Last month, I looked at ridings where the Liberals exceeded expectations. Today, a look at ridings where the Tories did better than we would have thought given what was going on around them. If you’re confused about what the numbers in brackets mean, check out my first post on this topic. I’m not saying it […]

As we learned last election, when the political wave rises, it’s hard to avoid it. If ever you wanted evidence of just how powerless local campaigns are, look no further than some of the quality men and women who were defeated by phantom candidates who hadn’t even set foot in the riding, never mind campaigned […]

Unless Stephen Harper breaks his own fixed election date law (ha ha ha!), we’ll have a new set of ridings for the 2015 election. So for kicks this summer, I’m looking back at life in the old ridings over the past four elections. I already posted a list of the most exciting ridings in the […]

In response to my previous “what if” post on running elxn41 under a preferential ballot, a few blog readers wondered how the election would have turned out had there been a Liberal-NDP merger. The challenge with that kind of analysis is that we have no real way of knowing what 1 + 1 equals. Even […]

One of the democratic reform initiatives that never seems to get much publicity is the preferential ballot. Yet it’s simple, assures the majority of the riding backs the winning candidate, and helps avoid some of the dangerous strategic voting mis-steps we see all too often. It’s how parties elect their leaders, yet we assume Canadians […]

We’ve now had 4 elections under the current 308 riding electoral map, a period over which the Canadian political landscape has completely transformed itself. 2004: 2011: Still, that doesn’t mean every local election has been exciting – after all, if you live in Calgary East or York West, your vote hasn’t been overly meaningful at […]