Canadian Election

[pearljammer]

mrstickball said:

famousringo said:

You can see the real reason the Conservatives won right here in this thread. Kasz's chart clearly shows how the entire political compass has been dragged to the right (apparently also towards authoritarianism, can't wait until the entire country is run by the PMO and we don't need these annoying MPs) over the years. People now describe centrist policies as the "extreme left."

The NDP surge is a counter-reaction to this tectonic shift. Most people gravitate towards the center, which is why the Liberals have been the natural governing party for so long. Now that the NDP is the only major national party anywhere near the center, it's battle between the new moderates and the extreme right.

Its not a 'tectonic shift' to the right.

1. If you bothered looking up any of PC's prior charts, you'd know that they've rated the conservatives and liberals in similar same spots since 2005

2. If anything, the charts show that Mr. Harper is a very centrist leader, and the NDP has gained popularity as an extreme-leftist party to a point that gave the Conservative party the majority; as the average Canadian doesn't want to gravitate to the most leftist minority party of most any election in a Western nation.

1. Firstly, those charts do not reflect the position of the Liberal Party accurately at all. Nor do they properly represents the Green Party's positions. The Liberal Party has been becoming more and more leftist in position (now actually opposing corporate tax cuts being perhaps one of the most telling positions of that shift) for some time now and is pretty much common knowledge to most active citizens in Canada.

The following chart better aligns each party's position:

On a side note, the Liberals and the Conservatives are not in similar spots even in your charts; no more than what the NDP and Liberals are in mine. One is more centrist with a slight leaning while the other is far and away leaning one way.

2. The charts, either thoses from the CBC or PC, show that Harper is decidedly far from centrist. Well perhaps not that far, but no more than what the NDP are on the opposite end,

On your other point, that's far from the actual reason why the Conservatives had won. The NDP had more than doubled their seats and greatly increased their vote share. Most of that vote, however, came from both the Liberals and the Bloc Quebecois. While that proved instrumental in the historic night for the NDP, it split the vote between two left groups in many ridings, in Ontario especially, allowing the Conservatives to take some of those ridings with as low as 30% of the vote.

I'm not trying to take anything from the Conservative victory, their strategy worked brilliantly (weaken the Liberal vote so that it will be more evenly distributed between both the Liberals and the NDP) but your reasoning is far from the actual case.

 

On another note - It is quite amazing to see a majority government form with less that 40% of the popular vote. I'm curious if this, or something similar, has happened before. There are now talks of a merger between the Liberals and the NDP from several pundits... it's going to make for an interesting year.