When one doesn't understand strategic voting
(or the Conservatives' path to their majority in 2011)

by Maurice Y. Michaud (he/him)

Emerging from the 34th Parliament with its best standing to date at 43 seats in the House of Commons, the New Democrats, along with the Progressive Conservatives, found themselves without official party status once the dust had settled from the 1993 general election. They regained it in 1997 and kept it after that, but their rebuilding didn't bring them anywhere near their glory days of 1988 to 1993: 21 seats in 1997; 13 in 2000; 19 in 2004; 29 in 2006, and 37 in 2008. But then, a peculiar alignment of circumstances occurred in 2011 and led to what was dubbed the Orange Crush, which resulted in the NDP becoming the Official Opposition in the Commons for the first time.

That "peculiar alignment of circumstances" was two-fold. First, the election had been necessitated because the incumbent Conservatives, unpopular among a large swath of the electorate and led by Stephen Harper, had been found in contempt of Parliament, although they wanted people to believe they had been brought down by a non-confidence vote over their budget. Second, the rehabilitation of the Liberals, who had lost power in 2006 due to a sponsorship scandal as well as the usual wear of power after 13 years in office, wasn't going well. Although Harper seemed cold, calculating and uncaring, the Conservatives had managed to brand the Liberal leader, Michael Ignatieff, as being "Just in it for himself" and an elitist who was out of touch with Canadians.

Against this backdrop, Jack Layton, who had been leading the NDP since 2003, started his fourth election campaign as he had his first three: by presenting himself as the happy warrior, and, some would say, cringeworthily declaring that he was "running to become Prime Minister of Canada." Except that, this time, after two Conservative minority governments over nearly five-and-a-half years, a near constitutional crisis in 2008 that brought Harper to prorogue Parliament, and a widespread sense that the national political discourse had turned negative, Layton's sunny disposition and passionate plea that he was the one who was "working for families" became appealing to some centrist voters.

But his appearance on the popular talk show Tout le monde en parle during the election campaign is today viewed as the moment when the Orange Crush began. As election day came closer, incredulous pollsters noticed that the NDP, which had never won more than one seat in Québec, was poised to win more seats there than the Bloc Québécois ever had. In turn, that led centrist voters elsewhere in Canada who disliked the Conservatives to take notice: if the Québécois were willing to ditch the Bloc, why shouldn't they, too, consider ditching the Liberals? However, in doing so, they fell into a trap of the first-past-the-post electoral system. Not all centrist voters were willing to abandon the Liberals, so if one lived in a riding where the NDP traditionally and consistently came in a distant third (or worse), all they would accomplish is to split the left-of-centre vote between the NDP and the Liberals, leading the Conservative candidate to become — indeed — the first past the post. In other words, precisely what they didn't want!

Winning 30.7% of the votes nationally, the NDP picked up 33.4% of the seats, or 103. The Liberals, with a meager 18.9% of the votes, got only 11% of the seats, or 34, not to mention that their leader, Ignatieff, was defeated. And the Conservatives, with only 39.6% of the vote, finally got their majority mandate: 53.9% of the seats, or 166. But it is also worth noting that the participation rate was such that Nobody was the figurative winner in 79.6% of the ridings, or 245.

Canada

41 → 2011 ::  2 May 2011 — 18 Oct 2015 — Majority  CPC  Summary Government Opposition Unproductive votes Party Votes Seats Party Votes Seats Party Votes # % % # # % % # # % Parliament: 41    Majority Majority=155  Ab.Maj.: +12  G.Maj.: +24 Population [2011]: 33,468,423 Eligible: 24,257,592  Particip.: 61.11% Votes: 14,823,408  Unproductive: 229,131 Seats: 308   1 seat = 0.32% ↳ Elec.Sys.:  FPTP: 308   ↳ By acclamation: 0 (0.00%) Plurality: Votes  CPC  Seats  CPC  Plurality: ↳ +1,322,859 (+8.98%) Plurality: ↳ Seats: +63 (+20.46%) Position2: Votes  NDP  Seats  NDP  Candidacies: 1,587 (✓ 308)   m: 1,133 (✓ 232)   f: 454 (✓ 76)  CPC  307   NDP  308   LIB  308   BQ  75   GRN  304   OTH  225   IND  60   CPC 5,835,270 39.63 53.90 166 NDP LIB BQ GRN 4,512,411 2,783,076 891,425 572,095 30.65 18.90 6.05 3.89 33.44 11.04 1.30 0.32 103 34 4 1 OTH IND REJ ABS 57,145 72,558 99,428 9,434,184 0.39 0.49 0.67 ——  OTH  →  CHP  47   ML  70   LBT  23   PCP  9   RHIN  14   PPC  10  OTH  →  COMM  20   ACT  12   MP  5   AAEV  7   WBP  4   UPC  3   FPNP  1  !!!  245 (79.55%)

How many CPC candidates thus managed to come on top because of this vote splitting? Did it happen often enough to give their party the majority they coveted, which, at the time, was 155 seats? Or was the Liberal-NDP vote splitting negligible, as those who don't think that there is such a thing as strategic voting want you to think?

To find the answer, let's:

Thus we could conclude that there would be 15 differences.

A shift of 58,615 votes in 15 ridings nationwide — 57,638 from the Liberals to the NDP and 976 from the Liberals to the Greens in the Yukon — gave the Conservatives their majority. That was on a total of 14,723,980 votes cast (not counting the rejected votes), or only 0.40%.

Picking up two new seats in Atlantic Canada and sweeping up 59 of the 75 seats in Québec, the Orange Crush ebbed upon hitting Ontario, where it picked up only five new seats but caused 10 seats to go to the Conservatives, and disappeared in the West, grabbing only one new seat on its way through. Many were those east of Manitoba who switched from the Liberals to the NDP, but not nearly enough to win new seats yet certainly enough to seriously wound the Liberals in the process. Moreover, had those who normally vote Liberal remained in that camp, the Conservatives would have won their third consecutive minority government, four seats shy of a majority.

Not understanding the need to vote strategically in the first-past-the-post system, many got... precisely what they didn't want!