View of the West as a Liberal wasteland mostly mythic
Close look at the numbers shows Conservative heartland hardly monolithic
Murdoch Davis, The Edmonton Journal
Published: Monday, December 05, 2005
In much pre-election commentary, the West is viewed as a bastion of conservatism or, as it's often put, a "Liberal wasteland."
This is an inaccurate portrayal of a large and complex part of the country. It results from the distortions built into our electoral system, in which support from only about 40 per cent of voters makes for landslides. News media, generally terrible at capturing nuance, amplify the distortions.
The same phenomenon in the U.S. has led to fixation on "blue states and red states" since the last presidential election. Rarely did Republicans or Democrats win a state by more than 55 per cent to 45, and many margins were closer to 52 to 48, but it gets portrayed as if the entire state populations are sharply different.
In fact, had one voter in 10 chosen differently, the outcome would have been reversed. Or even one in 20.
In our last federal election, Conservatives won 68 of the West's 92 seats. But in three of the four provinces, the party's voter support ranged from 36.3 per cent to 41.8 per cent -- hardly an indication of dominant thinking.
The West's political image in the East is shaped most by Alberta. Conservatives won 61.6 per cent of its votes in 2004, a crushing level of support in our system. Only the personal following of two MPs and pockets of Liberal support in Edmonton stopped the Tories from sweeping Alberta's 28 seats.
Still, Liberals got 22-per-cent voter support in Alberta, New Democrats 9.5 and Greens 6.1. So four in 10 of the province's voters seemed comfortable with a centre-left vote, spurning the province's alleged conservative orthodoxy. Depictions of Alberta as a redneck, right-wing homeland is an unfair interpretation of the thinking behind those Tory votes. For starters, Alberta conservatism has informed most new public policy discussion in Canada for more than a decade. But depicting it as a monolith is especially a dismissal of the views of a very large minority in the province.
The West shouldn't be viewed politically as one region. All four provinces differ, and they have regions within them that differ again. Like the rest of Canada, centre-left votes are concentrated in bigger cities, with more conservative leanings in outer suburbs, small urban centres and rural areas.
The best illustration of how the electoral system and lack of nuance shape the view of the West is in B.C. There, Tories won 22 of 36 seats. But they won the votes of barely more than a third of the voters, 36.3 per cent. Liberals won eight seats with 28.6 per cent and the NDP five seats with 26.5 per cent. Toss Greens into that salad, at 6.4 per cent, and B.C. was clearly dominated by centre-left votes.
Saskatchewan's results actually distorted voting intentions more than did Alberta's. Tories won all but one of 14 seats, with 41.8 per cent of votes. Liberals got 27.2 per cent but only one seat, that of Finance Minister Ralph Goodale. NDP got no seats from 23.4 per cent of votes.
In Manitoba, Tories got 39.1 per cent of votes and seven of 14 seats. New Democrats got four with 23.5 per cent of votes, concentrated in sectors of Winnipeg. Liberals won three seats with 33.2 per cent of votes.
Leave out the Alberta dominance, and the Tories won 42 seats to only 12 for the Liberals, although their vote totals were only 223,000 apart -- a difference of only about 10 per cent of the votes cast for the two parties.
Voting patterns in those three provinces look quite similar to those in the country outside Quebec. National support levels of the Tories and NDP -- 29.6 per cent and 15.7 per cent, respectively -- are distorted by their failure in Quebec, where they got 8.8 per cent and 4.6 per cent, respectively.
The West's real political diversity is shown in provincial elections. Alberta's 35-year Tory rule is the exception. And even there, the previous dynasty was Social Credit's peculiar combination of conservatism and collectivism, and more lately the Liberals and NDP have generally split close to half of the province's votes.
While Ontario has shocked itself and the country by electing an NDP government exactly once more than has Alberta, the other three western provinces have done so regularly. Saskatchewan and Manitoba have NDP governments; both are in their second term.
Manitoba's NDP Premier Gary Doer gets such high approval ratings that the province's Tory party, the official opposition, has just overthrown its leader even though no obvious winning alternative is ready.
All of this shows that, even in the West, the fight for electoral success is usually in the big middle.
