that said, brian masse was not a good mp and i will not miss him. in 20 years, the only thing he accomplished was a bill that legalized government run gambling, which is a terrible idea and which i'm staunchly opposed to. the government should not be basing healthcare or education revenues on profits from gambling, it creates a conflict of interest. i would support legislation to reverse the gambling legalization, or at least to privatize it and place a sin tax on private revenues, 100% of which go to help victims of the gambling industry recover.

i have only voted a few times since i moved here, and it has been liberal, with the explicit intent of trying to push him out. 

the conservatives have never been competitive in this riding.

as a city person, i'm not interested in being ruled by townies riding in from the farms, and especially not by one that looks like an amish person. no thank you.

the real reason that the three ridings in windsor swung to the conservatives is gerrymandering via redistribution. windsor is a small city with a very left wing, union-dominated population. the city itself take up a large space, and is surrounded by large amounts of more conservative exurban or suburban regions, bordering into remnant farmlands. those rural areas vote conservative.

previously, there were two small urban ridings and one big rural riding and the result was two left wing representatives (ndp or liberal) and one conservative, for the rural riding. what redistricting did was blur the rural/urban split, which folded the small urban zones into the larger rural zones. the urban zones are more densely populated but there are more people in the larger rural areas.

i would suspect that this is actually what also happened in hamilton, london and sudbury, but i don't know those areas well.

the ndp have been complaining for decades that the system does this on purpose. what actually happened to the ndp in saskatchewan was that the previous urban zones were folded into the rural zones, in a process that is quite similar to what happened in windsor.

this could create some problems here, as if the population has no legitimate representation, it will begin to act like it's unrepresented, which it now is. however, it might be difficult to undo. i mean, look at the long term result of redistricting in saskatchewan - the ndp have been wiped out of saskatchewan for decades.

this election outcome is essentially a mistake. 

i mused previously if it seemed like the result of dumb kids not understanding what they were voting for, or fundamental shifts in canadian demographics that realign the country's future with a conservative identity, as a result of increasing immigration from conservative societies.

however, i don't think either of those are correct. or not quite so.

for right now, this is a fluke brought on by skewed turnout and weird events. 

the government won't last long, and the result of the next election will undo this one. for right now, i'm not enjoying waking up in a conservative riding and a conservative region and i'm setting hard to work on fighting them as hard as i can.

i need to put a call out to frank at ekos or nik nanos or somebody else to get this analysis out.

the ndp did not fold into the liberals tonight. i can see enough of an analysis in specific ridings like windsor and hamilton to realize that's false.

the ndp vote bolted hard to the conservative party, and you can see that in the age demographics.

the reason the conservative lost is that carney then showed up and swung conservatives to the liberals. 

this was a complex tango, a two way shift, and not just the destruction of the ndp. we will wake up to a completely altered political spectrum, where the liberals represent older and more conservative voters and the conservatives are the party of youth, hope and future. it's a complete spectrum reversal.

if elizabeth may has the balance of power, will she bring back the carbon tax?

long live queen elizabeth III.

i usually beat the models and i did again. we'll see how close i get in the end.

liberals: around 160 

conservatives: around 140 

bloc: around 30 

ndp: around 10

green: exactly 2

i also suggested the following:

what is going to happen is that ndp voters are going to swing to the conservatives in urban areas, and the result is that the liberals will win those seats more easily, because the seats were two-way races between the liberals and ndp (these are seats the conservatives are not competitive in). 

i undershot this, and i want to correct something i'm hearing on the news. the news is suggesting that ndp voters are swinging to the liberals, and the conservatives ended up winning. that is an intuitive analysis and the numbers don't add up because the conservatives were in third place in all of these ridings - windsor, london, hamilton. if the liberals are in second, and the ndp vote shifts downwards to the liberals, the conservatives would not win. that's wrong.

what is happening is that ndp voters shifted to the conservatives in these ridings in such large numbers that the conservatives actually leapfrogged the liberals into first place. the ndp collapse is not from 40% to 20% in these ridings, it's from 40% to 5% and the movement is dramatically to the conservatives, who are jumping in these ridings from 15% to 55%.

the numbers are still coming in and my initial analysis could still be correct in the end, but if these numbers hold they're stark and startling. actually look at them. it's a giant swing from the ndp to the conservatives, and it's young people driving it.

conservative youth movements like this are scary stuff.