In the last few days I’ve seen a few comments to the effect that 62% of Canadian voters did not vote for the Conservatives in the last election, which calls the government’s legitimacy into question.
To put that in perspective, consider that one needs to go back to the 1984 landslide to find an election where a majority of the popular vote went to the leading party.
So were all those governments including Chretien’s three consecutive majorities illegitimate because the other parties received more votes?
|
Canadian Election |
Leading Party & Leader |
Number of Seats Won |
Percent of Total Seats |
Percent of Popular Vote |
Percent Voting for Other Parties |
|
Conservative (Harper) |
143 of 308 |
46.4% |
37.6% |
62.4% |
|
|
Conservative (Harper) |
124 of 308 |
40.3% |
36.3% |
63.7% |
|
|
Liberal (Martin) |
135 of 308 |
43.8% |
36.7% |
63.3% |
|
|
Liberal (Chrétien) |
172 of 301 |
57.1%
|
40.8% |
59.2% |
|
|
Liberal (Chrétien) |
155 of 301 |
51.5% |
38.5% |
61.5% |
|
|
Liberal (Chrétien) |
177 of 295 |
60.0% |
41.2% |
58.8% |
|
|
PC (Mulroney) |
169 of 295 |
57.3% |
43.0% |
57% |
|
|
PC (Mulroney) |
211 of 282 |
74.8% |
50.0% |
50.0% |
|
|
Etc. |
|
|
|
|
|
UPDATE: My apologies for the ugly table formatting. At least the table is showing up now – originally it displayed fine in Firefox but not in Internet Explorer – in fact having a table in this post made all of my previous posts disappear. If anyone knows how to insert Word tables into WordPress while retaining the formatting, please let me know.
I think over ninety percent of us didn’t vote for G Duceppe but now his input is going to be valuable??
The only candidate who talked about the economic crissis that was about to befall us is being slamed by the guys who wanted to tax us more or rip us apart. Harper won the election because of that plain and simple. Now these guys claim to have a real handle on this crissis I say let them and when it all goes down the toilet everyone who’s clamoring for Harpers blood will flip flop and blame Dion, letting Dion run the government will be the end of the liberal party for the next 10 years Yahoo!