Joe's Politics: Canadian Redistricting - and what it means for the balance of power

Last year, the government changed the formula that allocates House of Commons seats to provinces. The size of the House will increase from 308 to 338 as a result both of this change and last year's census.

The breakdown by province of this increase is as follows:

Ontario gains 15 seats, bringing it to 121
British Columbia gains 6 seats, bringing it to 42
Alberta also gains 6 seats, bringing it to 34
Quebec gains 3 seats, bringing it to 78

The reason none of the other provinces get seats is because they are already over-represented in the House of Commons. I touched on this on a post last year, so I won't go into it further.

Something else people have noticed is that, save Quebec, these are provinces where the Conservatives happened to have done well in last year's election. So it begs the question: how does this change the balance of power?

First, I need to make a caveat here. Elections Canada and the provincial elections agencies are still working on proposals for new boundaries. For the purpose of this exercise, I'm assuming that each party's seat total will increase proportionally to the province-wide total. When boundaries become available, which I expect to be some time next year, I will study them and come up with more precise notional results.

But in the meantime, here's what I estimate would be the makeup of the current House of Commons if seats were allocated based on the new formula (brackets show change from actual makeup):

CON: 186 (+20 - 10 ON, 6 AB, 4 BC)
NDP: 111 (+8 - 3 ON, 3 QC, 2 BC)
LIB: 36 (+2 - ON)
BQ: 4 (±0)
GRN: 1 (±0)

This would increase the Conservative majority over all other parties from 24 to 34. The Conservatives are certainly the big winners when it comes to seats, but that's more a sign that their vote was underrepresented to begin with than actual malice.

The other question I was interested in was how easy it would be for power to shift from the Conservatives elsewhere. This is where we go to our good friend, the Swingometer.

First, let's take a look at the Conservative-NDP swingometers. On the left is the current House of Commons, and on the right is the one using the new seat allocations.

You can see here that it will take a slightly larger swing for the Conservatives to lose their majority, up from 4% to 6.5%. To put this into popular vote context, a 4% swing from the Conservatives to the NDP would give the Tories a 1% lead in the popular vote, assuming no swing to the Liberals. The reason for this increase is simply because of the number of safe seats in Alberta that the Tories would gain, and the NDP don't gain enough in Ontario (the real battleground) to compensate for this quickly enough. That said, they make up for it later on in the Ontario battleground, so it doesn't change the swing required for the NDP to take power from the Conservatives.

We see a very similar story with the Liberals. There are a lot more CON-LIB marginal seats in Ontario, which should (in theory) make it easier for them to take away the Conservatives' majority, but we're seeing a very similar Alberta effect that increases the swing required for that majority to disappear. It also shows how far the Liberals will have to go to regain power, though the new boundaries should neither help nor hinder them in that respect.

When it comes to the Liberals regaining Official Opposition status, this doesn't change things by much, if anything. The swing required will still be around 15.5%.

Latest Projection
Now, to answer the hypothetical "If there were an election tomorrow" question. The result would be as follows under the current seat allocation:

CON: 137 (-29)
NDP: 113 (+10)
LIB: 51 (+17)
BQ: 6 (+2)
GRN: 1 (±0)

And under the new seat allocation: