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.