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| Authored by: uws archive on Sunday, May 26 2002 @ 08:06 PM CDT |
This is an archived comment posted by Stephen W. Young. You can view the original
here. You seem to misunderstand quite a bit about the nature of nature of Canadian electoral politics.
Firstly, it's hard to draw any reliable conclusions from the recent by-election in Calgary Southwest, firstly, since neither the Liberals nor the PCs ran candidates. Also, when one candidate tends to be as far ahead as Stephen Harper was, you'll tend to run into voter complacency, where your base will turn out in fewer numbers on election day. There is a lot of historial evidence for this type of behaviouer. Ask any polling firm about this.
Just like how Clark won his seat, people lining up to defeat the Alliance guy.
Leaders usually win their seats. Why? Because they pour TONS of money into their leader's ridings, and money spent = elections won. Also, you'll note that the Liberals ran a weak candidate in Calgary Centre, so as to "embarass" the Alliance by sending Liberal votes over to the PC candidate, and thus further the divisions between the PCs and the Alliance. Those Liberals are crafty - there's few groups in the country who practice politics as well as they do. It's easy when you're a populist.
So yeah, thanks to regional disparities they are the official opposition, with not much more vote than the PCs. And weren't then at about 6% last poll?
Popularly, they polled over twice as high as the PCs (the 3rd place party) did last election (3.2 million to 1.5 million). I think it's pretty clear that the CA was much more cut out to be the official opposition than the PCs were.
And, I realize they're not doing well in the opinion polls right now, but, don't forget, Mike Harris trailed Lyn McLeod by somewhere around 20 points in the polls when the writ was dropped in 1995 - and we still won. The bottom line is that the only poll that counts is on election day.
Things will get better for the Canadian Alliance. Stock Day, as likeable of a guy as he is, is a political amateur - Stephen Harper is as professional as they come. The CA/Reform has increased their popular vote in every election since their inception, and put a good chunk of money down on betting that they'll increase their vote again in 2004 or so.
So be proud concentrating seats makes you official opposition.
You misunderstand. Regional disparity guarantees that, even if, somehow, our popular vote should slip, we'll still be the official opposition. In 2000, whether you used a first-past-the-post regional-favouring system as we do in Canada, or whether you'd used a PR list system as Israel does in the Knesset... basically any way you cut it... the CA is the second most powerful party in Canada.
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