A Few 2015 Election Scenarios

So UBC has an election calculator for 2015. You key in vote movement from one party to another and it gives you a new seat count. Thought I'd play around with it. My 'the NDP performs well, the Conservatives perform adequately, and the others tank' calculation went like this:

• The Liberals retain only half their vote, with 25% going to the NDP and the remainder split evenly between the Tories and the Greens.
• The Bloc also retain only half their vote, with 25% going to the NDP and the remainder split evenly between the Tories and the Greens.
• The Greens split in half, with half of their 2011 vote going to the NDP and the other half staying with them.
• The Tories retain 90% of their support, with 10% shedding to the NDP.
• The NDP keep every one of their 2011 votes.
• One-third of 2011 non-voters starts voting NDP.

This would be, as you can see, a great improvement for the NDP. Unrealistically great, you could say. In fact, it would result in a sad 3.0% for the Bloc, an improved 5.1% for the Greens, a horrid 9.5% for the Liberals, a pretty-similar 39.1% for the Tories, and an astounding 43.2% for the NDP - in first place by four percent.

But here's the kicker: according to the UBC model, that would be a majority government... for the Conservatives. It would be a strictly bipartisan parliament with not a single Liberal, Bloc or Green MP, the NDP would bet 144 seats, anf the Tories would get 164, losing only three and maintaining a comfortable majority.

Surprising, eh? One could imagine how loud the electoral-reform talk would be in such a circumstance. It'd look like this:

• 19 CPC seats in the Atlantic (+5) to 13 for the NDP (+7).
• An amazing 71 NDP seats in Québec (+13) to a pathetic 4 for the Tories (-2).
• 72 Ontario seats for the Tories (-1) to 34 for the NDP (+12).
• 21 CPC seats in Saskitoba (-3) and 7 for the NDP (+5).
• No change in Alberta - 27 Conservative seats and one NDP.
• 20 Conservative seats in BC (-1) and 16 (+4) for the NDP.

Essentially, what would happen is that current Liberal and Bloc seats would subsume into NDP seats, while Tory seats would stay Tory (presumably, anyway - I'm not looking at a seat-by-seat projection).

The NDP can't go anywhere without eroding the Conservative vote.

So let's look at that: The CPC collapses and the NDP are one of several beneficiaries. So I imagined the Conservatives able to hold onto only 60% of their 2011 vote, losing 20% to the NDP and 10% each to the Liberals and the Greens. I don't know how it would calculate a 10% loss to the Bloc, since we're not talking uniform swing, so I skipped it. In fact, I disbanded the Bloc, giving half their vote to the NDP and 25% each to the Liberals and to the Greens. The NDP, Liberals and Greens retained all their vote, and non-voters stayed non-voters. The result? It's just as bizarre. With no BQ, we'd have the Greens at 9.5%, the Conservatives in 3rd place for popular vote at 24.0, the Liberals at 24.6% and the NDP as king of the hill at 41.9%. With this, the Greens would keep their one seat, the Conservatives would fall into a dismal third with 62 seats (-105), the Liberals would be the official opposition at 70 and the NDP would have a 175-seat majority. Region by region:

• In the Atlantic: 16 Lib, 15 NDP, 1 CPC.
• In Québec: 69 NDP, 6 Lib.
• In Ontario, 43 NDP, 38 Lib, 25 CPC.
• In Saskitoba, 15 NDP, 7 CPC, 4 Lib.
• In Alberta, 24 CPC, 4 NDP.
• In BC, 26 NDP, 5 CPC, 4 Lib, 1 Green.

And then here's one more: the NDP rake it in, stealing votes from left, right and centre. I have the NDP getting 100% of the Bloc vote, 75% of the Green vote, 50% of the Liberal vote, 25% of the Tory vote, and 25% of the people who didn't vote at all in 2011. This would give the NDP 59.5% of the vote and a ridiculous 88.0% of the seats - 271, with a dismal 37-seat rump Tory opposition (28 of those seats would be in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba).

One last one: here's 'The Liberals shift to the right': the Conservatives lose 25% of their vote to the Liberals, who lose 25% of their votes to the NDP. Nothing else changes. That would leave a total vote of 3.9% for the Greens, 6.1% for the BQ, 24.3% for the Liberals, 30.0% for the Conservatives and 35.7% for the NDP - that would be a loss of 10.0% for the CPC, split roughly evenly between the Liberals and the NDP. The seat count would be 1 each for the BQ and the Greens, 51 for the Liberals, 122 for the CPC and 133 for the NDP - an interesting hung parliament with the Liberals holding sway and able to decide who to support for PM, like we currently see in the UK.

Conversations With a Liberal

Did you know that I'm personally responsible for the Conservative majority? It's true: by being one of the 31% of Canadians who cast their vote for the party most strongly opposed to Stephen Harper's ideology, I myself gave him his coveted majority. I'm expecting a senate appointment pretty soon in return.

At least, I would if there were any truth, or logic, to the arguments I had to listen to today while speaking to that endangered species, the Canadian Liberal.

Capital-L, that is.

This person was abundantly clear: the NDP lack ethics, they are opportunists. The NDP split the vote with wild promises. They attacked Ignatieff. Ignatieff did nothing wrong, he was the best man for the job, he was the victim of smear attacks. The Liberals remain the best party, sooner or later voters will come back, the Liberals don't need to change anything.

Etc. etc. etc. Okay, one day after his party's worst-ever defeat, and he has a right to be angry. But I wonder what percentage of staunch Liberals agree with this assessment: for their own benefit, I hope it's next to zero, but I'm not at all sure it is. If the Liberals really do fade into obscurity (and I don't think they will), it will be through nobody's fault but their own. Their stubborn refusal to change, to accept defeat, would almost be funny if it weren't so damaging to one of Canada's proudest political legacies. Look what they've done to themselves in a mere decade:

• 2000: 40.85%
• 2004: 36.73%
• 2006: 30.23%
• 2008: 26.26%
• 2011: 18.91%

Yesterday, fewer than one in five Canadians cast their vote for the Liberal party. With only 60% turnout, that's closer to 11.5% of Canadian adults. You can blame Stephen Harper, and perhaps you should. You can blame Jack Layton, and perhaps you should. But the vast majority of the blame has to fall with Michael Ignatieff and with a party that was crashing and burning before he even lived in Canada.

I personally believe the Liberals have a continued relevance and place in Canadian politics, even if the Liberal cognoscenti themselves question it at the moment. This guy himself, and plenty of others, had plenty to say about 'the death of Canadian multipartisanism'. This is rich, and emblematic of the problem: the Liberals are so confident of their assured and rightful place in Canadian politics that the mere act of them on one occasion being a third party causes them to presume that they've been permanently gutted. Otherwise, how else do you come to describe the historic ascendancy of a third-party as the death of multipartisanism?

This person, and so many others, presume that the NDP have stolen away votes that rightfully belong to the Liberals - so 'rightfully' so that the Liberals didn't seem to think they were worth fighting for. The Liberals fought a bipartisan smear campaign (and despite what my colourblind friend claims the Liberals fought much dirtier than the NDP) out of the basic presumption that all it took to bring votes to the Liberals was to undermine the Conservatives. Any other party in Canada was a mere distraction, a mosquito in the ear.

My friend was one of those who look at vote tallies and talk about 'vote splitting'. He was angry that the NDP had the audacity to run candidates in all 308 ridings, while presuming it was the birthright of the Liberals to do the same. He pointed out 905 and 416 ridings where the combined Liberal and NDP votes were higher than the Conservative votes. He very sincerely believes that it was 7,731 NDP voters in Etobicoke Centre who turned that riding blue, as opposed to 21,661 Conservative voters in the same riding. Observations like the fact that my hometown of Oshawa has historically had a Liberal spoiler who by the same logic has repeatedly denied the NDP the seat (not last night, I hasten to add, where the Tories won it fair and square) fell on deaf ears. Did the Liberals take advantage of the retirement of an incumbent to use a star candidate in order to 'steal' the NDP's most loyal seat in a by-election last year? Irrelevant... what matters is the fact that NDP voters should have known better than to stray from Daddy LPC.

One party cannot steal votes from another. Parties don't determine elections, the individual decisions of millions of Canadians do. And if barely one in five were convinced by Ignatieff's claims that only he could stop a Conservative majority - if, in fact, only 32% of the anti-Harper vote were - it's for no other reason than the fact that he, and his party, were not convincing enough.

I am as sad, angry and upset by yesterday's events as the rest of the anti-Harper majority of Canadians. But I am entirely unrepentant. I chose to exercise my democratic right yesterday by doing the right thing. By opposing Harper in the firmest way possible and in support of the party with the best vision. If you choose to see it this way (I don't), yesterday it was the Liberals, not the NDP, who were the spoilers. Who, by 'splitting the vote' (whatever that even means), handed Harper his majority.

But don't tell them that. It was all our fault, not theirs.

This is All Your Fault, Michael Ignatieff

So as we grind inexorably toward another election, with the vast majority of the citizens of the country convinced that by and large the make-up of the House of Commons will stay the same, I find myself being forced to listen more and more carefully to a little nagging voice that's been in my head for the past year or so.

I'm speaking about the little voice that appears every time I seem Michael Ignatieff speaking on TV. The voice that says "I don't want this man to be my prime minister".

It's there; I can't deny it. I have seen this man speak, in full or in soundbite, on countless occasions. And yet not once have I ever gotten the slightest sense that I was watching a prime-minister-in-waiting, someone that I could ever feel comfortable calling 'my prime minister'.

This is not to say I feel comfortable at all calling Harper that. I think I'm one of perhaps, all told, an outright majority of Canadians who want neither Ignatieff nor Harper to be Prime Minister. And since we're currently stuck in the middle of one of history's most unfortunate false dualities - the media-fed notion that we have only these two figures to choose from as PM - I'm not surprised that larger numbers of Canadians are joylessly turning to Harper and his Conservatives as the 'devil we know', the less offensive of the two man.

Is Harper less offensive than Ignatieff? Not at all. Policy-wise he remains one of the most offensive politicians in Canadian history, and as a person he has had only the mildest sparks of personality and humanity down the years - though again that's more than you can say for Ignatieff. Plus, bad ones though they may be, Harper has ideas. Ignatieff does not appear to have any at all. None of his own, at least.

I have a theory - far-fetched though it is - that Ignatieff takes his current job description extraordinarily seriously, even to the detriment of himself and his party. While within a question of days he might be a candidate for Prime Minister, at the moment he's Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, sworn to provide an opposition to the government of the day. In theory, this is an extraordinarily valuable function in a democracy, a bulwark against dictatorship-through-yesmen - it's a position, defined that way, that a true believe in democracy would cherish, and perhaps Ignatieff is every bit the true believer in democracy that he's trying to present himself as.

That would mean that, to use my personal favourite example, the other day when Stephen Harper appeared before the press to outline Canada's position on Libya, Ignatieff's seemingly non-stop partisan response was actually delivered not as a desperate attempt to undermine Harper's public support but in his capacity as a person sworn to oppose every last thing the PM does.

It'd be nice to think: I can't stand Harper, but I watched that particular press conference to hear how Canada would react. The person delivering the message was unimportant to me: it was Harper due to the political reality at the moment, yes. But be that as it may, I might dislike the guy, but his is the voice that matters on this topic. I hated watching Ignatieff pick apart everything Harper said and making dig after dig at a moment where a bit of solidarity would have been appreciated. There are occasions where I think Ignatieff can gain political points and respect by saying, 'I commend the Prime Minister on his action, which is precisely the thing I would have done in his place'. Ignatieff never seems to take them: he appears to define himself solely as the anti-Harper.

Whether this is a po-faced reading of his role as Head of the Opposition or his ham-fisted attempt at an election campaign doesn't really matter - it is clearly not working, because it makes Ignatieff look like a mere thorn in the side of Harper as opposed to a viable alternative. The false dichotomy with which we Canadians are constantly presented - the one that tells us the only two people who could be Prime Minister are the leasders of the Conservative and Liberal Parties - makes a very real problem for the vast numbers of Canadians, myself included, who don't much care for either Stephen Harper or Michael Ignatieff. For me it reinforces the correctness of my decision to park my vote with a third party, but for many Canadians it will mean either a frustrated decision to sit out the election or a resigned decision to cast their vote with the Harperites, who at least present a vision of leadership that is less than ginggle-worthy.

Bad news either way. But perhaps a necessary medicine? The Liberals need either to give people a reason to care about them again or to fade into oblivion. I'm not bothered by the years Ignatieff has spent in the UK and the USA merely because they're not Canada: I've lived abroad, and if any country should take 'cosmopolitan' as a compliment it is this one. But when I think of some of the more inspiring Canadian politicians out there - and I think the leaders of the three progressive parties in Canada can all stake a claim to this - one thing I see is years and years of unfailing public service. Jack Layton's years in municipal politics, Gilles Duceppe's years with public service unions, Elizabeth May's years with environmental organisations: all of these stake real claims of legitimacy that Ignatieff's storied academic career fails to replicate. In other words, you just haven't earned it yet, baby - not because you haven't been on Canadian soil but because you haven't been in the front trenches serving Canada. Or much of anywhere. There is no dirt under your fingernails, and I don't mean 'you're an élitist' - hell, I love the idea of a published novelist and Harvard professor representing Canada. What I mean is that it really is tough to avoid the conclusion that on some fundamental level you are in it less for the public good of Canadians than for yourself. That's not CPC slander ads sticking - it's the truth. That damned false dochotomy again shows up and allows us to view Harper's meagre public service record and conclude that 'all politicians are in it solely for personal gain'. But I refuse to believe that. Or at least believe that it has to be that way. When I see Ignatieff's fundamental lack of fresh ideas, I can't avoid the conclusion that he has little to say because he has too little experience out there listening to people. It seems like a cliché but new ideas are borne from experience, and from being able to draw on years of experience. A neophyte's vision of politics is always a useful thing, too - but Ignatieff does not seem like that, either.

I find it difficult to believe that Michael Ignatieff will outlive this current campaign. And then once he's handed in his resignation, I'm curious to see where the Liberals will turn for a successor. If that successor fails to inspire confidence in the public - once again - then I think this time it might be lights out for the Liberals.

And while Michael Ignatieff will not deserve all of the burden of blame, he will deserve no small portion either.