[BRIEF NOTE] How did the Canadian election turn out?

[rfmcdonald]

The 2008 Canadian federal election is over and the results are in.

• The Conservatives did well, with Stephen Harper's minority government gaining control of 16 seats on top of the 127 seats that the Conservatives held before the election. They still didn't get a majority government, thank goodness. The British Columbia interior, almost all of Alberta and Saskatchewan, most of Manitoba outside of Winnipeg, and most of Ontario outside of Toronto and Ottawa.


• The Liberals did quite badly, losing 19 seats and now holding only 76 seats. They certainly not as powerful as they were in the 1990s; if anything, the Liberals suffered have been brought to their lowest point in 24 years. I suspect that people within and without the party will be caling for Stéphane Dion's head. Interestingly, as pauldrye noted, the Liberal Party is becoming a party of urban areas: Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, Montréal.


• The Bloc Québécois did well in Québec, winning 51 of Québec's 75 ridings. Thank you, Gilles Duceppe, for helping Canada to avoid a Conservative majority.


• The New Democrats did reasonably well, winning 7 seats on top of the party's pre-election 30. The party's leader, Jack Layton, is trying to prepare the New Democrats for further gains; one of the themes of his campaigning was his statement that he was running for the prime ministership.


• Even though the Green Party didn't win any seats, it did get the support of 7% of the electorate, roughly 940 thousand voters. Will the party manage to break through, will it become a fringe party, or will it be assimilated into another, larger party like (say) the New Democrats? Wait and find out.


• The various fringe parties combined won something like 0.4% of the vote. Good.

People in Toronto, at least, speculated that campaigns to boost turnout at election time would be successful. Quite the contrary.

Some 59.1 percent of eligible Canadian voters went to the polls Tuesday, breaking the previous record low turnout of just under 61 percent in 2004, according to preliminary results from Elections Canada released on Wednesday.

"There was either general apathy toward the candidates or a degree of voter fatigue as this was the third Canadian election since 2004," said Antonia Maioni, director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada.

Under Canada's system of government, the prime minister is able to schedule an election on the fly to test voter support and put seats in the House of Commons into play.

Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the first Western leader to face the electorate since the start of the international economic meltdown, called the election in the hopes of strengthening his mandate and won Tuesday with a slightly bolstered minority government.

Harper said he was concerned by the low turnout.

"We're obviously disappointed when voter turnout is low, and it's been low and getting lower for some time now," Harper said at a news conference in Calgary, Alberta.

It looks like I wasn't alone in feeling so apathetic as to (nearly) avoid voting.