even more prime ministerial trivia

Well, this has more to do with parties than prime ministers, but anyhoo.

After going through the results for all of our elections, as posted at 
Wikipedia, it seems that the Liberals -- who are currently in something of 
a freefall -- had the second-lowest percentage of the vote *ever* in their 
history in the last election (in 2008), with 26.26%, and you have to go 
all the way back to the very beginning of our country -- to the 1867 
election -- to find an election in which the Liberals scored even lower, 
at 22.67%.

Seat-wise, things are a little different -- but of course, the House of 
Commons keeps growing, so the meaning of any given number will change over 
the years.  At any rate, the lowest number of seats that the Liberals have 
ever won is the 40 seats they won in 1984.  They won 77 seats in 2008, so 
we may see just how much lower things can get on Monday.

The NDP, meanwhile, is "surging", as all the headlines say.  Their best 
performance ever was the 43 seats and 20.38% of the popular vote that they 
won in 1988.  Interestingly, their worst percentage of the popular vote 
ever -- even if you count the NDP (which was formed in the 1960s) and its 
predecessor, the CCF (which was formed in the 1930s), as a single party -- 
was not that long ago: the 6.88% that they won in 1993.

And then there are the ruling Conservatives.  Matters are complicated by 
the fact that the party split in the 1990s and then semi-reunited less 
than a decade ago, but, *prior* to the split, the party's worst results 
ever were 36 seats in 1940 and 27.62% of the popular vote in 1945, and its 
best results ever were 211 seats in 1984 and 56.93% of the popular vote in 
1917 (when the party's name was temporarily changed to Unionist).

*After* the split, between the 1993 and 2000 elections, the Conservatives 
won between 2 and 20 seats and carried between 12.19% and 18.84% of the 
popular vote, while the Reform Party and its successor, the Canadian 
Alliance, won between 52 and 66 seats and carried between 18.69% and 
25.49% of the vote; if you combined the results, then the two parties 
combined wavered between a low of 54 seats and 34.73% of the popular vote 
in 1993, and a high of 80 seats and 38.19% of the popular vote in 1997.

And then the parties re-united.  So, between the 2004 and 2008 elections, 
the reunited Conservatives have grown from 99 seats to 143 seats and from 
29.63% of the popular vote to 37.65% of the popular vote (and note how 
their combined percentage in 2008 was actually slightly smaller than their 
combined percentage in 1997, but the seat count was nearly double).

Meanwhile, there is the Bloc Quebecois, which, since its creation in the 
early 1990s, has always had a majority of Quebec's seats (of the 75 seats 
available to them, their lowest share was 38 in 2000 and their highest was 
54, which they scored in both 1993 and 2004).  Percentage-wise, however, 
they were biggest at the beginning, with 13.52% of the popular vote in 
1993, and they were smallest in the last election, with 9.98% of the 
popular vote in 2008.  (Note: the percentage is measured as a percentage 
of the *national* population, not just the provincial population.)

Other parties that have come and gone over the years include the 
Progressives (seats: low of 3 in 1930, high of 58 in 1926; percentage: low 
of 0.67% in 1935, high of 21.09% in 1921) and Social Credit (seats: low of 
0 in 1958 and every election they've run in since 1980, high of 30 in 
1962; percentage: low of 2.59% in 1940 and 1958 (not counting the 
elections since 1980), high of 11.92% in 1963).  And then there are the 
Greens, who have never won a seat since forming in 1983, but have seen 
their percentage grow from 0.21% in 1984 to 6.78% in 2008.

Interestingly, in the 40 elections we have had so far (the current one is 
our 41st), it has happened only *six times* that a party won over 50% of 
the popular vote: three times, it was the Liberals, and three times, it 
was the Conservatives.  Sir Wilfrid Laurier (Liberal) did it twice -- the 
only Prime Minister ever to do it twice, in fact -- in 1900 and 1904. 
Then Robert Borden (Conservative, or "Unionist" if you prefer) did it in 
1917, with the highest percentage of any party ever (56.93%).  Then 
William Lyon Mackenzie King (Liberal) did it in 1940.  Then John 
Diefenbaker (Conservative) did it in 1958.  And then Brian Mulroney 
(Conservative) did it in 1984, winning the most seats ever (211).

(Although, when Mulroney won 211 seats in 1984, there were 282 seats in 
the House of Commons, giving him 74.8% of the seats, whereas when 
Diefenbaker won 208 seats in 1958, there were 265 seats in the House of 
Commons, giving him a slightly bigger share, or 78.5% of the seats. 
FWIW, when Borden won the largest percentage of the popular vote ever in 
1917, he got 153 seats out of 235, or only 65.1% of the seats.)

Oh, and I just realized that I never said what the Liberals' upper scores 
have been.  (In the paragraphs that started this e-mail, I focused on 
their lowest scores ever.)  The most seats they ever won was the 191 seats 
they won in 1949, and their highest percentage of the vote, ever, was the 
51.32% of the vote that Mackenzie King won in 1940.


On Fri, 29 Apr 2011, Peter T. Chattaway wrote:

> Stephen Harper is currently running for re-election.  He has been 
> elected Prime Minister twice before, both times with minority 
> governments, going back to 2006.  So he has served as our Prime Minister 
> for just a little over 5 years so far -- or slightly longer than the 
> maximum he could have served with a single majority government.
>
> Harper is also our 22nd prime minister.  And, as luck should have it, 
> those 5 years plus are enough to make him the 10th-longest-serving Prime 
> Minister in our history.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Prime_Ministers_of_Canada_by_time_in_office
>
> Mind you, of the 12 prime ministers who served shorter terms than him, 
> only 5 were actually elected to the position; the other 7 were all 
> people who took over and carried on the previous prime minister's 
> mandate after the previous prime minister died or resigned, and who 
> never got re-elected after that (in fact, between the elections of 1891 
> and 1896, there were no less than *five* prime ministers who shared a 
> single mandate, three of whom were dead before the five-year mandate was 
> over; so 4 of the 7 prime ministers I just referred to all date to the 
> 1890s; incidentally, no Canadian prime minister has died on the job 
> since then).
>
> On the other hand, no one has ever led minority governments for as long 
> as Harper has, *certainly* not consecutively.  Lester Pearson had two 
> back-to-back minority governments in the 1960s, and both of Harper's 
> terms (the shortest of which was 2 years, 142 days) lasted longer than 
> Pearson's terms (the longest of which was 2 years, 135 days).  John 
> Diefenbaker had two very short-lived minority governments in the 1950s, 
> but they were separated by a majority government also led by 
> Diefenbaker.  And William Lyon Mackenzie King, if I read this right, was 
> elected to a minority government twice in the 1920s -- the first time 
> Canada ever had a minority government -- but the first of these "shifted 
> back and forth between majority and minority status" due to resignations 
> and floor crossings, with the result that he served as a minority Prime 
> Minister for only about 1 year and 2 months (within a mandate that 
> lasted 3 years and 233 days altogether), and the second of these lasted 
> only 204 days.  So even if you grant Mackenzie King the *entire* length 
> of both terms -- including the times when his first government was a 
> majority -- he would still have presided over a minority government for 
> less time than Harper has.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_minority_governments_in_Canada#Minority_governments_by_term_of_office

-- 
dadl-ot mailing list
http://mail.thehood.us/mailman/listinfo/dadl-ot_thehood.us
http://news.gmane.org/gmane.music.dadl.ot