The West Is Ticked!

Boy did Roy Green from AM770 CHQR do a number on all three of these guys (okay Libby is a gal). Here is a commercial free edition for your pleasure. Make sure you listen to the last two segments, the listeners give some very good commentary. Thanks to frmgrl for the link, it starts at 12:00 and goes until 2:00, well worth the listen. Libby Davies gets smacked down good.

After listening to it, my feeling is: The west is ticked, really, really ticked!

We have also been hearing endlessly about how the Conservatives only got 38% of the vote and therefore 62% did not vote for them, this apparently justifies a coalition government. Not so fast there buddies, let's have some fun with numbers. I remember taking a course in university where we were shown how to lie with statistics, the opposition seems to have taken that course as well.



So, looking at the results, the Conservatives clearly were the winners. Now for the fun with math!

This comment was posted on the CTV site:

Paul B.
Seems a lot of people on here have limited math skills. Yes, if you add up how many votes Libs-Dippers-Greens-Bloc received, it is more than the Conservative's.

Now this is where your math is flawed. Conservative's ran 308 candidates. The wanna-be coalition ran more than 970, so, ya, sure they would receive more votes.

Funny no one used the same argument when the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Coservative's ran in the same elections, getting a combined vote of more than the Liberal's.

So, what we have failed to do, is take into account that the opposition are adding up the popular vote numbers and forgetting to divide by 3 or 4. Remember that only one party can win a seat, so popular vote doesn't mean dick if you don't win! For example, let's look at Ontario's numbers:



The Conservatives got 2,019362 votes, the lib/grn/NDP got 3,091044 combined, so if we divide their vote by 3 we get 1,030,348 for their coalition. Now, that's fun with the numbers! Face it, popular vote means nothing if all parties are running candidates.

How did it work out for Green May? The Liberals did not run a candidate, so according to their logic, she should have won because all Liberal voters would then vote for the coalition candidate, right??? Wrong.



Peter MacKay won with 18,239 votes, May came in second with 12,620, and that is without a Liberal candidate running. In order for May to have won, the NDP would have had to axe their candidate, and even then only if all NDP votes went to May, would she have won.

In order for a coalition government to have any chance, they have to run only one candidate in each riding, potentially eliminating the NDP, Green and Bloq candidate so a Liberal could win. Are the other parties willing to disappear so that the Liberals can get back to the trough? I don't think so, but it would be funny to see the fight over who runs a candidate where.

If this coalition of the hopeless wants to win, they better not ignore the west, and I don't just mean holding a convention in Vancouver. Now, won't that be funny, are the NDP, Greens, and Bloq now invited to vote for the new Liberal leader? That would really show the GG that they truly are a coalition!