COYNE: DEMOCRACY PREVAILS AT BALLOT BOX
Comfortable, not crushing: Trudeau’s crew took three regions but with slimmer margins than Tories
Who won this election? In the most obvious sense, the Liberals. But for once the cliché is true: democracy won. No, wait, I’ve got the numbers to prove it.
First, a quick overview of the parties. While the Liberal win ranks, without a doubt, as the greatest political comeback in Canadian history — an increase of more than 20 percentage points in their popular vote, a 43-percentage-point increase in their share of the seats — it is far from a sweep. Both in seats and in popular vote, it is comparable to the Tory majority that preceded it, comfortable but not crushing.
In one respect, however, it surpasses it: breadth. The Liberals not only won seats in every province ( as did the Tories before them), they carried three of the four regions. If they failed to win the West, for the 21st straight election — the last time the Liberals took a majority of seats there was in 1949 — they recaptured Quebec for the first time since 1980 (albeit with only 36 per cent of the vote). And yet they won 29 seats west of Ontario, their best showing there since 1993.
In addition to winning 184 seats, moreover, they finished second in 118 more, giving them a “footprint” of 302 out of 338 seats where they are competitive. That’s significantly broader than the 256 seats in which the Conservatives finished first or second last time (or would have: for comparability, I will throughout this piece use Elections Canada’s reconstruction of the 2011 data using 2015 electoral boundaries).
And yet the Liberals cannot rest easy. The average Conservative winning margin in 2011 was 28 per cent; for the Liberals in 2015, just 20 per cent. One Liberal seat in six was won by less than five per cent; in only 44 per cent did their margin exceed 20 per cent. And the Conservatives, while beaten — only the sixth majority government to be defeated in the last 80 years — did not suffer the kind of debacle that their predecessors did.
It’s true that their popular vote declined eight points, from nearly 40 per cent to just under 32 per cent.
That’s real enough, and should not be discounted. Some Tory partisans are seeking comfort in the fact that, in raw numbers, the party’s total vote “only” declined by 230,000. But that does not mean all is well.
Turnout was up 2.8 million in this election. Suppose the Conservatives took a quarter of it (on the assumption that new voters were more likely to be looking for “change” than “more of the same”), adding 700,000 to their total. That would mean a decline of 930,000 votes — nearly one in six — among those who voted for them last time.
The good news, here again, is the breadth of Conservative support — outside of Atlantic Canada, that is, where the Liberals swept every seat. With 123 second-place finishes — 22 of them within five per cent of the winner — to go with their 99 seats, the Tory footprint shrank only slightly. They held onto 33 seats in Ontario, while increasing their seat-count in Quebec from five to 12. That’s a base they can rebuild from.
Alas the news is grimmer for the NDP. Not only did the party drop 11 points and 65 seats, but its footprint shrank by half, leaving it competitive in only a little more than a third of the country. Moreover, its grip on its remaining seats is much less firm: onethird were won by less than five per cent.
Even worse was the performance of the Bloc.
While it increased its seat count from four to 10, this was more by the luck of split votes than anything. Its popular vote shrank four points, to 19 per cent. More telling still, it dropped from 44 second-place finishes in 2011 to just 11 this time out, only two of them close.
That 80 per cent of the vote in Quebec went to federalist parties is good news for Canadian unity, of course. In fact, this is in many ways the healthiest outcome for the country I can recall in several decades. This is not a replay of 1980, with its stark regional divisions. This is a Conservative party that can win seats in Quebec, a Liberal party that can win seats in the West.
Indeed, across much of the country we have some of the most contestable politics in memory.
The number of ridings won by a margin of less than five per cent has increased from 42 in 2008 to 51 in 2011 to 68 in 2015.
What is more, in 35 ridings, the third-place party finished within 10 per cent of the winner.
In only 16 ridings was that true in 2011; in 2008, five. That’s competitive.
Broad national parties. The largest provinces rived by threeand even four-way fights. Relatively fewer safe seats.
And, not coincidentally, the highest turnout in more than 20 years.
There’s lots of good news in this election: for democracy, and for Canada.