Fruits & Votes is the Web-log of Matthew S. Shugart ("MSS"), Professor of Political Science, University of California, Davis.
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Quebec’s National Assembly (i.e. provincial) election is 4 September. It is a three-way race, which is always interesting–and potentially anomaly-generating–under plurality (first-past-the-post) rules.
The incumbent is a majority government of the Liberal Party, re-elected most recently in 2008, with the Parti Quebecois (PQ) as its main opponent. The newly created party in the mix is the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), and there are other smaller parties as well.
The CAQ is trying to make a splash by bringing Jacques Duchesneau, a “celebrity whistleblower” (as the Ottawa Citizen described him) into the contest as one of its candidates. This personnel strategy by an upstart party is an excellent example of attempting to use a high-profile individual to signal something about the party as a whole.
The PQ is attempting as well to use a newly recruited candidate to help re-brand the party. The “sovereigntist” message of the party is in danger of not resonating with younger voters who have grown up under policies implemented by past PQ governments, and continued by Liberal ones. So to try to counter this lack of appeal, it has nominated Léo Bureau-Blouin, a 20-year-old leader of the recent Quebec student strike. As Konrad Yakabuski comment in the Globe and Mail: “Mr. Bureau-Blouin’s candidacy brings much more to the PQ than a chance at picking up a seat. It sends a message to Quebeckers that the party and its mission will live on.”
As for the three-way race, Eric Grenier notes in the Globe and Mail, even before Duchesneau’ entry, “the CAQ, even at these low levels of support in the polls, could still win as many as 11 seats, Québec Solidaire as many as two, and Option Nationale one, making it possible for either of the two main parties to form some sort of working arrangement or formal coalition in order to govern if they do not win a majority on their own.”
Quebec had a real three-way race in March, 2007, when the largest party was the Liberals, but with only 38% of the seats on just under a third of the vote. The Assembly elected then lasted only about a year and a half, and new elections were held in December, 2008, producing the majority that is attempting to defend its position now.
A leader of a past (Equality Party, 1989) attempt at third-party politics, Robert Libman, has made an appeal for strategic voting:
“Anglophones… should perhaps, in order to send a message to the Liberals, consider voting for the CAQ,” said Mr. Libman, “(but) only in areas where there is no danger of splitting the vote and electing the PQ.”
The ridings Mr. Libman has in mind are largely located in Montreal’s west end, with a few more in western Quebec. There are also a handful of ridings where any wavering by Anglo voters could spark big swings in close local races.
With so many outcomes being plausible–including a majority government by either major party–and dependent on results of key districts (ridings), this will be a contest to watch.
With so much attention focused on Canada’s federal government, and the government-in-waiting, I almost forgot that Quebec is about to go to the polls in a provincial assembly election. That’s happening on Monday! {Today!}
(Click “Qc.” above to see discussion of the previous election, in March, 2007.)
The arbiter role in a minority government in Quebec was to have fallen to the ADQ. But a funny thing happened on the way to its arbiter status: It emerged as the official opposition.
I won’t game out the parliamentary confrontation that seems almost certain, except to point this much out: the assumption until now was that the ADQ would arbitrate, between Libs and PQ, as to who formed the government. But if the ADQ and the Libs turn out to be rivals, with Charest unable to lead (what will still be, constitutionally, until a confidence vote) his government from within the National Assembly, then it is at least conceivable that the arbitrator’s role falls to the PQ. Does the PQ vote no confidence in a Liberal government? Does it then support Mario Dumont? That dilemma would risk tearing the PQ apart.
Yes, this is going to be fun to watch.
And then things are also going to be pretty interesting in Ottawa:
Also recommended on what this three-party dynamic, with the “ethnic nationalists” in third place, might mean: The Pithlord, Scott Lemieux, Jacob T. Levy, and various others that they link to. Quite an interesting discussion.
In particular, reflecting on Premier Charest’s interest in parlaying his new federal money into a tax cut that the ADQ will have to support him on (thereby postponing the PLQ-ADQ rivalry that Wells referred to), Pithlord notes:
Harper’s shown that you can play a minority with strength if your opponents don’t want an election. Charest isn’t as clever, but the way seems clear.
The results of the Quebec provincial election were stunning enough, as we have been discussing in the previous planting. No one saw the strong showing of the ADQ coming. The fall of the ruling PLQ to minority status was expected, but there was quite a late swing away from the PQ. A few days before the election, it looked as if a PQ minority government was possible, but the party wound up in third place.
In this entry, I want to look not at the shifts in voter sentiment, but rather at how the electoral system took those actual votes and turned them into seats. This is a politically relevant question for Quebec given that the province: (1) has never before had an election result in a minority situation, and (2) has had a recent electoral-system review process. The minority government might be seen as a sign of the “failure” of the FPTP system just at a time when there has been discussion of replacing FPTP with some form of PR.
The seat-vote result is striking in being almost proportional:
We certainly do not normally expect such close correspondence of votes and seats percentages in FPTP systems.
To get an idea of whether this aspect of the election is a “surprise” or not, I turned to one of my favorite tools, the seat-vote equation (originally devised by Rein Taagepera). If you are unfamiliar with the seat-vote equation, I suggest clicking on those words at the top of this planting and scrolling back in time–especially to the first planting in that orchard block (an estimation of seats in the then-upcoming Canadian federal election). But the short version is that the seat-vote equation allows us to estimate a “normal” seats distribution based on the following inputs (and only these inputs):
The votes shares of the leading parties
The total number of votes cast
The number of seats in the legislature
The number of electoral districts
Naturally, in FPTP systems, those last two are the same quantity.
The s-v equation does not incorporate any information about the geographic distribution of the parties’ supporters, notwithstanding the obvious importance of such distribution to the actual outcome. Parties win seats in FPTP systems solely based on where their votes are–no district-level plurality, no seat–rather than as a function of their jurisdiction-wide votes shares.
So, how did the equation perform in this election? Asking this question is really another way of asking a more politically relevant question: How did the electoral system perform? The latter question assumes that there is some “expected” relationship between jurisdiction-wide party support and their legislative support. Deviations from the s-v equation estimates would suggest that the electoral system is not translating votes into seats in a predictable manner. Again, we should not necessarily expect such a predictable translation when the system is FPTP, because of the dependence of parties on local pluralities rather than on jurisdiction-wide support in order to win seats.
Following are the (rounded) predictions of the seat-vote equation, based on the known values of the input variables indicated above:
PLQ, 51
ADQ, 42
PQ, 32
These hardly differ from the actual result (48, 41, 36). The s-v equation expects the largest party to get a bigger bonus than it actually got and the third party to get slightly more punished than it actually was. But it tells us that, in a jurisdiction with FPTP and the number of seats and voters that Quebec has, an election so close among the top three parties in votes should produce a fairly close correspondence of seats and votes. The predicted advantage ratio for the PLQ was 1.23; its actual ratio was 1.16. Even FPTP with three-way competition can produce moderate deviations from proportionality and Quebec’s 2007 result was one where moderate deviations were both expected and actually materialized.
As for the impact of this outcome on the electoral system review, I am not in a position to predict the political consequences of this outcome on that review, but I would conclude that the outcome has not made the objective case for PR stronger. None of the formal review processes in FPTP jurisdictions in the last four decades stemmed from a minority situation, and Quebec’s result was not even disproportional. The existing electoral system gave Quebec voters pretty much what they voted for.
Update 2: Democratic Space provides an overview of the projections and where they were wrong. Excerpts:
Our under-estimation of the ADQ came from a greater than expected swing towards the ADQ in just 2 regions: Lanaudiere-Laurentides and the Monteregie (largely due to the abandonment of the PQ in these regions). [...]
Overall, of the 21 incorrect ridings, 16 were in our “too-close-to-call†or “tight race†categories. So there were 5 genuine surprises.
(Well, the real surprise is that virtually every close riding swung the same way. In other words, it was not a case of “too close to call” but of the pollsters having missing the underlying trend.)
The remainder of this planting is unchanged since last night, but comments have kept coming in.
The Quebec provincial election has produced a Liberal minority government, the first resulting from an election in the history of the province (and the first at any time since 1878).
The ADQ, which had five seats in the previous parliament, will have 41 members in the new one, just seven seats behind the Liberals. Current Premier Jean Charest barely held his own riding. The PQ has 36 seats.
(originally from 23 March, with updates on 26 March)
With polls now open across Quebec, Democratic Space has posted its detailed final pre-election analysis, noting the election is too close to call but that a PLQ minority government now looks more likely than one headed by the PQ. A few days ago, the ADQ was within two percentage points of overtaking the PQ for second place in votes, but the PQ had the narrow edge in projected seats. (I don’t think it has ever happened anywhere that the seat plurality went to a party with the third most votes; it still won’t have happened.) In the interim, the ADQ has lost about a point and a half in votes to the PLQ, but the latter has picked up about 5% in projected seats, mostly at the expense of the PQ (thanks to the vagaries of three-way competition under FPTP). Of course, all of this is well within margins of error, so several scenarios remain in play. But a PLQ minority appears most likely.
The voting intentions of voters have not changed all that much at the aggregate level, but three-party politics under FPTP can be volatile, and as the ADQ grows even slightly, it is cutting more into the potential PLQ seats than to those of the PQ.
For example, compare the DS projection based on polling about a month before election day (and on riding-level analysis) to the current one. Over that time, the PLQ voting intention has fallen by 2.2 percentage points, but their seats having fallen by 11.2 points (from 65, a narrow majority, to the present projection of 51). Meanwhile, the ADQ has gained 3.2 percentage points in the vote and nine seats (7.2%). The PQ is gaining in expected seats, despite no real change in votes. If the trend were to continue and be realized on election day, the PQ could wind up with the most seats, albeit several short of a majority.
I know I have several readers who are in (or follow the politics of) Quebec. I hope they will consider this an open thread on the closing days of the campaign. Thanks to all those who have commented on this campaign thus far!
Stephen Harper’s minority Conservative cabinet has tabled its 2007 budget. In a parliamentary system, the budget is by definition a matter of confidence and thus a precarious time for any minority government that lacks confidence and supply agreements with parties that could guarantee it a majority–or join in an opposition-sponsored vote to oust the cabinet.
The Bloc Quebecois will support the budget, because it addresses one of Quebec’s most important issues, the federation’s “fiscal imbalance.” With the Conservatives having 125 seats and the BQ 50 in the 308-seat parliament (in which two seats are currently vacant), the BQ’s support virtually assures the budget will pass.
The cooperation of the BQ with a Conservative government is interesting due to the competitive dynamic between the two parties. That the BQ is playing along suggests that they fear an election. And in that case, while it is good for Harper in the short run to stave off an election, he nonetheless faces a bit of a trap: Whenever he does anything subsequently to upset the BQ constituency, the BQ will be able to bail at a time when they’d have an issue that might help them prevent the Conservatives from getting their majority. (In the 2006 elections, the Conservatives made big gains in Quebec at the BQ’s expense.) But if they remain on board with Harper’s budget, then the latter can’t get the election at a time when he might want it.
And then there is also the provincial election next Monday in Quebec. The BQ’s provincial counterpart, the Parti Quebecois is in a tight race in its bid to unseat the ruling provincial Liberal party–actually, a three-way race that may result in a hung parliament, given the ADQ’s strength. With the Quebec Liberals perhaps buoyed a bit by the budget announcement, this may not be a time when the BQ would want a federal election. On the other hand, they retain the ability to precipitate one in the future more or less whenever that want, as I mentioned above.
Meanwhile, one Liberal member has said he will support the budget. Well, make that ex-Liberal member Joe Canuzzi of Thunder Bay, Ontario. (Canuzzi has not exactly had warm relations with the Liberals, having resigned as a cabinet member in the previous government over its same-sex marriage bill.) Cannuzi gave as his reason the government’s inclusion in the budget of funds for a “for a molecular cancer research centre that employs 300 people in his riding”–perhaps a worthy project, but definitely pork. Canuzzi will sit as an independent, and has already said this is his last term.
Multiparty, federal, and FPTP politics certainly can be interesting!
Quebec will hold general elections for its provincial assembly on 26 March. An excellent way to follow the campaign is at QuebecPolitique.com (if you read French, that is).
Quebec’s FPTP electoral system has a long record of producing odd results, including a plurality reversal in 1998 and several lopsided majorities. In my research on conditions for reform in FPTP systems, the province rates as one of the most ripe for reform. However, so far a reform process initiated by the now-ruling Liberals after their “victimization” by the vagaries of plurality allocation in 1998 has not borne fruit. I hope some of my readers who follow politics in the province can give us some ideas of the likely dynamics of seat distribution in this race, and whether this election is likely to bury or revive the movement for reform.
I’ve consulted all the people involved in this dispute. It was the same answer everywhere. They don’t feel it is a good agreement but they just don’t have the choice.
So, what concessions did the BQ extract on this or other issues? Or was it simply a case of fearing a new election, given how much the Conservatives cut into former BQ support in the last one, in January?
It is budget season in Canada. The minority Conservative government needs votes in parliament from outside the party to survive–a budget vote is a confidence vote. The Bloc Quebecois is on board, and their 51 seats plus the Conservatives’ 125 would be sufficient to pass the package, which includes tax cuts and a new child-care benefit–two of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s key campaign pledges.
Wilfred Day planted the following seed regarding electoral reform in Quebec at my previous thread on Canada’s dysfunctional FPTP system (at the federal level). Quebec electoral reform deserves to a planting of its own, so here it is. I am also copying below a comment that Vasi planted in response to Wilf.
The first shoe has dropped (what kind of fruit is a shoe?), but it has no legal weight. The eight citizens sat at the same table as the nine MNAs and had the same right to ask questions, but have no vote on the Report of the Special Committee (the nine MNAs.) The thud, if any, will come from their report.
It also calls for fixed election dates. Uniquely for a citizen panel, it calls for rules to maintain stable government: for example, that a government cannot be defeated in the House except by the formation of a new coalition government holding a majority of seats. (They did not attempt to define exceptional circumstances permitting an early election.)
Will the government pay any attention to the Citizens’ recommendations? The Minister says he too had some reservations about the draft bill, and will take the committee’s recommendations as a starting point for presenting a new version of the reform in coming months. We’ll see.
As a PR wonk, what interested me is the Citizens’ formula for assigning the 50 compensatory seats to the 17 regions. All they said is “start by giving Party A a seat in the region where it is most under-represented” — presumably by highest average, as the draft bill uses — “and continue compensating parties under-represented in regions so long as the region has seats available” until the party’s seats are all assigned. Unlike Germany, the regions have a fixed number of seats, making the assignment process far trickier than in Germany.
Suppose a fourth party won 7 seats. Would parties go turn-about? Then all seven of their seats would be among the first 28 assigned by this process, leaving the large parties to take the left-overs. Or would they go in order of which party has the highest average (is most under-represented) in any region? If so, the fourth party’s 7 seats will mostly be assigned at the end of the process, and some will go to regions which have a seat left over but where the fourth party had little support.
Here the citizens’ talents hit a wall. They ask the Special Committee staff to do simulations of how this would work and attach them to the Citizens’ Report (not attached). Once again, as in BC, we find citizens needing experts to help them write their MMP model, and no experts assigned to that task.
Here are Vasi’s additional remarks on this subect:
In order that list MNAs not become immune to being thrown out, they recommend a limit of two consecutive terms as a list MNA. They do want to permit double-candidacy (list and district), however.
Apparently Quebec law already provides parties with election financing dependent on the number of votes received last election–with a bonus if a certain percentage of candidates are women. The proposal wishes to increase the bonus, increase the required percentage, and make it apply to elected members rather than candidates. There should also be a separate bonus which applies to minorities. Moreover, if this measure does not result in significantly increased representation of women within two elections, then parties should instead be required to alternate between men and women on the lists. (Note that apparently English-speakers and those of minority religions are not considered “minoritiesâ€â€“not that I’m bitter or anything.)
Thanks, Wilf and Vasi, for keeping the orchard planted with the latest hybrid varieties of fruit! (And I am still pondering that question about what kind of fruit is a shoe.)
The biggest surprises in the Canadian election–for me, at least–were the extent of Conservative gains and Bloc Quebecois losses in Quebec. As I noted in my post before the election about estimating the seats, there is a tendency in Canada for the largest party nationally to obtain fewer seats that would be predicted based on the size of the two leading parties (and given the size of parliament and voting population). However, in 2000 and 2004, the estimation procedure worked quite well for all non-Quebec seats. In 2006, the estimation procedure overestimated the Conservative seats even outside of Quebec. Nonetheless, my estimates of the seats based on votes totals for the leading parties that were closest to what actually resulted on election day were pretty close. Why? Because while the Conservatives underperformed (according to the model) outside Quebec, they performed substantially better than I expected within Quebec.
I based my Quebec estimates on a riding-by-riding analysis, rather than on any equations. I expected the Conservative party to go from zero seats in 2004 to 3-7 seats in 2006, and I thought the upper range of that estimate was too optimistic from the Conservatives’ perspective. Instead, the party won ten seats in Quebec.
Meanwhile, I expected the BQ to gain seats even if it lost votes. While I did not anticipate the BQ’s vote falling as much as it did, I expected the biggest result of Conservative gains in the province to be to take seats held by the Liberals and put them into the BQ column. While my pre-election estimates were based on riding-level analysis, and not the seat-vote equation, it is worth entering the now-known provincial votes distribution into that equation to see if the actual Quebec seat allocation is what we should have expected, or if the result was indeed anomalous.
The seat-vote equation’s basic premise is that the ratio of the two largest parties’ seats will tend to equal the ratio of those parties’ votes raised by an exponent that is calculated as the log of the number of voters over the log of the number of single-seat districts. For Quebec, that exponent is 3.5. This means that with the two largest parties—here the BQ and Conservatives—having a votes ratio of 1.71, they should have a seat ratio of 6.54! Using the extended form of the seat-vote equation, the rough estimate—using known votes shares in the 2006 election—would be for the BQ to win 57 seats, the Conservative party 12, and the Liberals 6.1
So, the seat-vote equation expects the Conservative party to have more seats than the Liberal party—hardly remarkable, given that the Conservative party (24.6%) had more votes than the Liberal party (20.7%)! Instead, the Liberals won 13 seats (17.3%) and the Conservatives only 10 (13.3%). The actual ratio of BQ to Conservative shares of the seats was 5.1 instead of the estimated 6.5.
Of course, the reason the Liberals held their own in seats despite a collapse in votes is that they are concentrated. Just as the BQ is overrepresented nationally because its small (10-12% in recent elections) share of the national votes is all concentrated in one province, so within that province the Liberals are overrepresented because most of its voters are concentrated in English-speaking Montreal ridings.
So the surprise, from the standpoint of both the seat-vote equation estimates and my own riding-by-riding analysis is that the Conservatives won seats at the expense of the BQ rather than at the expense of the Liberals.
I said above that I expected the Conservative seat gains to be small because the main effect of their surge would be to displace seats from the previous number two party (the Liberals) to the far larger BQ. That is, just as the seat-vote equation “thinks,” I thought that the main pole of competition was between the two smaller parties in the province, from which the big party would benefit, given the plurality system.
Such expected swings from the Liberals to the BQ on account of Liberals and Conservatives splitting the federalist vote did indeed occur in six ridings2 The BQ lost votes in all six (an average of 1.4 percentage points), but won these seats anyway because it faced divided competition.
However, the Conservatives did extremely well elsewhere in Quebec by appealing to former BQ voters. Eight of the Conservative party’s ten seats gained came in former BQ ridings in which there was an almost wholesale flip of the votes totals of the Liberal and Conservative parties, but also a large decline in the BQ vote. In only one of these ridings (Levis-Bellechasse) could the Conservative candidate have won without the benefit of BQ defections.
Drawing inferences about individual voters from aggregate votes is fraught with peril, but it is not too much of a stretch to say that the Conservatives gained votes in Quebec mostly at the expense of their federal rival, the Liberals. Nonetheless, they gained seats primarily because in districts where a combination of disaffected federalist voters and former sovereigntists could oust the Bloc, many Bloc voters obliged and joined their federalist counterparts in giving a boost to the Conservative candidate.
Consider some average vote-swing data. In the province as a whole, the party percentage-point swings were as follows:
Lib, -13.2
Cons, +15.8
BQ, -6.7
NDP, +2.9
However, in the eight districts that swung from BQ to Conservative,3 the vote swings were:
Lib, -19.3
Cons, +29.9
BQ, -13.5
NDP, +2.1
Yes, Tories plus thirty! Again, we need to be cautious about drawing inferences about individual action from aggregate data, but consider that the NDP gains almost certainly were votes “lent” to the party by Liberals knowing their party was doomed. That leaves around 17% Liberal voters defecting elsewhere. Add that 17 points to the BQ’s 13-point loss and you have 30 for someone else. That someone is the Conservative party. A thirty-point average swing, nearly twice what the party gained provincewide, concentrated in districts that were winnable for the party only if it could attract both federalists and sovereigntists!
This is the stuff realignments are made of, or even the stuff floor-crossings are made of. Could the BQ be cracking up? Are there BQ members elected in 2006 whose ridings are trending Conservative? Actually, no. Or at least I can’t identify any. It looks to me as though every district in which the Conservative party was within twenty points of the winner in 2004 was a district that it won in 2006. There were no near-misses.
There were at least seven other seemingly vulnerable ridings in which the BQ won the district in 2004 with less than 50% of the vote. However, these seven ridings had a very different pattern of swings in 2006 from the eight that flipped from BQ to Conservative:
Lib, -14.4
Cons, +15.0
BQ, -3.4
NDP, +2.4
I do not know enough (or anything, really) about these specific constituencies to draw firm conclusions, but (with again those caveats about inferences drawn from aggregate data) these ridings look like shifts within the federalist vote. The BQ vote losses here were less than in the province as a whole, notwithstanding that some of them could have swung to the Conservatives if more of the BQ vote had been ready to defect, as it was in the eight that actually did swing. In fact, these seven BQ holds all had a Bloc lead of less than twelve percentage points in 2004 and now all but one have a Bloc lead of from 14.7 to 22 percentage points. (The one, with a lead of only 9.3, is Chicoutimi-Le-Fjord.)
This latter group of ridings looks more like the full set of ridings in which the BQ and Liberals were close (less than ten percentage points)—a set that includes BQ holds, Liberal holds, and the six seats that swung from Liberal to BQ. In this expanded set of relatively close Lib-BQ contests from 2004, the Conservatives gained, on average, 11%, the Liberals lost 11%, and the BQ lost just under 3% of the vote.
In other words, while the BQ lost votes throughout the province, its greatest losses were concentrated in a set of districts where many of their voters “lent” the Conservatives their votes. Whether this proves to be a long- or short-term loan will say much about the future of Quebecois politics, as well as about the potential for further Conservative gains. In this context, an early post-election poll4 that shows plummeting support in the province for separatism could be significant. If that holds, the Conservative gain could be sustainable, though as I noted, it would take a far bigger loss of BQ support for the Conservatives to gain much more, given the dynamics of three-way competition, which benefit the BQ in seats even as it loses votes.
(An aside. There is one interesting riding, Hull-Aylmer, across the river from Ottawa. It was one of the NDP’s strongest districts in Quebec in 2004, with 11.9%. But in 2006, the NDP candidate obtained only 5.5%. Perhaps it was the candidates. Or perhaps NDP voters voted strategically, trying to save their local Liberal incumbent. If so, it worked. Without the decline in the NDP vote, the BQ candidate very likely would have won, despite less than 30% of the vote. However, the Liberal candidate squeaked by, winning 32.7%. The riding is in no way representative of any pattern. In fact, it is one of the very few in the province in which the NDP vote declined from 2004 to 2006.)
Footnotes:
1. It is worth emphasizing that the purpose of the s-v equation is not to predict a specific election—which would be pretty worthless after the results are in—but to identify elections that deviate from a pattern; the deviating elections are far more interesting than those that are properly estimated, or even ‘predicted’!
2. Ahuntsic, Brome-Missiquoi, Brossard-La-Prairie, Gatineau, Jeanne-Le-Ber, and Papineau.
I will admit to being a very big fan of historical counterfactuals, and this is a good one. It hinges on the question of what might have happened had the British lost the battle of the Plains of Abraham in what Americans refer to as the French and Indian War. I tend to find most convincing the logic of Dominic, who suggests there might not have been an American Revolution.
[UPDATE: Political Arithmetik has graphs of the polling trends, and an analysis of the latest polls, which show an average lead for the Conservatives nationally of 2.5%, though a tracking poll shows slippage in recent days. It is worth reiterating that the following--original--post is based on the poll that has been most advantageous to the Conservatives.]
[SECOND UPDATE: Via a comment at the above-linked Political Arithmetik post, I just discovered a blog, Peace, order and goood government, eh?, that is setting up a poll tracker that looks like it will be quite nice.]
Yesterday I noted that a poll by EKOS showed the Conservatives with a 6-point lead over the Liberals nationally. A closer look at the poll background report at the EKOS website shows that the biggest source of the Tories’ national gain is their surge in Quebec. In that province, the separatist Bloc Quebecois remains in front with 43.8%, but the Conservatives (20.2) are closing in on the Liberals (21.9) for the federalist vote. In fact, this result means that the Conservatives are also chipping away somewhat at the BQ vote.
If the Conservative vote in the election later this month were to remain this high it would be quite a remarkable turnaround from the 2004 federal election result in Quebec:
Bloc, 48.8
Liberal, 33.9
Conservative, 8.8
However, given first-past-the-post voting, the Conservatives would not be likely to pick up many seats. In fact, if the EKOS swing were to be realized on election day, and to be relatively uniform across Quebec (two big “ifs” to be sure), the BQ could pick up as many as nine seats despite losing five percentage points in the vote compared to 2004. All of the seats in question would be at the expense of the Liberals. The Conservatives, on the other hand, would be in position to win perhpas no more than three (also at the Liberals’ expense) despite being by far the big winner in votes.
The Conservatives currently hold none of Quebec’s ridings, while the Bloc Quebecois has 54 (or 72%, despite less than half the votes).
The only Quebec riding where the swing suggested by EKOS, if it were to occur uniformly, would be quite likely to fall to the Conservatives would be Pontiac. They would be within striking distance in Beauce and Brome-Missisquoi (though in the latter, a complication for the party is that the riding’s former Progressive Conservative MP is running with something called the Progressive Canadian Party).
Given the Conservatives’ bleak prospects for actually winning seats, it is likely that the party’s surge in the province–and thus, to some degree nationally–will prove temporary, as many Quebec voters currently leaning Conservative recognize that the battle in their province remains BQ vs. Liberal.
Another trend suggested by this poll–and others recently that have shown the former Liberal lead dwindling if not gone–is the very real possibility of a reversed plurality: The Conservatives may wind up with the most votes, yet the Liberals may retain the most seats. A majority for either party still looks very unlikely, but the new parliament could have more BQ members, and thus a result that is even more disproportional and dysfunctional than the current parliament.
Probably not, because the sepratists are much weaker than Canada’s first-past-the-post electoral system makes them appear, and Quebec is in the process of adopting a more proportional system. (more…)
If by my laws you walk, and my commands you keep, and observe them,
then I will give-forth your rains in their set-time,
so that the earth gives-forth its yield
and the trees of the field give-forth their fruit.
--Vayikra 26: 3-4
F&V time: This blog's date function is so set as to start a new day at approximately local sunset.
(Why, if we have "day" and "night," should a new "day" start in the middle of the night?)
FRUITS: Support your local, organic growers; and, plant vines and fig trees and pomegranates for the generations to come...
VOTES: For democratization and full representation, for environmental sustainability, social justice, and peace, always sincerely...
