Quote:
Originally Posted by Ford Prefect
That was once true, but it's no longer the case. In the Oct. election the Liberals won 32 out of 42 seats in Toronto, which is 76% of the Toronto seats. And they only won an additional 6 seats in all of the rest of Ontario.
Take the Toronto seats out of the equation and the Liberals were elected to 45 of the remaining 266 seats in Canada, which is only 17% of those seats. So in reality they represent 17% of the constituencies in Canada outside of Toronto.
As for the west, the Liberals won 8 seats in total, including the territories, which is 8.5% of the 95 seats available in the west.
They won 17 out of 32 seats in Atlantic Canada, which is not a resounding mandate.
And they won 14 of 75 seats in Quebec, which amounts to 18% of the seats in Quebec.
Please explain how a party that only has one power base in Canada, Toronto, is national party.
So in effect this is a coalition of Toronto, Quebec separatists and a left wing rump party that will never earn enough voter support to have any legitimate power on its own. Not only are the Liberals NOT a national party, this whole coalition cannot pretend to be a national party when it consists of two regional parties, the Toronto Liberals and the Bloc, plus a fringe group of socialists.
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This is a great post, it's nice to see it broken out in this way. Still though the 45 seats are a national distribution so you can't just ignore it. The 32 seats that you bring up for Toronto represent a sum of 865,335 total votes. Considering 3,629,990 people voted for the Liberals, I would hardly characterize them just as the party of Toronto.
EDIT: Summary of vote distribution provincially for the Liberals versus total votes:
Alberta 144,364 1,270,294
BC 346,795 1,793,373
Manitoba 89,313 466,889
New Brunswick 119,197 368,035
Newfoundland and Labrador 91,084 195,397
NWT 1,858 13,677
Nova Scotia 130,038 436,008
Nunavut 2,359 8,068
Ontario 1,741,200 5,153,321
PEI 35,372 74,195
Quebec 859,634 3,620,362
Saskatchewan 62,209 418,842
Yukon 6,567 14,511
Hardly just a Toronto party. The 3,629,990 represented 26.2% of the population while the 5,205,334 that voted Conservative represented 37.6% of the voting population.