Liberals Prove Kings of Tight Ridings. And More Election Crunching

“Political sclerosis.” That’s what Andy Yan sees when he looks at voting patterns across the country. He finds a clotting within Canada’s body politic among clusters of ridings and the rifts between them — the left coast, the Conservative sweep across central Canada, the reemergence of the Bloc Québécois.

“It’s a stiffening of boundaries in how key regions are voting,” said Yan, an expert in data crunching and the director of Simon Fraser University’s City Program.

Yan cleaned up the raw data from Monday night (please note, these are the preliminary numbers), and together we sifted. Here are some ways to measure the night’s winners and losers, including the party whose candidates survived the most close calls. Answer?

The Liberals won the most races by just two per cent or less.

There are 15 ridings where Liberals won with that super-slim margin.

Here are the 10 closest races.

Most seats lost? The Liberals.

The Liberals lost 38 seats they held in 2015.

Next are the NDP, who lost 23 of their seats.

Most seats wrested from other parties? The Conservatives, followed by the Bloc Québécois.

The Conservatives nabbed 27 seats, from the Liberals and the NDP, while the Bloc nabbed 22 seats.

Here are all the ridings that changed hands.

The province with the strongest NDP base? That would be B.C., where they won 11 out of their 24 seats.

In the table above, you can see that they lost the most seats in Quebec, 15.

The most decisive victories? The Conservatives. In fact theirs were the only candidates who won with a lead of more than 50 per cent of votes.

In contrast to the closest ridings, we decided to look at ridings where there was essentially no contest, which we defined as ridings where victorious candidates had a 50 per cent lead. There were 34 of these ridings.

The Conservatives crushed the competition, winning all 34 of those ridings, the majority of which were in Alberta.

The least proportionally represented? The Greens, who had half the votes the NDP did, but won just three seats compared to the New Democrats’ 24.

Here are the 10 ridings where the Greens did the best.

Outside of B.C., you can see the strength of an Atlantic Green vote.

The losers at meeting pollster’s expectations? That would be the People’s Party. Expected to win three per cent of the popular vote, they only received half that.

The new party ran 315 candidates this election, almost one in every riding. But its ambitious play to run on libertarian values and nativist populism — attracting bigots and white supremacists — fell flat.

Party founder Maxime Bernier performed the best out of all candidates, with 28 per cent of the vote in his riding of Beauce. But he lost to Conservative candidate Richard Lehoux, a former dairy farmer, who won the seat with 39 per cent.

Here are the 10 ridings where the party performed the strongest.

Overall, the party received 1.6 per cent of the popular vote. Despite this dismal showing — worse than polling predictions of three per cent — Bernier said his party would only “continue to grow in the coming months and years.”

The winner at gaining seats out of proportion to votes received? The Conservatives, who landed 82 per cent of the seats in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, but only 60 per cent of the votes.

Yes, these provinces are home to decisive Conservative victories, but they aren’t devoid of progressives, despite what some pundits might say.

Have a look yourself.

Alberta

Saskatchewan

Manitoba

What about democracy? By one measure, we slipped.

This election only 65.95 per cent of the electorate showed up. That’s a drop from 68.5 per cent in 2015.

Here’s how we did historically.

Is there any cure for political sclerosis? The chances of that are less easy to measure. What remains to be seen, said Yan, “is how a minority government may or may not unify our country.”