do the tories have better "vote efficiency"?

no. not even close. they have no chance in most urban ridings, and the riding maps people are using seem to be stuck in the 50s - as ford's campaign, itself, is.

these are people that think the 905 is 'rural'; it hasn't been anything of the sort for decades. suburban, perhaps. but not rural. and, the cities in the region are actually growing very quickly. the liberals swept the 905 last time around for the exact reason that it's urban.

what the conservatives do have is an advantage in geography, as they do do better in rural areas, and that does give them more safe seats. but, if you take a look at that closely, inefficient is a better term to use than efficient. they're going to get 70% in some of these ridings, then get 12% in half of toronto. they need huge swings to win a mere handful of seats; whether they run at 25 or 35 is likely only a small difference in seats exchanged.

the liberals have the opposite problem - they're uncompetitive outside toronto - but they have what could be described as efficiency, and they're the party that this idea of vote efficiency should be applied towards. pulling them down 15% might seem catastrophic, but if it's all in ridings they'll never win anyways, it doesn't matter.

so, then, are the ndp inefficient? the reality is that they win a lot of close races. the disadvantage they've had is that they don't have a similar-sized base, so they need to rely on efficiency to win. i suspect this is in the process of changing.

the fact is that the exact same people made the exact same error in 2015, and it's probably rooted in a geography error rather than a mathematics one - if it isn't the internalization of campaign propaganda. go take a drive through the 905 and tell me it's "rural" in 2018.

people are living in london and working in toronto, nowadays.