Election results!

[theweaselking]

Conservative Party: 124 seats.
Liberal Party: 103 seats.
Bloc Quebecois: 51 seats.
New Democratic Part: 29 seats.
Andre Arthur Party: 1 seat.

Now begins the careful process of crippling the federal government, gutting its funding,and taking "free votes" on the issues of minority rights. The good news is that they can't do it alone - nothing they want to do can pass without the BQ or the Liberals supporting it, since it takes 155 votes to pass the Commons and even a bizarre CPC/NDP/AA conglomeration could only get 154 votes. The bad news is that the Liberals and the Bloc won't be willing to break the government quite yet over most issues, so Harper will have a free hand to pass most of the less strictly repulsive parts of his platform.

The best news of all is that Martin has resigned.
EDIT: James Nicoll has a wonderful commentary

Just as with our previous election, the results are numerically interesting: Harper would find it hard to make a deal with Liberals, given the past campaign (plus, what's in it for the Liberals, when a catastrophic CPC minority government exploding into flames while crashing through the roof of a local ophanage only works in the Liberal's favour?). The CON + NDP + IND are one vote short of a majority (and besides, an alliance between Layton and Harper would not seem likely to last long). That leaves the BQ and CPC as allies.

You may remember the BQ as the group Harper said weren't really Canadians back when we legalized same sex marriage.

Comments

[zenten.livejournal.com]

Well, they can shoot down any votes that arn't confidence votes.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

All votes are confidence votes.

[zenten.livejournal.com]

Do you have a source on that? Because everything I've read on it has those votes only for things like budgets.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

If you can kill a bill without a free vote, you can kill a government. A government who has it's choice bills killed tends to resign.

It's a custom, like the party with the most votes forming the government.

[zenten.livejournal.com]

Ok, you're right, I was misunderstanding what you're saying.

However, the parties could just say that it was the conservatives who called the election by calling a vote that wasn't a free vote.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

... a free vote means that MPs are not bound to vote with their party.

The CPC are *more* likely to fall on a free vote. They've also promised free votes on most issues.

[zenten.livejournal.com]

Free votes are pretty much by definition *not* confidence votes.

[evilbitchqueen.livejournal.com]

Is it just me, or did NDP get over 3x the seats that they did last election?

[torrain.livejournal.com]

Number of seats is not proportional to number of votes. The NDP's number of seats went up by 52%, from 19 to 29. If their number of votes went up by 16.5%, then it went from 2,223,745 to 2,590,663; if their percentage of the vote went up by 16.5%, then it went from 15.01% to 17.49%.

[torrain.livejournal.com]

No problem. (It's one of the things that come up when arguing for proportional representation; it's possible for a party to do what the NDP did, and get 17.49% of the votes but only 9.41% of the seats.)

Incidentally, I can't find the article you mentioned online, and I'm curious; was it their number of votes or their percentage of votes that went up by 16.5%?

[harald387.livejournal.com]

Any newspaper's election coverage published today is going to be somewhat inaccurate, because a lot of papers had to have copy ready well before all the final votes were tallied.

-K"H"S

[cmseward.livejournal.com]

According to Elections Canada, the NDP's vote and popular % totals for 2004 were 2,127,403 votes (~21% gain) and 15.68% of all votes (~11% gain). Neither of those are 16.5%, though if you average the two increases it would "work out", but is pretty sloppy math.

[frith]

As I said to a coworker, quel choix aggréable! On a un choix entre le parti des croisseurs (Liberals) et le parti des débiles (the Recessive Conservatives). Well, the nutbars won. It didn't help that the Bloc put up ads denigrating the west and cowboys. Twits.