Redistricting in Canada - The Final Results

Later this month, the Governor General of Canada will sign into law the new riding boundaries for the Canadian Parliament.  This will officially create the 30 new seats in the House of Commons starting in the 2015 General Election.  This comes after both the 2011 Census, which tells us how the population has shifted across the country, as well as a change to the formula on how seats are allocated between the provinces.  But what does this mean for the balance of power in Canadian politics?

Video: I discuss in detail the reasons for the formula change and how it affects the balance of power.

Notional Results

The notional results - what the result would have looked like in 2011 had we been using the 2015 boundaries - keep the Conservatives well into majority government territory.  They would finish with 189 of the 338 seats, well above the 170 seats that are now needed for a majority government.  This results in a net gain of 23 of the 30 new seats being created.

On two fronts, the huge gain in Tory standing as a result of boundary changes is not surprising considering where the new seats are being created.  Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia are all under-represented relative to the rest of the country on a per-capita basis, and so this is where 90% of the new seats are being created.  These, though, were areas where the Conservatives did well in 2011, hence it's natural for them to get most of the new seats.

 

It's more interesting to look at the seat changes on a province-by-province basis.  Bear in mind that all provinces, even those which are not gaining seats as a result of this redistribution, have to look at redrawing the boundaries between ridings to reflect internal population shifts.

Most of the new seats in Ontario are being created in the 905 area around Toronto.  This is typically a battleground area between the Liberals and the Conservatives, though the Conservatives made huge gains there two years ago.  The surprise, though, came in British Columbia, where the NDP have notionally lost a seat despite six new seats being created there.  This is due to most of the new seats being created around Metro Vancouver, in areas like Richmond, Surrey and down into Abbotsford, where the Conservatives did really well.  In particular, seats in Burnaby, which went to the NDP in 2011, are getting an influx of Conservative voters from the former riding of North Vancouver, leading one of them to become notionally Conservative.

Balance of Power

Last year, when the provincial seat allocations were announced, I used the Swingometer, a BBC invention, to look at how the seat changes impact how easy it is for one party or another to gain or retain power.  The conclusion I came to at the time was that the new seats make it slightly easier for the Conservatives to hold onto their majority government, but there's negligible change for either the NDP or the Liberals to form a government of their own.

Now that the actual boundaries have been drawn, there's practically no change to the overall findings.  The size of the extra buffers are slightly different from by back-of-the-envelope calculations last year, but the headline finding is the same.  The Conservatives have an extra 1.4% buffer against the NDP and 2.1% buffer against the Liberals when it comes to protecting their majority, but the swing required for them to lost power altogether changes very negligibly.

 How to read: if 4 out of 100 voters change from Conservatives to NDP, the Conservatives would have lost their majority government prior to the seat redistribution.

Looking forward to 2015

If there were a general election today, the Liberals would be looking at a minority government.  This is due to larger-than-average swings in Quebec (at the expense of the NDP) and the large number of battleground seats in Ontario (taken from the Tories).  In fact, the swing in the battleground province of Ontario is much smaller relative to the rest of the country, and if the Liberals were able to achieve a similar swing there to the rest of the country, they could find themselves within striking distance of a majority government.