Eastern news chains can claim whatever they want, last Monday’s by-elections results were no victory for the Liberals. The party lost one bellwether riding to the Conservatives, came within 162 votes of giving up a stronghold in Vancouver and won decisively only in Toronto where they were running two high profile leadership candidates. Actually, these by-elections were much more of a loss and another small blow to Stéphane Dion’s leadership.
But the ones who are really in troubles are the New Democrats. They lost popular support in three out of four ridings and finished the evening virtually tied with the Greens in terms of votes cast. Even more worrisome, their two largest drops were in Ontario (-6,59 % and 9,9 %) where they need to do extremely well to increase their seat tally in the next general election. For a party that has been able to act as the de facto official opposition for the past six months, this is extremely troubling news. Hopefully, it will mean that they stop spending all their time attacking the Liberals on behalf of “working Canadians” and start putting forward some truly innovative policies that made their reputation in the days of Tommy Douglas.
So what do these by-elections all mean? In the broader scheme of things, not much! The Conservatives are definitely winners, but the fact that they did so poorly in Ontario indicates that they’re still not capable of taking a majority. The more interesting trend to watch will be the evolution of the Green Party’s numbers. They grabbed nearly 10% of votes cast, which means that for the first time, their elections numbers are matching the polls. These Green votes will be a big part of the next general election. Will they stay Green? Or otherwise, where will they go?
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