Thanks to Wilf Day for the reminder that there is also a provincial election in Prince Edward Island this week–today, in fact.
It will be another large manufactured majority, with Liberals currently on 18 seats with a bit over 41% of the votes. Conservatives 7 seats on 37%, and a Green MLA elected (11% province wide). The NDP looks to be shut out in seats, despite currently being just slightly ahead of the Greens in votes.
As for the one Green win, in Kellys Cross-Cumberland, it is not close. The Green candidate, Peter Bevan-Baker has 54.8%, and the Liberal trails far behind on 27.6%. I know nothing about Kellys Cross-Cumberland or Bevan-Baker, but I am always intrigued by constituencies where Greens win, given how rare they are.
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The Greens have won 2077 votes in the district they have won (as of current count) That’s 24% of the provincewide total.
Classic small-party strategy under FPTP:
“This election featured a different approach, with Bevan-Baker spending most of his time in his own district of Kellys Cross-Cumberland, and the party focusing its efforts on getting him elected, rather than garnering province-wide support.” (CBC)
Quite a contrast between Green and NDP distribution. The latter maxed out at just over 10% of its provincial vote in its best district, Charlottetown-Lewis Point. Even so, they were not too far off winning there: it is a three-way contest, with the Liberal winning 34.3%, the NDP on 30.7, and the Progressive Conservative on 27%.
Also a “classic” FPTP result, albeit a different kind of classic.
Very similar to New Brunswick. The NDP, with grand plans to win lots of seats boosted by polls, runs a province-wide campaign and tries to attract lots of votes. The Greens try a classic small-party strategy, and focus on a single electorate in order to try and gain a foothold. In the end, NDP ends up with no seats, after doing poorly in all districts, while the Greens end up with a seat.
The NDP needs to learn from this, and they should probably move slower when expanding into new provinces.
PEI voters cast 81,988 votes yesterday. But only 46% of voters — 38,042 — helped elect an MLA. The other 54% of voters — 43,956 — found their votes did not count toward the result.
If every vote had counted, the 41% of Islanders who voted Liberal would have elected 11 MLAs, 41%. The 37% who voted Conservative would have elected 10 MLAs, or 37%. The 11% who voted NDP and the 11% who voted Green would have elected three MLAs each, 11%.
Using the mixed-member system recommended by Norm Carruthers, or the similar systems proposed by the New Brunswick Commission on Legislative Democracy and the Law Commission of Canada, that would likely have meant 16 local MLAs elected from 16 local ridings a bit larger than today, and another 11 MLAs elected on a “top-up” basis by voters whose votes elected no one yesterday.
The result might have been a Liberal-NDP coalition government with 14 MLAs, or a Liberal-Green coalition government with 14 MLAs. Laws passed by such a government would have the support of a true majority of MLAs representing a true majority of voters. PEI would not risk having a one-man or one-party government, such as we see in Ottawa today.
It looks as though MMP may be coming to PEI, though a caution that the plebiscite is non-binding. Turnout was just 36% but unlike in BC in 2005 there was no minimum vote threshold set.
http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/canada/prince-edward-island/mixed-member-proportional-representation-in-plebiscite-1.3840172
Interestingly, the electoral referendum used AV to choose between 5 options: the present FPTP system, FPTP but with the addition of the party leader of any party earning 10% of the vote, AV, MMP, and Dual Member Proportional, a system invented by a graduate student which would give each constituency 2 seats, allocate one seat to the party winning the seat FPTP, and then distributing the second seat in each constituency to ensure proportionality (so it bears some similarity to both the Italian-style regional distribution of seats into constituencies without a list, as well as to best-losers variants of MMP).
Apparently some voters were also upset that STV-PR wasn’t an option as well
For details of the voting, see
http://www.electionspei.ca/plebisciteresults
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