In case you missed it (and I’m sure most people did), Canada had elections yesterday. The liberal party won a plurality of the seats in Parliament, but did not win the 155 needed to maintain control. So Canada will have it’s first minority government in 25 years.
I’m not sure what, if any effect this will have outside Canada. Or even if anyone will notice. But I was watching the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation coverage (on C-SPAN) and noted a couple interesting things.
First, the CBC anchor noted that there were several close races which would go to automatic recounts. I sure hope they have a more orderly recount procedure there than we saw in Florida. No mention of Diebold machinery, however. So that’s another thing their election system has going in its favor.
Second, the pre-election polling–or rather the poll-based projections. We often hear complaints about the polling here, but in this case it was way off. In the days leading up to the election some media outlets speculated that the Conservative Party might win a majority of the seats. At this point during the returns they trail the Liberals by 38 seats. Oops.
From the TV analysis I gather that methodology was at fault here. Apparently, the media outlets took polls which showed Conservatives gaining x% of the vote. So they simply added that percentage across the board to some prior data base and accordingly concluded that the the Conservatives would win x more seats. Obviously votes don’t get neatly distributed across districts (or “ridings” as they’re apparently called up there) so that didn’t work.
Another quirky aspect of watching news from the land up north is bilingualism. I was watching a guy give a victory speech, roughly 80-90% of which was in English. But for some reason he sprinkled two or three French sentences every now and then. Why? I believe he was in Calgary, where English is the norm. Did he think that by throwing in a few lines every now and then, it would help keep the French TV audience glued to their sets? Do their translators need to take a breather from time to time? Odd.