Daemonic Dispatches

Canadian election results trivia.

• Closest ridings: In the riding of Vancouver South, the Liberal candidate, Ujjal Dosanjh, is currently ahead of the Conservative candidate, Wai Young, by 33 votes. Other close ridings (within 250 votes) are Kitchener-Waterloo (Conservative 48 votes ahead of Liberal), Egmont, (Conservative 62 votes ahead of Liberal), Esquimault-Juan de Fuca (Liberal 68 votes ahead of Conservative), Brossard-La Prairie (Bloc Quebecois 102 votes ahead of Liberal), Brampton West (Liberal 223 votes ahead of Conservative),
• Widest margins of victory: Jason Kenney, the Conservative candidate in Calgary Southeast, achieved the widest margin of victory, coming 35,689 votes ahead of the Green party candidate, Margaret Chandler. Crowfoot, which had the widest margin of victory in the 2006 election, came a close second with the Conservative candidate, Kevin Sorenson, beating the NDP candidate, Ellen Parker, by 35,559 votes. Out of the 12 ridings (including Calgary Southeast and Crowfoot) which were decided by margins of more than 25,000 votes, 10 were Conservative wins in Alberta; the other two were St. John's East, where the NDP candidate, Jack Harris, came 25,670 votes ahead of the Liberal candidate, Walter Noel, and Montcalm, where the Bloc Quebecois candidate, Roger Gaudet, came 25,132 votes ahead of the Liberal candidate, David Gregoire.
• Votes cast: Thanks to a drop in voter turnout, only 13,834,000 votes were cast, almost a million less than in the 2006 federal election; however, thanks to Canada's growing population, this is still the second-most votes ever cast in a Canadian election, narrowly surpassing the 13,667,671 votes cast in the 1993 federal election).
• Votes received by the winning party: Thanks to the reduced voter turnout, the Conservative party received 5,208,000 votes, slightly fewer than the 5,374,000 votes they received in 2006, in spite of increasing their share of the popular vote from 36.3% to 37.6%.
• Votes received by the second-place party: The Liberal party received 3,633,000 votes, or 26.2% of the total; this is the smallest fraction of the popular vote ever received by a second-place party in a minority parliament.
• The Green party did not win any seats, but they improved on their performance in 2006, coming second in five ridings: Calgary Southeast, where they lost to the Conservatives by 35,578 votes; Macleod, where they lost to the Conservatives by 31,173 votes; Wild Rose -- the sole riding where the Green party came second in the 2006 election -- where they lost to the Conservatives by 30,291 votes; Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound, where they lost to the Conservatives by 9,879 votes; and Central Nova, where -- thanks to the Liberals not running a candidate -- the Green leader Elizabeth May lost to Peter MacKay by 5,619 votes. The Green party also managed to come third in 40 ridings.
• In order for the Conservatives to win a majority, they would have needed to win 12 seats more than they did. The 12th closest seat, by fraction of the popular vote, which the Conservatives lost was Western Arctic, where the Conservative candidate received 37.6% of the popular vote compared to the NDP's 41.4%. If we consider a hypothetical "magical bag of votes" which would allow the Conservatives to increase their share of the popular vote equally in every riding across the country, the Conservatives would need to gain 3.8% extra votes in order to win a majority... which would place them at 41.4% of the popular vote, entirely in line with the rule of thumb that 40% is the minimum popular vote required in Canada in order to form a majority government.
• The winning candidate with the most support, as measured by the fraction of the popular vote received, was Kevin Sorenson, the Conservative candidate in Crowfoot, who recieved 81.8% of the votes in his riding.
• The winning candidate with the least support, as measured by the fraction of the popular vote received, was Richard Nadeau, the Bloc Quebecois candidate in Gatineau, who received 29.1% of the votes in his riding, beating the NDP candidate (26.1%) and the Liberal candidate (25.4%) by less than 2000 votes. There are 128 losing candidates across the country who received a greater fraction of the popular vote in their respective ridings than Richard Nadeau received in his.
• The losing candidate with the most support, as measured by the fraction of the popular vote received, was Nettie Wiebe, the NDP candidate in Saskatoon-Rosetown-Biggar, who received 44.4% of the votes in her riding yet fell 253 votes short of the Conservative candidate, Kelly Block, who received 45.4% of the votes. There are 92 winning candidates across the country who received a smaller fraction of the popular vote in their respective ridings than Nettie Wiebe received in hers.
• Candidates receiving more than 50% of the votes: There are 110 candidates who won a majority of the votes in their respective ridings: 79 Conservative candidates, 14 Liberal candidates, 9 Bloc Quebecois candidates, 7 NDP candidates, and 1 independent (Bill Casey, in Cumberland-Colchester-Musquodoboit Valley).

Note to media and blogs: Feel free to republish the above (in part or in whole), giving credit to Colin Percival or a link to this post.

UPDATE: Statistics concerning the fraction of the popular vote won by individual candidates added on 2008-10-16.
UPDATE: Some statistics adjusted to replace preliminary results with validated results on 2008-10-17, 2008-10-18, and 2008-10-23.