11:30pm: SSP’s home riding of Edmonton-Strathcona is held by the NDP…the only non-Tory seat in Alberta.
11:21pm: Almost two hours after polls closed in Quebec, the Bloc finally has its first seat, Haute-Gaspesie-La Mitis-Matane-Matapedia. (jeffmd here – I think I figured out why I like Quebec riding names, it lets me pretend I stil know French!).
11:13pm: Harper should be grateful for ridings like Bramlea-Gore-Malton (37 Con-32 NDP-27 Lib) and Scaborough Centre, 36 Con-31 NDP-31 Lib. Notably, the Tory vote actually dropped 1% from 2008…but the NDP/Lib split hands the seat to Harper.
10:54pm: The decimation of the Grits and Bloc is stunning. Libs elected/leading in 31 ridings; the Bloc is leading in only 4.
10:51pm: CBC is now calling a Conservative majority for Stephen Harper.
10:50pm: Moving further west, Green Party leader Elizabeth May is out to an early lead in Saanich–Gulf Islands over Tory incumbent Gary Lunn.
10:45pm: Tories now leading or elected in 165 ridings. Tory majority looking more and more likely.
10:37pm: Tories are leading or elected in 158 ridings now; 155 is the magic number for a majority.
10:34pm: In my home riding of Edmonton-Strathcona, incumbent NDPer Linda Duncan is leading by a 53-40 margin, but a lot of votes are outstanding.
10:33pm: The power of vote splitting! Brampton/Mississauga could go from 7/8 Liberal to an 8-0 Tory shutout.
10:29pm: Tories are now leading in 150 ridings; NDs in 104. Liberals in just 32, BQ 4.
10:28pm: Hah — in just Toronto alone, the Tories are leading in 9 of 23 Toronto seats, up from 0.
10:22pm: Michael Ignatieff is losing to a Tory, and Gilles Duceppe is losing to a New Democrat. Interesting times.
10:18pm: Things are just moving so fast right now, but we’re really on the cusp of a Conservative majority government with an extremely robust NDP opposition.
10:12pm: CBC has projected that the NDP will overtake the Liberals as the official opposition in Parliament. Harper has a government, but we’re still unsure whether or not he’s won a majority.
10:07pm: Checking in on the party leaders, Grit leader Michael Ignatieff is leading by 1 vote in his Toronto riding of Etobicoke–Lakeshore. A few ridings east, in Toronto–Danforth, NDP leader Jack Layton has 64%. With just one poll reporting in Laurier–Sainte-Marie, Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe finds himself in 3rd! Nothing yet from Harper’s Calgary Southwest or Green Party would-be Elizabeth May’s Saanich–Gulf Islands.
10:00pm: Results in from the Atlantic provinces:
- PEI: steady at 3 Lib, 1 Con.
- Newfoundland and Labrador: Contrary to earlier reports, the Tories didn’t get shut out here. 4 Lib, 2 NDP, 1 Con. Net shift of two from the Grits to NDP. Libs do hold Avalon, though.
- Nova Scotia: 4 Con, 3 NDP, 2 Lib, with two more Libs leading. Would be a shift of one from the Libs to the NDP.
- New Brunswick: 7 Con, 1 Lib, 1 NDP, with one more Tory leading. Would be a net shift of two Lib>Con.
Polls are finally closing in all of Canada at 10pm Eastern; we’ll soon get our first verified election results at that point. Hang Hold on to your butts!
RESULTS: Elections Canada | CBC | Globe & Mail
any “surprises” we’ve heard of so far based on twitter?
Or is it shaping up like everyone thought?
http://www.cbc.ca/video/#/News…
I think this is a good idea, hopefully some americans can steal it for 2012. I like how the signs says “Surprise! We are voting!”
But the line is, Hold onto your butts
Radio-Canada (French language TV) is actively broadcasting results coming in from Quebec (and Ontario), as well as from the Atlantic.
They are flashing riding results too fast for me to write them down, and they are all very early (like 1 or 2 polls per riding).
We’ll have official results accessible on the web in five minutes, so the heavy petting can now begin.
conservatives win most seats, NDP probably will become main opposition
CON 134
NDP 62
LIB 27
BQ 5
It looks like NDP and Liberals are just splitting the votes and letting the Conservatives win the seats. This is the problem with First Past the Post. NDP and Liberals both have about 30% with Conservatives having about 38%.
Really, guys? You make an idiotic law that makes all results start coming in at once, and you don’t even prepare for the possibility that that might cause things to slow down and the site to overload? Unbelievable. That law does a great job of making Canadian elections less enjoyable.
Liberals narrowly hung on.
I have a problem with how they’re covering this election. They’re talking about 6 out of 217 boxes and saying breathlessly that someone is winning or losing with only hundreds of votes counted.
Even Iggy’s riding (Ignatieff) is looking close right now, I know it’s early but ugh.
There are about 100 ridings where people are leading by 50 or less votes. Probably a result of almost no votes being reported yet. Also, both Ignatieff and Duceppe are losing in their ridings, but really almost nothing reporting.
says a conservative majority is probable. the NDP has picked up enough to kill the liberals, but the conservatives are holding their 2008 vote.
Bloc collapsing in Quebec.
If Harper manages to pull out a majority because the NDP and Libs split the vote, is it time for and NDP-Lib merger?
now projecting that NDP will be the official opposition.
Not really surprising, but predictions of a Lib Dem-like collapse were obviously false.
Yay! We’re about to be irrelevant in a parliamentary system and give the Conservative a majority government. They’re talking about a learning curve for MPs. They get to sit there and do nothing for the next 5 year.
I’m happy to have a two-party system. Seriously, if the Liberals and NDP combined to form some kind of center-left party, they probably win tonight.
It looks like typical turnout in a riding is somewhere between 40K and 50K.
It’s looking like Iggy could lose.
and I’m really confused about the number of calls the CBC has made on seemingly flimsy evidence. The typical riding has a population of about 100k. Most of the seats I’ve seen scrolling across the bottom with called check-marks only have vote totals in the 5k to 9k range. I was under the impression that there’s no exit polls, so what are they going on? What’s turnout out like?
in America, you can split a CD down by counties and see which areas are left to report and how a candidate is doing vis a vis their baseline. In Canada, you just have to wait and see. And if I were Iggy I would really want to fast forward time right now.
Looks likely given where the late results trended the last few times. If not strong minority.
with 10% in he’s “only” trailing 47-33
NDP leading Tory 53-40 in Ed-Strath with 6% reporting
That the conservatives will be just a few seats over or under a majority. Very, very narrow. So my question to people who know Canada better than I do is: how disciplined to party members tend to be in Canada? Is it like the US where people frequently vote against their party, or like the UK where crossing party lines is extremely rare?
for the center left here. One party has won a historic victory – and in the process enabled a conservative majority with 40% of the vote.
Let me just say, as an American who up until recently paid very little attention to foreign elections, it’s mildly disorienting to hear the term “Liberal” being used to refer to a party without it being meant as an insult.
that my Canadian national but American resident father, who only voted once in his life, can no longer joke about voting NDP in 1979.
Damn, It was a good joke too.
That greens are scourge to left leaning politics in every FPTP country in the Western World.
But that’s one way of getting rid of him.
So…I figured the CBC probably knew what it was doing with all of this early vote counting. Then, I checked on one of the ridings I’ve followed pretty closely for awhile because I liked the incumbent so much. So, could someone please explain to me how the CBC knows that Libby Davies is likely to go down in Vancouver East–what should be one of the safest-of-safe NDP ridings?
Duc is losing 46-33, Iggy’s only losing 40-35, although Iggy’s riding is reporting faster (27% vs. 18%)
does SSP turn into a pumpkin at midnight or the middle of the night?
a Conservative majority.
per CBC, huge news itself
Damn.
Thanks to FTTP, a leftist country is destined to be governed by rightists for a while.
Vancouver Quadra (home of the University of BC) is going Lib, as is somewhat usual. Why do students not vote NDP in a greater percentage?
Duc is trailing 47-34 with 27% in. Iggy is trailing 40-34 with 36% in. I guess Iggy could pull it out in theory, but I don’t think people come back from deficits like Duceppe’s unless they have a huge ace up their sleeve (like how Jack Conway erased a huge Dan Mongiardo lead with Louisville).
Of the 19 elected Libs (according to the CBC) 58% are from Atlantic Canada.
This is only the 6th or 7th time the Conservatives have held a majority going back to the end of the 19th century.
Oh, Fuddle-Duddle.
And two of those are leads in the 100-150 vote range. Haute-Gaspesie-La Mitis-Matane-Matapedia is the only riding that’s looking safe for them right now.
Ahuntsic: 79 votes over NDP (30% reporting)
Montmorency-Charlevoix-Haute-Cote-Nord (takes deep breath): 88 votes over NDP (33% reporting)
Haute-Gaspesie-La Mitis-Matane-Matapedia (takes another deep breath): 35-25 over Lib (44% reporting)
It’s conceivable that the Bloc will only have one seat left!
BQ down to one, now. Will they be totally wiped out?
a)I’m hammered right now on Molson; as to why, once upon a time I interned for the Liberals in Quebec.
b)I think that everyone in LPC worth their salt would be wise to be placing calls to a one Frank McKenna right now, begging him to run this thing. He’s just about the only guy I can think of who can unite every wing of the party behind him; he’s bilingual, and that “Not A Leader” shit the Cons would get laughed at by most of the country.
c)Perversely, I think Liberal leadership is more attractive now; you have four years to rebuild the thing. Lets not forget that the NDP danced on the Liberals grave in ’88 only to watch them kick the living crap out of everyone in 1993.
in any national election as the Bloc and the Liberals have in this election. This sort of collapse is on the order on Whigs in the mid 19th Century or the British Liberals in the 1920s. With results like this neither the Bloc and the Liberals might not exist in the next go round and Canada might have a true two party system
his trailing margin is getting larger and larger. He’s down 48-34 with 48% reporting. He’s done.
Elizabeth May is leading 49-34 in Saanich-Gulf Islands. 25/245 in, but that’s a pretty significant lead. Interestingly that they did so well there even though their national vote is down.
Linda Duncan’s been declared elected.
what booths are still out in Etobicoke-Lakeshore, that might hold the key to Ignatieff’s fate.
1984: 211 seats (40 Lib, 30 NDP)
1958: 208 seats (48 Lib, 8 CCF)
1988: 169 seats (83 Lib, 43 NDP)
2008: 143 seats (77 Lib, 49 BQ, 37 NDP)
Probably in between 1988 and 2008.
He is going very, very heavy on the centrist/moderate themes. Some parts of this speech sound like they’re pulled straight from a David Broder column. I’m not sure if this is new, but he seems to be essentially accepting that the NDP is the new party of the left and trying to position himself as the centrist alternative to the Conservatives and the NDP.
they’re leading in Ahuntsic again by 16 votes. I guess 4 seats is less embarrassing than 1, huh?
projecting Gilles Duceppe has been defeated.
big loss too
Duceppe’s been defeated. 😀
I couldn’t help it, but the first thought in my mind watching the Olivia Chow’s speech at the NDP and with everyone celebrating, was that they’re celebrating irrelevancy (at least in the short term).
Tell me, what can the official opposition do in a majority government?
Ignatieff put me to sleep. He’s too bland. Sounds like a nice guy but “charismatic”, or a “transcendent leader”? Not at all. Zzzzzz.
just laughed when the CBC reported noted that if Elizabeth May gets elected, the Greens will have 1/4th of the seats the BQ has right now.
Heh, he sounded almost open to the idea of a NDP-Lib merger of some kind. Amusing, since he used to be in the NDP.
He’s walking in, looks like a wake.
if these guys can’t get a lead and keep it, I don’t know what to say. the SSP-approved phrase “sadsack” comes to mind.
its taking forever for Duceppe to get to the podium….
Sean Casey, the new Liberal MP for Charlottetown (PEI), looks to be one of the few new Liberal MPs this time around. He’ll do a good job.
in the one riding that they held, they only beat the NDP by 117 votes.
just announced he is stepping down as leader of the BQ.
leading 47-36 with 35% in.
Is this the first time a majority government has been elected with almost no support in Quebec? Even in the strong BQ years in the 90s the Liberals still were able to win at least 19 seats in la Belle Province to pad their national majority.
The Tories have 6 seats there, so Quebec will be an afterthought again in their caucus. The NDP has a bit of a balancing act; they must balance their Quebec-heavy caucus with their traditional base of blue-collar workers in Sudbury, Windsor, and Hamilton, and other areas of the country where Quebecers aren’t exactly popular.
they just grabbed a 9-vote lead in Bas-Richelieu-Nicolet-Becancour
May has win according to the CBC. And she’s knocked off a Tory minister also.
Just found one seat in Toronto (Etobicoke Centre) where the Grit is one vote ahead of the Tory. I hope the Grit wins, so people will try to have to pronounce his name (Borys Wrzesnewskyj) for 5 years. The Tory’s name is Ted Opitz–too easy.