Re: even more prime ministerial trivia

On Sat, 30 Apr 2011, Peter T. Chattaway wrote:

> 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.

Wow.  Votes are still being counted, so these numbers might shift a bit, 
but right now the Liberals are believed to have only 34 seats.  An 
all-time low.

And it's even *more* significant when you consider that seats have been 
added to the House of Commons consistently over the years.  In other 
words, 34 seats today is a heck of a lot smaller than, say, 34 seats in 
1961, let alone 1911.

Don't know about the popular vote yet.  Probably too early to tell.

> 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.

Well well.  The NDP are currently believed to have 104 seats (though I've 
seen the figure waver between 103 and 106 in the last few hours).  Not 
only is this more than double their 23-year-old best-ever record, they 
will also potentially have more seats in the House of Commons than any 
opposition party since 1979.  (The Liberals had 103 seats in 2006, when 
the House was just as big as it is now, and the Conservatives had 103 
seats in 1980, when there were 282 seats in the House.  The Liberals led 
the opposition in a minority government in 1979 with 114 seats.)

A big factor in the NDP forming such a major opposition is, of course, the 
fact that the Bloc Quebecois collapsed (more on that below).  But of 
course, the ongoing -- and rather sharp -- decline of the Liberals is a 
big part of that too.  A part of me can't help thinking that Conservative 
leader Stephen Harper has achieved one of his true goals here -- not 
merely winning a majority government (cf. below, also), but the demise of 
the Liberals and the Bloc, leading to a more polarized Parliament.  It's a 
little too early to say that we're becoming a two-party system like the 
one that exists in the States, but we may be a little closer to that, now. 
(But I guess someone could always argue that Harper actually wants *both* 
the NDP and the Liberals to stick around, knowing that they will sap each 
other's strength, the same way the Reform and Progressive Conservative 
parties sapped each other's strength in the 1990s and early 2000s.)

> 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).

And with over 160 seats, it looks like the Conservatives got their 
majority -- the first majority government elected in Canada since 2000.

> 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.)

Three seats.  They're down to only three seats now.  (You need 12 to be 
considered an "official" party, which comes with certain perks, like a 
certain level of funding etc.  Well, buh-bye to that, now.)  Admittedly, 
I've seen estimates vary between two seats and four seats tonight -- but 
that's as good as it's gotten for them.  Nowhere *near* double digits.

> 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.

And tonight, they won their first seat ever.

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