At this point, I'm going to have to take issue with Allan's assertion that the NDP and Liberals are close enough in policy, as parties, to start stepping aside so as not to compete with each other against the Conservatives. This is more or less dead in the water with the withdrawal of Capain Coaliton from the leadership race, but I'd like to discuss it anyway.
This may be a surprise to Allan, but the Liberals and the NDP are different parties with different policies, and therefore, in the minds of many Canadians (myself included) are not equally suited to run the country. On issues like carbon tax, post-secondary funding, corporate taxation, and peacekeeping, there are huge difference between the NDP and Liberal positions. Most of the time, the Liberals do a way better job of expressing the Canadian opinion on these issues, which is why they keep doing well in elections, while the NDP changes their policies quickly without much apparent expert consultation, which is why they come off as craven and opportunistic.
Now, let's examine Allan's thesis in a little more detail - namely, that the Liberals could benefit electorally from such a truce. Let's assume that the Liberals and the NDP agreed not to field candidates in the same ridings. I'd like to consider one particular set of ridings in this post: ridings with NDP/Liberal competition which the Liberals would have to give up under this proposed system - that is, ridings where the NDP won, but the Liberals came in second. In the most recent election, the following ridings fell into this category:
- Vancouver East
- Vancouver Kingsway
- Churchill
- Thunder Bay-Rainy River
- Thunder Bay-Superior North
- Timmins-James Bay
- Algoma-Manitoulin-Kapuskasing
- Nickel Belt
- Ottawa Centre
- Hamilton East-Stony Creek
- Toronto-Danforth
- Trinity-Spadina
- Outremont
- St John's East
- Acadie-Bathurst
- Halifax
Basically, any such deal would require the Liberals to give up on big chunks of the urban centres of Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, and Halifax. Not only are urban areas historically very supportive of the Liberal Party - and here the Liberals would be giving up many ridings in such areas - but they are also essential to party fundraising efforts (as they trend way wealthier than their surroundings on average) and it is difficult to see the Liberals fundraising effectively in ridings where they have made a conscious decision not to run a candidate. (This ignores the huge loss of the $1.95 per vote in the ridings the Liberals would be giving up, and there also tend to be more voters in urban ridings. Vancouver-Kingsway, Halifax, Outremont, four ridings in Northern Ontario, Toronto Danforth, and Ottawa all recorded more than 10,000 Liberal votes. Trinity-Spadina recorded more than 20,000. Right there, we have something like a quarter million dollars.)
Moreover, the list above includes sixteen ridings - almost half the NDP total - while there are only thirteen ridings - less than a fifth the Liberal total - where the opposite situation holds. Any such hands-off deal would free up substantial resources for the NDP while delivering far less benefit to the Liberals as they fight to keep their stronghold ridings.
In a bit of sloppy analysis almost worthy of this blog, the Ottawa Citizen tried to determine the electoral prospects of such a coalition. The article relies on an Ekos poll from shortly before the last election which contains the following result:
The article concludes that, even if everyone voted for their second choices, the Liberals would only pick up five seats and the NDP one; this would still leave the Conservatives in power. Moreover, as the idea of a coalition has driven voters to the Conservatives in swarms (those links point to three different polls from Friday pegging the Conservatives at 44%, 45%, and 46%), so even these pessimistic results are likely a huge overestimate of the efficacy of the coalition.Only about half of decided voters who intended to vote Liberal said they would make the NDP their second choice, the poll showed. Similarly, about the same share of NDP voters would cast a Liberal vote without a New Democrat on the ballot.
Some voters from each party would vote for the Greens or the Bloc Quebecois in Quebec, and some would vote Conservative.
As much as Allan is motivated by his distaste for the Conservative government, the fact remains that, unless the Liberals are willing to fight for every seat, they're never going to form government.
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