the joys of a multi-party system!

I've posted a couple links to my Facebook wall today that I thought some 
of the more politically-obsessed here might find interesting.

Here in Canada, we've had a three-parties-or-more system since, oh, before 
my parents were born, and that means it's never a simple black-or-white 
choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

Every now and then the party with the most seats in Parliament fails to 
win a clear majority -- it gets less than half the seats -- and this means 
the ruling party is vulnerable to "no confidence" votes if all the other 
parties gang up on it, and usually that means we end up having another 
election again; I believe the shortest gap between elections in my 
lifetime is the nine months or so between the 1979 election, in which Joe 
Clark won a minority government for the Tories, and the 1980 election, in 
which Pierre Trudeau won a majority government for the Liberals.

Matters were complicated in 1993, when the Tories split into three 
parties, with the Reform going in a more right-wing direction and the Bloc 
Quebecois going in a more left-leaning separatist direction.  So now we 
had *five* major parties.  Then, at some point before the 2004 election, 
the Reform (renamed Canadian Alliance) reunited with the Tories, so now we 
have *four* major parties ... and for the past election cycle or two, some 
people have treated the Green Party as a quasi-major party too.

Of course, the United States has had its own share of this in presidential 
elections recently too, I guess, what with H. Ross Perot stealing votes 
from the Republicans in 1992 and 1996 and Ralph Nader arguably snatching 
victory away from the Democrats in 2000.  But it's easier to forget, I 
guess, since the presidential candidates are not attached to the parties 
in Congress, and we don't see the losing candidates leading their comrades 
in Congressional debates between elections, etc., etc.

Anyhoo.  Two links from today's Facebook postings:

- - -

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-notebook/why-everyone-including-the-bloc-will-join-the-ndp-pile-on/article1992505/

Why everyone -- including the Bloc -- will join the NDP pile-on

Les Perreaux
Montreal -- Globe and Mail Update
Posted on Wednesday, April 20, 2011 8:51AM EDT

Liberals usually live in fear of them, and now the Bloc Quebecois is 
running scared.

Vote splits: They are a determining feature in any multi-party 
parliamentary system, and they drive election losers crazy.

The slicing and dicing of the electorate starts to fill the air like a 
seasonal allergen right around the two-thrids point of every federal 
election campaign. The NDP's rise in mid-campaign polls usually triggers 
another round of New Democrat-bashing by Liberals. And like spring pollen, 
the NDP vote usually falls back to earth.

This time, Gilles Duceppe first betrayed his nerves over the pesky rise of 
the New Democrats under Jack Layton -- the Bloc Quebecois Leader's workout 
buddy during parliamentary sessions.

Ditching his usual policy of never commenting on polls, Mr. Duceppe said 
this week that recent surveys showing the NDP catching up to Liberals and 
Conservatives "is a troubling trend, not so much for the Bloc as for 
Quebec. ... It favours a Conservative majority."

It wasn't always this way. In the 1990s, a divided right was driven to 
distraction by vote splitting. Jean Chretien exploited the existence of 
two conservative parties to win massive majority governments that went far 
beyond his actual popularity.

The splits now mostly stalk the centre and left parties, producing a 
series of minority governments for the now-united Conservatives.

In recent campaigns, it was Liberals who launched the fear campaign to 
bring the NDP back down. A couple dozen traditional Liberal bastions in 
suburban Toronto provide the clearest examples of what's at stake. In 
riding after riding, Liberals won in 2008 by margins that could easily 
evaporate if the rise in NDP popularity holds (which it usually does not.)

In Mississauga South, to name one, Liberal Paul Szabo won by 5 percentage 
points over a Conservative. A strong showing by the New Democrats, who 
only received 8 per cent of the vote last time, could put Conservatives 
over the top. Similar calculations can be made in ridings in Winnipeg, the 
Atlantic provinces and many other places.

The math gets more complicated in Quebec, where the rise of the NDP comes 
from declines in support for both the Liberals and the Bloc.

In a handful of ridings in Quebec City and scattered in rural areas of the 
province, Conservatives do stand to at least hold and maybe gain seats if 
the NDP bleeds Bloc support.

In Montreal, it gets trickier. In immigrant-heavy ridings like Justin 
Trudeau's Papineau, the Bloc and Liberals can both lose votes to the NDP. 
In a more francophone and nationalist riding like Ahuntsic, it's 
left-leaning Bloc voters who are more likely to wander.

In the suburbs of Vancouver, NDP support could knock off Liberals, too. 
But in British Columbia, where polls have fluctuated wildly, the NDP is 
positioned to take some races -- not just act as spoiler. That's if they 
can hold on through the coming assault.

- - -

http://www.punditsguide.ca/2011/04/why-the-conservatives-love-the-strategic-voting-sites/

Why the Conservatives Love the "Strategic" Voting Sites

Every election campaign lately seems to mark the return of so-called 
"strategic voting" websites. No matter how carefully debunked their 
methodology, they keep coming back like elephant bamboo in the garden that 
you always think you've gotten out by the roots, but keeps popping back up 
to block the sunshine and steal all the nutrients from the other plants.

At least three strategic voting websites have popped up claiming to be 
using "local polling data" (in quotation marks, because there is no such 
data), in order to recommend which opposition party candidate people 
should vote for to "get rid of Stephen Harper" in 22, 33 or 50 ridings.

You would think that with all these sites ganging up on Conservative 
candidates, that party would be up in arms for fear of losing its shot at 
a majority, right?

Hardly.

To the contrary: they are gleeful, as evidenced by the fact that they have 
not said one peep about the three sites publicly since the campaign began.

Here's why . . .

[ snip ]

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