Five Liberals = 1 Conservative

Speaking of urban-rural splits, here's a trivia question: Which MP was elected with the most votes? Answer: Jason Kenney, in Calgary Southeast, with 44,987 votes. That's more than Liberal MPs Wayne Easter (Malpeque - 9,779), Shawn Murphy (Charlottetown - 9,586), Roger Valley (Kenora - 9,465), Larry Bagnell (Yukon - 6,487), and Todd Norman Russell (Labrador - 5,737) received, combined. In fact, 17 of the top 20 votegetters were Conservatives, while of the bottom 20, 14 were Liberals. If there's anyone dependent on the rural vote, it's the Grits. Electoral reform, anyone? (Thanks to reader Paul O for flagging the Elections Canada data from which this is drawn.) MOREOVER: Conservatives also tended to win by the most lopsided margins. 14 Conservative MPs, all from the West, won by margins of 50 percentage points or more over their nearest competitors. Not 50%, as in 12,000 to 8,000, but 50 percentage points -- as in 70% of the vote to 20%. Monte Solberg, for example, took 35,670 out of 44,751 votes cast in Medicine Hat -- nearly ten times as many as his nearest competitor. Upside: talk about your safe ridings. Downside: Lotta wasted votes... MOREUNDER: Mind you, Conservatives also eked out some of the narrowest victories as well. Tony Clement (Parry Sound-Muskoka), Rod Bruinooge (Winnipeg South), Pierre Lemieux (Glengarry-Prescott-Russell), Luc Harvey (Louis-Hébert), Rick Dykstra (St. Catharines), and Mike Allen (Tobique Mactaquac) all won by a margin of less than 1 percentage point. How close a thing was it for the Conservatives overall? The Tories won by 21 seats, 124 to 103. A swing of 11 seats, then, marks the difference between a Tory plurality and a Liberal one. Take the 11 closest races where a Tory beat a Liberal. The margins of victory in these races sum to 8981. If just 4502 voters in those ridings had voted Liberal instead of Tory -- well, we still wouldn't be looking at a Liberal government, in my view, since I don't think the Grits could have commanded the confidence of the House. But they would have at least had bragging rights Actually, depending on how you look at it, it's even closer than that. The 11 closest Tory wins of all include two ridings where they beat the Bloc. The total margin of victory in these 11 ridings comes to 6592. So a switch of 3307 Tory voters to one of the other two parties would have been enough to cut the Tory lead to one seat: 113-112. Had another 772 voters in Barrie voted for the Liberal, Aileen Carroll, instead of the Tory, Patrick Brown -- bringing the total required to 4079 -- then Paul Martin would today be trying desperately to cling on to power, instead of planning his retirement. 4079 voters made the difference. Out of 14.8 million nationwide. Still think your vote doesn't count? FURTHERMORE: Much of the controversy over the "urban-rural split" centres on how you define a big city. "Vancouver" is supposedly a dead zone for the Tories, but only if you define Vancouver to exclude its outer suburbs -- in which case it's only a medium-sized city. A commenter on Small Dead Animals (relayed by way of YYC) has, it seems to me, settled the argument. Tallying the seats won by each party in the nine largest cities, using the best known definition -- StatsCan's Census Metropolitan Areas -- the overall standings work out to Liberals 60, Tories 57 (Bloc 28, NDP 15). End of story? Not quite. In the big three, the Grits lead 55-12. In the next 6, the Tories win 45-5. There's your split. LESSISMORE: I, Ectomorph has some more thoughts, and data, on "Canada's rotten boroughs." It turns out that 10 Liberal ridings equals 2 Tories. MOREISLESS: Overall, it took 43,314 votes to elect each Tory MP (including votes for losing Tory candidates), to 43,468 for each Liberal. No discrepancy, for once (see: First past the post, distortions arising from). The real unfairness is in the relative fortunes of the other two parties. The NDP, with 2.6 million votes, gets 29 seats -- an average of 89,338 votes per seat. The Bloc Quebecois, with fewer than 1.6 million votes, gets 51 seats, or one seat for every 30,432 votes. MOREORLESS: The folks at Fair Vote Canada have some fresh inequities:

The chief victims of the January 23 federal election were: Western Liberals: In the prairie provinces, Conservatives got three times as many votes as Liberals did, but won nearly ten times as many seats. In Alberta, the Conservative Party won 100% of the seats with 65% of the votes. The 500,000 Albertans who voted otherwise elected no one. Urban Conservatives: The 400,000-plus Conservative voters in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver should have been able to elect about nine MPs, but instead elected no one. The three cities together will not have a single MP in the governing caucus, let alone the cabinet... Green Party: More than 650,000 Green Party voters across the country elected no one, while 475,000 Liberal voters in Atlantic Canada elected 20 MPs. Federalists and nationalists: As usual, the voting system turned entire regions of Canada into partisan fiefdoms, rather than allowing the diversity of views in all regions to be fairly represented in Parliament and within each national party... “How can anyone continue to think that this voting system gives us good geographic representation,” said Wayne Smith, President of Fair Vote Canada, “when it fragments and divides our country like this?”... Had the same votes been cast under a proportional voting system, Fair Vote Canada projected that the seats allocation would have been approximately as follows: Conservatives - 36.3% of the popular vote: 113 seats (not 124) Liberals - 30.1% of the popular vote: 93 seats (not 103) NDP - 17.5% of the popular vote: 59 seats (not 29) Bloc - 10.5% of the popular vote: 31 seats (not 51) Greens - 4.5% of the popular vote: 12 seats (not 0) However, Smith emphasized that speculation should be tempered. “With a different voting system, people would have voted differently,” he said. “There would have been no need for strategic voting. We would likely have seen higher voter turnout. We would have had different candidates - more women, and more diversity of all kinds. We would have had more real choices.” “The voting system really matters -- a lot -- and the system we have is simply not acceptable in a modern democracy.”