae and Peterson pledged a deal, and Miller was out on non-confidence, even though the PCs had more seats than the Grits.
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Clark in BC in 2017: Clark had a few more seats than the NDP, but couldn’t work out a deal with the Greens and had to resign, even though she had more seats.
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New Brunswick in 2018: the Liberal premier had a few less seats than the PCs, but there were two small parties. The Lt Gov said that he was entitled to try to stay in office. It was only after he lost the first vote on the Throne Speech that he resigned and the PC leader became Premier.
All you can draw from these examples is that if there’s a major difference in seats, there’s a feeling that the guy with more seats should become PM. But if the two largest parties are close, the political process has to play itself out.
But the government whip only applies to the government party. A second party that has pledged political support on confidence and supply isn’t subject to the Government whip, and can withdraw from the agreement, which is only a political deal, not legally binding.
Bernie has lodged a formal complaint with the Elections Commission, arguing that someone hired Kinsella to run a crypto-social media campaign against the P’sP. Kinsella isn’t talking.
While that may be a serious allegation, given campaign finance laws, one part of Bernier’s complaint doesn’t ring true to me. He says someone put the Rhino party up to running someone named Maxim Bernier up as their candidate in Beauce, to confuse the voters by having two guys with the same name. Dunno - that sounds like the kind of thing the Rhinos would do, without any nefarious prompting from someone else! 
It’s not even an original stunt. They’re plagiarizing themselves! In 1988 the Rhinos ran a candidate named John Turner in Vancouver Quadra, where the Liberal Party candidate was a somewhat better known John Turner. Max is really reaching on that one.
I don’t know normally watch the election because whatever will be will be. But I might have it on in the background tomorrow.
I was watching the news before bed last night (ugh, I hate watching the news) and one of the talking heads said “In this election, both of the major parties lost.” I think he really nailed it. I think people in general are tired of Conservative / Liberal parties going back and forth into power, and want a change. They want other voices at the table. I think we may see a string of coalition governments that may very well meet with high approval from the electorate.
Ideally, this will encourage the CPoC to return to the centre a bit. Especially on climate change. I could almost have voted for Scheer if he had a good climate action plan. I.e. I don’t think he’ll roll back social progress like same-sex marriage. People are increasingly serious about climate change, and the conservative parties face a danger of being left behind. It will only be worse for them as the already obvious evidence becomes obvious to more or less every living soul on the planet as they will be living the change every day.