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Viewers Guide to Election Night
What to look for on the night of Monday
June 28th.
Watching election results come in on election night can be a dizzying
experience – numbers are flying across the screen fast
and furiously; the coverage shifts from national results to local
constituencies and back again; and partial results from an apparently
endless string of individual constituencies keep scrolling across
the bottom of the screen. To make it worse, most of the analysts
on TV are doing the same thing you are: trying to make sense “on
the fly” of a rapidly changing picture.
Therefore: Mapleleafweb is proud to present this “viewers
guide” for the 2004 Canadian federal election. These are
some of the things to watch for as you sit down and watch the
results come in.
155 is the magic number.
The Canadian House of Commons has been
enlarged to 308 seats (up from 301). This means that a
party needs to win in at least 155 seats to have a majority in
the House of Commons. The pre-election polls indicate that we
are likely heading to a minority government, meaning that no
party will win this many seats, and this in turn means that the
thing to watch on election night is how close any party can get
to the magic number.
If no majority government, which parties will cooperate?
If no party has a majority, we have to move to the next question:
we need to look at which combinations of parties might be able
to cooperate in order to hold a majority of the seats in the
House of Commons. The combination that has worked in minority
government situations in the past – Liberals working with
the NDP – may not be possible this time because the two
parties combined may not have 155 seats. If the Conservatives
have the most seats (but don’t win a majority), the
question becomes: could the Conservatives cooperate with
the NDP? And remember also that all the parties will be
exhausted and short of money, so they have an incentive
not to trigger a new election too quickly; minority governments
in Canada do not usually last the full term, but their
life is typically measured in years, not months.
Will the Bloc hold the balance of power?
A possible (perhaps even a likely) outcome is that the Bloc will
hold the balance of power – that is to say, they will have
enough seats that a voting majority of the Commons would be created
whenever they voted with either the Liberals or the Conservatives.
For the Bloc, this is the best possible outcome – it
suggests that they can drive a hard bargain for their support,
and that bargain will be measured in terms of how well
Quebec does. But for the Liberals and the Conservatives
(and especially for the one forming a minority government)
it may be the worst possible outcome: for one thing, dealing
with the Bloc may carry a political price for the next
election campaign; and for another, the decision on the
timing of that next election may very much belong to the
Bloc and not to the government. (But we cannot forget that
triggering an election by defeating the government means
that the Bloc risks losing the balance of power situation
that gives it this leverage, so we should not assume that
they would do it casually.)
How many people are voting?
For years, voter turnout has been
declining in Canada. In the last federal election, only
61% of registered voters bothered to cast a ballot – this represents
a record low, and the third consecutive election in which voter
turnout declined, but many experts are expecting it to go even
lower this time. Canada is not unique in this respect -- many
other countries are experiencing a similar decline – and
the causes are complex and varied. So you should be watching
for signs of whether turnout drops again, or whether the close
election race reverses the trend by attracting more people to
the polls.
Green Party breakthrough?
Election night coverage tends to focus on
the big parties: the Liberals, Conservatives, the NDP,
and the Bloc Quebecois. The Green Party has made a concerted
effort to break through in this election, running candidates
for the first time in every constituency. There are three things
to watch for with the Green party.
- First keep an eye on their share of
the popular vote. Under recent changes to the laws governing the financing
of political parties, any party that gets at least
2% of the national vote will get an annual subsidy
from the federal government of $1.75 per vote. The
Greens are hoping to break through that barrier and
the polls suggest they are likely to do so. If they
succeed, the Greens will be a stronger presence in
the next election.
- Second, popular vote doesn’t necessarily mean
seats. It is possible that the Greens will earn a decent share of the
vote and win no seats. They have hopes for a breakthrough in
a few ridings, but you will have to watch well into the night
to see if this has any real chance of materializing. Historically,
the Greens have been strongest in British Columbia and the riding
to watch is Saanich—Gulf Islands.
- Third, even if the Greens don’t win seats,
they still could alter the results by
attracting votes that would otherwise have gone to other
parties; keep an eye on which losing parties in specific
seats could have used the Green vote to pull ahead. The
conventional wisdom is that the NDP is most likely to be
hurt by a strong showing
by the Greens -- the parties are going after similar pools
of voters -- although Liberal support among younger voters
might also be affected.
Ontario is the battleground.
You have probably already guessed
this because of the high proportion of their time the major
party leaders are spending in the province. With 106 seats (over
one third of the seats in the House of Commons), Ontario’s
sheer electoral weight is often enough to make or break
governments, especially when the province votes as a block. What
has kept the Liberals in power for the last decade is the fact
that they have taken almost every seat in the province three
elections in a row, something that has never happened before
in Canadian political history. Can the Liberals do it again?
Can the Conservatives create their own sweep? Or will the province
fragment and divide its seats between three different parties?
Watch the regions roll.
Thanks to a decision of the Chief Electoral
Officer, there will be no blackout of election results.
This means that voters will be able to watch the results roll
in from eastern parts of the country even while the polls are
still open locally. In this election, there are six distinct
regions.
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Atlantic Canada
- Atlantic Canada has only 32 seats and is expected to
go Liberal. The Progressive Conservatives took
nine seats there in 2000. If the new Conservatives cannot
increase this number, it would suggest they
are not going to do very well; if they can pull even with
the Liberals, they may have a shot at a majority.
Another Atlantic subplot is the extent to which
the NDP’s switch
in leaders from Nova Scotia’s Alexa McDonough to Ontario’s
Jack Layton will hurt it in Atlantic Canada.
-
Quebec
- Quebec’s major story in this election will be the return
of the Bloc, which split the province’s seats with the
Liberals in the last election but has been energized by the sponsorship
scandal and a strong campaign by Gilles Duceppe. Going into this
election, the Liberals expected to lose some ground in Ontario
but planned to regain it in Quebec; that plan is now in ruins,
but the question is: how ruined? The bench-mark is the Bloc’s
previous high (under Lucien Bouchard in 1993) of 54 seats – if
the Liberals can keep the Bloc below
this, they will have done well, but if
the Bloc can take more, the chances of
a majority government or even of the
Liberals being the largest party are
much smaller.
-
Ontario
- Ontario has been solid Liberal for a decade
now, giving Jean Chretien’s Liberals all but a handful of their seats three
times in a row. The polls suggest that this is about to change,
but the question is: by how much? Expect to see a lot of incumbent
Liberals going down to defeat, but Martin can lose forty seats
and still have a good chance of remaining Prime Minister (albeit
in a minority position). Different parts of the province present
different possibilities – the Conservatives are threatening
in the Toronto suburban areas and down into the “gold horseshoe” of
south-western Ontario; the Liberals
are still very strong in Toronto;
and the NDP is hoping to recapture
seats in places like Oshawa, Hamilton,
and the North, as well as some
parts of Toronto. Ontario this
time is very much the election
in miniature: if either the Liberals
or Conservatives come out of the
province with most of the seats,
they will probably form the government;
and if the NDP fails to capture
some seats, their expected revival
will probably not materialize.
-
Manitoba and Saskatchewan
- We typically
lump these provinces together because of their
small populations, but they are quite different;
and in both provinces the urban seats and the
rural seats present quite different challenges.
The city of Winnipeg is home to a number of
interesting three-way races. Will the NDP hold
its seats in its traditional support base,
mostly in the urban areas of the two provinces,
or will voters be drawn away by the tight two-way
race between the Liberals and the Conservatives
in national standings? (Recent Liberal ads
have been directed at getting NDP voters to
consider this option.) The Conservatives are
very strong in the rural regions; the question
is whether their surge in the polls will carry
them into the cities.
-
Alberta
- There isn’t much mystery in Alberta. One of
the two safe predictions
about this election is that the Conservatives will win
almost every seat in the province. (The other is that the
Bloc will take most of the seats in Quebec.) But how close
will they come to a complete sweep? Will Deputy Prime Minister
Anne McLellan manage to eke out another narrow win in Edmonton
Centre? Will Liberal David Kilgour hang on to Edmonton
Belmont? In the other direction: can Conservative Rahim
Jaffer be toppled in Edmonton Strathcona?
-
British Columbia
- There are lots of unknowns here in a province that, like
Ontario, is a three-sided race. The interior of the province
is expected to go largely to the Conservatives, the NDP
is expected to do well on Vancouver Island; and the Liberals
should be strongest in Vancouver. But these general statements
obscure the fact that there are many interesting three-way
contests, complicated by a potentially strong showing for
the Green Party in some areas. Given how close this election
is shaping up to be, these districts could make the difference
in this election. For those of you watching from Atlantic
Canada, it could be a late night!
-
The North
- The only question here is whether
the NDP can steal a seat from
the Liberals.
Specific seats to watch:
-
Atlantic
- Scott Brison’s seat in Nova Scotia Kings-Hants will
show very quickly how strong the defections from the newly united
right are going to be – will the Conservatives hold a seat
that the PC’s took last time, or will
a PC MP who defected to the Liberals take the
seat with him?
-
Quebec
- Saint-Maurice-Champlain is Jean Chretien’s old riding
(although redistribution has completely redrawn
its boundaries). Chretien spent the last decade fighting
off the Bloc, but the swing away from the Liberals may
carry this seat as well.
-
Ontario
- in Toronto-Danforth, NDP leader Jack Layton is trying to
take the seat away from incumbent Liberal Dennis Mills,
who won by 10,000 votes in 2000.
-
Manitoba/Saskatchewan
- Winnipeg-North is a seat that has two strong
incumbents – Liberal Ray Pagtakhan and New Democrat Judy
Wasylycia-Leis – because of the way that redistribution
redrew the electoral boundaries. Paul Martin’s attempt
to overcome western alienation will collide with the NDP’s
attempted comeback in this seat.
-
Alberta: Edmonton Centre
- Deputy Prime Minister Anne McLellan has
always faced a tough battle, but has always survived (although
the margin has usually been in the hundreds of votes);
this is the most interesting race in Alberta, and probably will
not be decided until well into the evening.
-
British Columbia
- Burnaby-Douglas was Svend Robinson’s seat
until he left politics earlier this year; but
the Liberal challenge is undercut by the fact that a parachuted
candidate pushed aside local Liberals who were fighting
for the nomination. This is still a seat that the NDP has
to hold, but it is in a city where the Liberals have anchored
their hopes for a western comeback.
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