World Politics and Elections 2025

[dubsartur]

Liberal leader and PM-without-a-seat Mark Carney has called an election with the Liberals and Tories approximately tied in voter intent.  He already implemented one major Tory policy by ending the individual carbon tax after the April rebate payment.  Trump's threat to annex Canada caused about 10% of voters to shift their intent from NDP to Liberal, and 10% of voters to shift their intent from Conservative to Liberal.  The election is the earliest possible, Monday 28 April (roughly five weeks away).

On the weird Internet communities front, Carney is really into spicy autocomplete despite being a banker where precision and factuality matter.

Something called the Toronto Star was one of the papers which had an excitable headline about the Kelowna residential school in 2021.  Its only read by people in TO and other journalists (although back when I read newspapers I wonder how many journalists read even one paper a day given some of the things they forgot and some of the patterns they failed to recognize) https://www.thestar.com/

Doug Saunders once published the book Maximum Canada (meaning population 100 million https://www.dougsaunders.net/about/maximum-canada/ ).  After an American pundit talked about 1 billion Americans, Pierre Polievre is complaining about the Century Initiative, a lobby group with Saunders' original goal https://www.centuryinitiative.ca/  Usually its Canadians who adopt bad old idea that the Americans are abandoning.

[Jubal]

According to 338 Canada, the "neck and neck in the polls" thing may be a little misleading insofar as the Liberals probably hold a structural advantage in seat numbers: a dead heat in the polls on polling day probably equates to a Liberal win in seats terms. The Conservatives conversely have a much more solid base in their rural ridings but in a sense "stack" too many votes there so the distribution is less efficient. So at present from a career perspective many Conservative MPs have better job security but the Liberals are more likely to form governments.


Over here in Europe, the Portugese have set their general election date for 18 May, coinciding with the first round of the Polish presidential election. In France, François Bayrou's government holds on to existence by the skin of its teeth, plagued by internal arguments, and in Germany and Austria new centrist coalitions are completing negotiations (Germany) or starting governing (Austria). None of them feel very optimistic - it does feel like, with one or two exceptions, governing parties have been facing very bad headwinds for most of the last 10-15 years such that the political penalty for being in government is becoming very tricky to deal with. There's always some incumbency penalty, but my gut feeling is that it's dangerously large right now.

[dubsartur]

The other problem in Canada is that BC and Alberta are underrepresented in parliament. Quebec and the maritime provinces have a number of special favours written in to the rules for the size of parliament and the western provinces were not good negotiators last time it came up.

This would not be such an issue if JT had fulfilled his promise to replace First Past the Post, because then winning 60% of votes in a riding would be 50% better than 40% of votes, and not "exactly the same result."

[Jubal]

The other problem in Canada is that BC and Alberta are underrepresented in parliament.

How many more seats should the west have, out of interest?

[dubsartur]

The other problem in Canada is that BC and Alberta are underrepresented in parliament.

How many more seats should the west have, out of interest?

That is a technical question and I don't have a reference offhand.  Its also complicated because parliament will expand from 338 to 343 seats after this election. 

Wikipedia gives population of Canada 41.5 million Q1 2025
population of BC 5,722,318 in Q1 2025
population of Alberta 4,960,097 in Q1 2025 (obviously these are all estimates)

So BC and Alberta have 25.8% of the population of Canada, and would have got 87 MPs under representation by population.  They actually had 80.

This site seems pretty reliable although I don't know where the figure 339 comes from https://businesscouncilab.com/insights-category/analysis/why-alberta-continues-to-be-under-represented-in-ottawa/ Note that the number of electors per MP varies by a factor of 3:1 or 3:2 if you exclude tiny Prince Edward Island (somewhat smaller and much less populated than Crete).

[Jubal]

The UK likewise has some particular carve-outs for island areas (Orkney and Shetland being consistently the least populated seat).

[Jubal]

Canada has voted!

The Liberals did a little less well, and the Conservatives a little better, than the last few weeks of polls suggested, but the result is still a situation where the Liberals are clearly remaining in government (an enormous turnaround from the start of the year). And the Conservatives losing Polievre's seat feels pretty stark as a symbolic rejection which will make the defeat feel sharper narratively than it really is numerically.

Sucks to be the NDP though. I think this was a situation where there really may have been no right answer for them.

On another note - it's interesting to me that the Conservatives feel like they're more competitive in some city centre seats, and the Liberals & NDP in some big rural seats, than would be the case in much of the UK or US. I may be wrong but the maps I've been nosing through make that divide look a bit less sharp than elsewhere.

[dubsartur]

Rural seats in Canada are traditionally contested between the NDP and the Conservatives (or their offshoots such as Reform). A third of the population of Canada lives in three metropolitan areas so its hard for the big parties (especially the party of the credentialed professional class) to represent the rest of the country.

A lot of first- and second-generation immigrants are obviously very conservative (and because of Canada's discriminatory labour market, first-generation immigrants tend to be in jobs that don't require academic and pseudoacademic credentials like construction trades, driving, or real estate rather than engineering, teaching, or accounting).

The Green Party of Canada appears to have lost one of its two seats, and the remaining MP is age 71.

[Jubal]

Yes, that aspect of the NDP reminds me a bit of Britain's Liberal Democrats in some ways - obviously the Liberals and Liberal Democrats are sister parties, but in terms of electorate, the NDP role of being the left-of-centre party in outlying rural areas is definitely a Lib Dem thing in the UK (though combined with being a surburban centrist party more in the Liberal mould, whereas Labour is largely a party of urban and industrial areas).

But it is interesting to me as well that in Canada, Conservative regions have Conservative cities - Edmonton and Calgary are mostly returning Conservative MPs - rather than the situation where Conservative regions tend to be those with smaller cities and more fully rural populations. To take my own very Conservative part of the UK, it would still be almost unthinkable for our Conservatives to win every seat in, say, Cambridgeshire or Norfolk, because the city of Cambridge or the very urban university seat of Norwich South are both completely outside their reach. The largest city in the UK in which the Conservatives are genuinely competitive in every parliamentary seat in the city is probably Milton Keynes, which is a fraction of the size of Calgary.

[dubsartur]

One thing that differentiates the Conservative Party of Canada from their international equivalents is that they are not the party of racism or xenophobia. There are elements of the Conservative coalition that want to be, spurred by American and Americanized propaganda over social media, but Barack Obama would have been satisfied as a Tory backbencher if he had grown up in Toronto instead of Chicago.

In addition, the rules for creating ridings in Canada ensure that they are diverse (often lumping parts of smaller cities with larger rural areas).

Edit: example story https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/prince-george-kamloops-riding-size-1.7510314

[Jubal]

rules for creating ridings in Canada ensure that they are diverse (often lumping parts of smaller cities with larger rural areas)

Interesting, almost the opposite of rules in many other places. In the UK a general rule is to try and stick to council boundaries where possible etc and if a city isn't quite big enough for two seats, it will sometimes get "inner" and "outer" (York) or one relatively unpacked seat and one very urban one (Norwich). There's some semi-rural sprawling seats but those are mostly "well heeled rural" - essentially a wide commuter belt seat, like South Cambridgeshire, which doesn't have a lot of "rural issues" type stuff on the agenda compared to, say, Mid Norfolk, because the electorate & economy is more built around Cambridge commuters.

[dubsartur]

At current count, the winning candidate in one riding (Terrebonne, QC) is ahead by one (1) vote.  Another thing that would not matter with a better electoral system than first past the post!

I would like to know where "twelve seats for official party status" is defined.  Currently three parties have it, down from four in the last election (out of five parties with seats).

[Jubal]

I would like to know where "twelve seats for official party status" is defined.

A quick google suggests "The Parliament of Canada Act" and "the By-laws of the Board of Internal Economy" - having just looked up the text of the act, there's notes in sections 50, 62, and 62.3 that pertain to 12 member parties. S50 refers to rights to appoint Privy Councillors, S62 and S62.3 are about additional remuneration for party leaders. So I guess any procedural benefits to party status are in the By-laws. It feels like amending to "12 members or at least five percent of the national vote at the last election" would be a very reasonable thing for the NDP to ask for to reclaim party status, given they're going to presumably be propping the Liberals up on some stuff.