Angry in the Great White North

I just did a bit of number crunching, comparing the distribution votes in the three Quebec ridings that held by-elections yesterday, and the votes in those same ridings in the 2006 election.

I won't bore you with all the details, but these numbers pop out at me.

In 2006, as a percentage of all the votes cast in the riding, the Conservatives won 24% of the vote, the Liberals 17%, the NDP 9%, and the Bloc Quebecois 44%.

In the 2007 by-election, as a percentage of all the votes cast in the riding, the Conservatives won 37% of the vote, the Liberals 14%, the NDP 17%, and the Bloc Quebecois 28%.

Not surprisingly, the Conservatives and the NDP look good -- the percentage increase in the votes translated into a riding win for each. But the share of votes won by the Liberals and the Bloc Quebecois dropped significantly, indeed dramatically for the Bloc Quebecois.

Don't think about the distribution of MPs for a moment. The Liberals dropped by 3% in the votes cast, while the Bloc Quebecois lost 16%, yet each lost exactly one MP. But the numbers do matter with regards to funding. As we know, parties are paid as a function of each vote cast in their favour. That money makes up a large chunk of the party's budget.

When the share of votes cast for the party drops, the money drops too. Imagine if these by-election results were translated across the province of Quebec in an election if one was held soon. The Liberal Party, always short on cash, would take a hit it could ill afford, but the BQ would get slammed.

So for members of the Liberal Party and of the Bloc Quebecois looking at the results of the by-election, they have to be asking themselves whether they could afford to go into an election led by Stephane Dion and Gilles Duceppe.

I don't know that you can extrapolate that much from this limited data (Thomas Mulcair is a bit of an outlier and skews the numbers too heavily away from the Bloc to the NDP, I think), but certainly the numbers are pointing in the wrong direction. Both Stephane Dion and Gilles Duceppe might find themselves being forced to defend against an argument some people might make that as expensive as a leadership campaign would be, it will cost less than the the election results likely to seen by these parties under these leaders.

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