Some Political Numbers

OK, I know, I haven't written on here in a while. I am very sorry, but I have been extremely busy, what with school, swimming, and other events.

There have been some interesting developments in Canadian politics lately. I'm sure most of you have heard about the possibility of a coalition government in Canada. And some of you may have heard about what Jim Flaherty said a couple days ago in response to this new idea. Pretty much what he said was: This is the government that Canada has voted for. Well, I'm sorry Mr. Flaherty, but you're wrong. Over half of Canada didn't vote for Stephen Harper and his government, and I've got the numbers to prove it. I will talk more about the coalition government idea and what it means later, but first, here is some proof that Canada doesn't want the Conservatives in government.

Well, because of Canada's lack of proportional representation in the way we choose our MPs, there are some unfair things going on. Here is a short table of the parties in the last election, the seats they got, the percent of the vote they got and the number of votes they got. Canada's population is 33,442,000, but only 13,832,972 votes were actually cast. This is because of the amount of eligible voters, and the amount of people who actually chose to vote.

Party	Seats	% of Vote	# of Votes
Conservative	143	37.63	5 205 347.3636
Liberal	77	26.24	3 629 771.8528
Bloc Quebecois	49	9.97	1 379 147.3084
NDP	37	18.2	2 517 600.904
Independent	2	0.65	89 914.318
Green	0	6.8	940 642.096
Other	0	0.51	70 548.1572

So that means that 8 627 624.6364 votes in the last election were against the Conservative's 5 205 347.3636 votes. So Mr. Flaherty, not all of Canada voted for the Conservatives in the last election.

Something interesting you may notice is that there were 2 Independent seats voted for in the last election, but there were only eighty-nine thousand, nine hundred fourteen votes. But there were no seats for the Green party, even though they had many more votes than the Independents, nine hundred forty thousand six hundred forty-two votes. Same thing with the Bloc Quebecois and the Green party. The Bloc Quebecois only had 3 percent more of the vote than the Green, but the Bloc had 49 seats and the Green none.

As I said, I will definitely write more about the possibility of the coalition government, but right now, there are some numbers to try and wrap your head around.