Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Canadian Election Results

We operate by the first-past-the-post system of elections and our federal government has 308 seats. A majority would thus require 155 seats. Yesterday's election results are as follows:
Conservative: 143
Liberal: 76
Bloc Quebecois: 50
New Democratic Party: 37
Independent: 2

So as I predicted the results show a Conservative Minority government, which is exactly what we had before the election.

The Green Party is proposing some form of proportional representation to take into account the fact that almost a million people voted Green in this election and yet no seats were won, and only 1.4 million votes for the BQ were recorded and they got 50 seats.

I do not know how the proportional representation would be implemented, however, I developed my own idea of allowing 2/3 of votes received to be counted as FPTP by riding while the remaining 1/3 of the votes taken nationally are used to form the remainder of the 308 seats. By using this formula the seat reassignment is as follows:
Conservative: 134
Liberal: 78
Bloc Quebecois: 43
New Democratic Party: 44
Green: 7
Independent: 2

So it still ends up being a Conservative Minority government, but at least now the seats are more balanced by the choice of the voters.

I think that's about it with respect to political posts, at least, until the next election.

2 comments:

ghost said...

canada is like a foreign country to me. oh..wait...

Rita said...

Well at least yours are over.

I am green party, also. Although our Green party is probably different then yours. I am probably going get to meet Ralph Nader this weekend. How exciting is that!