Canadians shunned the polls during their general election with the lowest voter turnout on record, even as a global financial crisis threatened to plunge the nation’s economy into recession.
Some 59.1 percent of eligible Canadian voters went to the polls Tuesday, breaking the previous record low turnout of just under 61 percent in 2004, according to preliminary results from Elections Canada released on Wednesday.
“There was either general apathy toward the candidates or a degree of voter fatigue as this was the third Canadian election since 2004,” said Antonia Maioni, director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada.
Most fascinating to me as a dual USA-Canada citizen is the extent to which the Liberals have become the party of large English-speaking cities. Nearly all the Liberal MPs now come from west-island Montreal (the English suburbs), Toronto, and to some extent Vancouver.
Apart from the perpetually-on-the-dole Atlantic provinces, where the Grits garnered 14 seats, outside the aforementioned cities they only picked up one seat in Yukon, one on Vancouver Island, one in Saskatchewan, and two in Ottawa.
Canadian politics are somewhat to the left of those in the US. The Tories (Conservatives) share many political beliefs with McCain and lack the evangelical wing of the party found in the US.
Canadian Liberals are generally in a camp with Carter, Mondale, and Dukakis. They, like American Democrats, are a brokerage party, meaning they are primarily focused on power (not principle) and cobble together diverse special in an effort to attain that power.
The New Democrats are an avowedly socialist party typically capturing 15 to 20% of the vote, but concentrated enough that they usually pick up 5 to 10% of the seats in Parliament.
The Bloc Quebecois is a slightly right-of-centre nationalist party in Quebec, advocating separation (or at least special status) for Quebec, but not as avidly as they once did.
Both the Bloc and the Tories share a virulent distaste for Liberal power politics. Many Bloc members were Tories back in the Mulroney era, and PM Harper can probably count on the Bloc to vote with his Tories during yet another minority government.