News Analysis
Despite suggestions that votes cast in Western Canada don’t influence the result of general elections, an analysis of results from past elections challenges this notion.
The perception about the irrelevance of Western votes may have become popularized by the statement “Screw the west, we’ll take the rest” by Liberal political organizer Keith Davey in the 1980 federal election. It turned out to be a winning strategy for the Pierre Trudeau Liberals, who prevailed with a majority win against the Progressive Conservatives led by Alberta MP Joe Clark.
This idea may have gained further acceptance when the Reform Party won 52 seats in 1993 under the slogan, “The West wants in.” Reform won one seat east of Manitoba and the Bloc Québécois won 54 in Quebec. The Bloc became the opposition to a majority Liberal government with minimal Western support.
However, the current political era, which began with the merger that formed the Conservative Party, demonstrates that Western votes do matter. It’s true that the Conservatives have consistently won a majority of seats in the West since then and that only in 2011 did that result in a national Conservative majority. However, except for the 2015 Liberal majority, the West has always either played a role in deciding the winner, or decided whether that winner would have a majority or minority government.
In the 2004 election, 308 seats were in play. Western ridings (including those in the territories), numbered 95, for 30.8 percent of the national total. Eastern Canada (which includes Ontario and Quebec for this article’s purposes) had 213 seats. That year, the Paul Martin Liberals won 118 in this region, but just 17 seats in the West. What the East would have made a majority government, the West reduced to a minority.
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In 2006, the West chose the winner, handing the Stephen Harper Conservatives a minority victory. Had the East chosen alone, the result would have been a Liberal minority, or a Conservative–Bloc coalition. In the East, the Paul Martin Liberals won 87 seats, or 40.8 percent of Eastern seats, followed by the Conservatives with 59 seats, the Bloc with 51, the NDP with 15, and one independent.
In 2008, West and East were even more evenly matched. The Conservatives won in both regions, with 72 seats in the West and 71 seats in the East. The Stéphane Dion Liberals placed second in the East with 69 seats, but placed third in the West with just eight seats. The result was a Conservative minority.
The 2011 election was noteworthy, not only for handing the Harper Conservatives their only majority, but for giving the NDP their only second-place finish in history. West, East, and nationally, the Conservatives were first, NDP second, and Liberals third.
However, the 2011 Conservative majority would not have happened without the West. In the East, the Conservatives won 92 seats, the NDP 87, the Liberals 30, and the Bloc just four. This, the zenith of Conservative support in the East in the post-Mulroney years, only took 43.2 percent of Eastern seats.
2015 Election the Lone Outlier
While the four federal elections from 2004 to 2011 all had 308 seats at play, that number increased to 338 in the 2015 and subsequent 2019 and 2021 elections, and the West had 107 of those 338 ridings. This was a 31.7 percent share–more than the 30.8 percent that the Western region had before.
In 2015, however, the Justin Trudeau Liberals swept the Atlantic ridings and dominated Ontario and Quebec. The majority Liberal win is the lone recent outlier where the West did not determine the majority or minority status of the winner.
Even that year, however, the West reflected some of the swing in national sentiment. The Liberals, which had placed third behind the NDP in Western ridings in both 2008 and 2011, increased its Western seat total to 32 in 2015, a remarkable rise from just 4 in 2011. For the Conservatives, their 54 Western Tory wins were 50.5 percent of the 107 Western seats. This was down from their 74 seats, or 77.9 percent of Western seats in 2011, when 308 seats were at play across the country.
If the East had its way in 2019, it would have handed the Liberals a comfortable majority that year, having taken 140 of the Eastern region’s 231 seats and leaving the Andrew Scheer Conservatives with just 50 seats. The West felt differently, giving the Conservatives 71 seats and the Liberals 17. The result was a national Liberal minority.
The 2021 election saw little movement, as the Liberals gained three seats nationally, from 157 to 160, and Jagmeet Singh’s NDP gained one to reach 25. The Erin O’ Toole Conservatives lost seven seats in the West, falling from 71 to 64, and gained five in the East, increasing from 50 to 55. Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party took almost 5 percent of the national vote, but no seats. Once again, the West reduced to a minority status what would have been an Eastern-chosen Liberal majority.
Population growth and electoral realignment means that in the upcoming 2025 election, the West will have a greater percentage of total ridings than ever. The West has 108 of the nation’s 343 ridings, composing 31.5 percent of the total.
All told, in the past six of seven elections, from 2004 to 2021, the West decided whether the electoral winner had a majority or a minority. This is no small impact in a parliamentary system. And, given the region has roughly 30 percent of Canadian votes, this degree of Western impact is all Canadians should reasonably expect.
On the basis of population, it could be argued that Prince Edward Island is over-represented, but the same could be said of voters in the territories. Those wrinkles aside, the fact is, whether a Canadian lives in the East or the West, their vote still counts.
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