Mea Culpa or, So Much for the Great Prognosticator

[ed_rex]

Back on the 10th, I decided to damn the polls and so, over on canpolitik, I stuck to my guns and predicted tonight's results as follows.

Liberals: 155
Conservatives: 77
Bloc: 39
NDP: 36
Green: 1

What can I say? The actual results as of 11:44 are in fact,

Conservatives: 144 (not a majority, thank god!)
Liberals: 74 (I don't understand Dion — why couldn't he campaign? What the hell happened to the Liberals' organization?)
Bloc: 50 (Good to see their share of the popular vote decrease)
NDP: 38
Independent: 2

Not quite a disaster for this country, but not a particularly heartening result either. On the other hand, those Yanks among you who are as frightened of McCain/Palin as I am might take heart from the fact I predicted a McCain landslide — here's hoping I'll be as wrong about the results in the US as I was about those north of the border. (I note also that my father is slightly smarter than I am; he predicted a Liberal minority. Tomorrow we shall commiserate via telephonic device.)

Comments

[davegodfrey.livejournal.com]

Nice to see the NDP gradually picking up seats, although as in the UK there's the "Vote Liberal (or Labour as it is in the UK) to stop a Tory" ethos preventing them and other parties from picking up seats.

In the UK getting rid of First-Past-The-Post would make a massive difference to the Liberal Democrats. With 600-odd seats smaller parties face an uphill struggle to get anywhere. The last Conservative government was a minority by the end as a result of defections, etc, (and relied on the Irish Unionist parties to pass bills) but an election hasn't returned a hung parliament since 1974, and there was another election that year to resolve the issue.

We Are Not Enthused

[ed-rex.livejournal.com]

I too am pleased to see the NDP gain a few seats — particularly since they managed to hold their seat in in Québec, a first during a general election — though with not much more than tepid enthusiasm; today's NDP is closer to a Tony Blair-style "New Labour" than it is the genuinely social democratic party it once was. And, unlike Labour when Blair started his make-over, Canada already has a Liberal (centrist) party, wounded as it is at the moment.

I'm a little surprised Britain hasn't had a minority since '74. They aren't normal here, but neither are they rare. We had two in the '60s, two in the '70s, and now three in the new century.

First-past-the-post definitely makes life difficult for new parties, but I'm a little leery of Italian-style proportional representation. One model I'm intrigued by is the preferential-ballot system, though I haven't investigated it in much depth.

Re: We Are Not Enthused

[davegodfrey.livejournal.com]

The Liberal Democrats have been running around for years. They're whats left of the Liberal Party of Lloyd George, and the Whigs of Pitt after years of various splits and mergers. So there was a centrist party when Blair began his march to the right. It wasn't terribly big, and it wasn't going to be winning elections any time soon though. Labour moved to the right to get those who wouldn't have voted for a party keen on nationalisation, etc- i.e. people who normally voted Tory but didn't this time round.

Yes Italian-style PR is a disaster. Some elections have started to use a version of PR. The Mayoral Election used Single Transferrable Vote. The London Assembly also uses PR, so there is a single member of the British National Party (racists in suits), and several Greens.

Re: We Are Not Enthused

[ed-rex.livejournal.com]

Yes, quite so about your Lib-Dems, but in Canada, the Liberals have long been the "natural governing party". It's possible they are now in permanent decline and going the way of the British Liberals, but so far the NDP's social democratic history (and present, in terms of a significant percentage of its membership) has not left it able to seriously challenge for the "middle" of the political spectrum.

In terms of British politics, the Lib-Dems were a centrist option, but as in Canada, I suspect history and its resulting inertia meant it was easier for Labour to transform itself than for a third party to come up the middle. Similarly, I think it will be easier for the Liberals here to succesfully remake themselves than for the NDP to supplant them.

Historically, while the NDP has never gained national power, when it stuck to its social democratic guns it managed to achieve a lot of (what I consider to be) good, forcing the Liberals to the left and so leading us to medicare and other social goods.

...so there is a single member of the British National Party (racists in suits)...

Sigh. The beauty of giving voice to "the people". Still, Churchill had it right when he said democracy was "the worst form of government, except for all the others". At least for now.