rabble.ca Canadian federal election blog

Lets ask good questions about what happened

By Fred Wilson

Enough already with the “if only we had PR…” We don’t and won’t anytime soon. The election results are completely understandable when 37% vote for one party, and no other party is within 10 points of that. But it still didn’t produce majority government – thanks to Quebec.

It is likely too soon to really comprehend what happened yesterday.  The best we can do today is to begin asking good questions.

How do we explain the extra 3 points that the Conservatives gained in the last couple of days after the ABC campaign had them trending downward? Those gains were to some extent matched by a corresponding softening of the NDP vote (if we can rely on Nanos’ numbers) to the point where it exceeded the 2006 result by just one percent – in spite of Layton’s effective campaign and country-wide impact. Was there an invisible strategic vote that cost the NDP? It doesn’t appear so, because neither Liberals nor Greens were the beneficiaries.

Perhaps those additional NDP votes that did not materialize were another dimension of the low voter turn out. I think we need to know who didn’t vote, and how much that drop affected outcomes.

Another question we have to answer is how union households and workers voted. Why did the “orange crush” sweep Northern Ontario, but fail in British Columbia where there are similar rural and industrial forest based communities?

Lower the Conservative vote by 3 points and add that to the NDP column, and we would be having a very different conversation today about transformational possibilities for a different government. Of course that speculation, however exciting, is no more useful than complaining about the lack of PR. The useful questions are what opportunities there are now for parliamentary majorities on key issues – not just to block Harper’s agenda, but to implement some alternatives. Or must we relive the last year of the first Harper minority, with him governing as if he has a majority, and a pathetic Liberal opposition making that possible?

Good questions are the basis of good analysis, and maybe some useful answers. In the meantime, lets thank the Quebecois who blocked the majority and bought us some time to get this figured out.