As Alice Funke describes, this was a tremendous showing for NDP candidates surpassing the 10% rebate requirement*, with over 300 NDP candidates getting at least 10% of the vote in their riding and making them eligible for an Elections Canada refund. All the more impress since in 2004, less than 200 NDP candidates achieved this mark (the rebate rules were lowered from 15% to 10% in 2004). On the other hand, this increase was at the expense of the Liberals, with only 217 candidates qualifying for the rebate – down 53 since 2008.

How did this look in Saskatchewan?

In 2008, 9 Liberal candidates (out of 14) qualified for the rebate. But this year just Ralph Goodale was able to crack the 10% mark.

I don’t know how much these candidates spent on their election campaign. But not cracking the 10% mark will affect the party’s war chest. Nationwide, the Liberals lost just about 850,000 votes this year, which I believe will reduce their  per-vote subsidy by about $1.5 million. Perhaps the greatest challenge the next Liberal leader will have is rebuilding the party with less funding than before.

* “A candidate who is elected or receives at least 10% of the valid votes cast at the election is entitled to a reimbursement of 60% of the actual paid election expenses and the paid personal expenses, to a maximum of 60% of the election expenses limit.” – Elections Canada

They re-elected Ralph Goodale, keeping their 1 seat in the province. The rest of the seats went to the Conservatives so that, as far as seat distribution goes, there was no change.

However, the Liberal vote in the province declined from 14.2% to 8.6% (62194 votes to 38,981)* – that’s a 40% decline over 2008 results.

The Conservatives again won 10 of their 13 seats with an outright majority of the votes in that riding (50%+), with some extremely wide margins, such as Ed Komarnicki in Souris-Moose Mountain who claimed 73.98% of all the votes. Province-wide, the Conservatives increased their share of the popular vote, from 53.7% in 2008 to 56.3% this year (225,152 votes to 256,004).

Overall, voter turn-out was up as a percentage (the number of registered voters declined slightly over 2008) and in absolute numbers: from 438,033 in 2008 to 455,053.

Who were the big losers in 2011? The Liberals lost about 23,000 voters since 2008. The Green party also lost nearly half their support in Saskatchewan, about 11,000 voters. And other parties (Christian Heritage, Western  Independence, etc) lost about 20,000 votes collectively since 2008.

This tells us that voters were motivated by the stark choice - Conservative or NDP - and few wasted their votes on the Liberals, Greens, or a myriad of other also-rans. In 2008, the Conservatives and NDP together accounted for about 79% of the vote. So 21% of voters chose other options. This year, less than 12% did so. Combined with an increase in the total number of voters this year, this put a lot of votes into play.

Who benefited? To which party (the Conservatives or the NDP) did these tens of thousands of voters turn to?

Well, it appears that both parties attracted these voters in large numbers, but the NDP attracted about 33% more. Put another way, these voters went to the Conservatives and NDP at a ratio of 3:4. The Conservatives obtained about 30,000 more votes over 2008, and the NDP obtained about 40,000 more.

Now, we can’t draw too many conclusions about that, at least without doing a poll-by-poll comparison – which I frankly lack the time to do – but it is an interesting ratio.

In the end, the NDP obtained 32.3% of the popular vote – a significant increase, but it didn’t come at the expense of the Conservatives, and so they were unable to win any seats.

Let’s look again at what actually happened to the Liberal vote. In Dead Grits – Part Two, I talked about how the personal brand of Ralph Goodale and David Orchard artificially inflated the province-wide Liberal popular vote. And obviously the same effect is at work in 2011. So let’s normalize the situation by taking Ralph out of the equation (David Orchard didn’t run in 2011 – so he didn’t have an effect; nor were there any other “star” Liberal candidates).

Goodale’s votes alone (15,842) account for 40% of all Liberal votes cast in Saskatchewan in 2011! Leaving out the Wascana from the provincial Liberal results, we get the a normalized rate of 5.1%.  Down from a normalized rate of 10.9% in 2008 – a steep decline. While Goodale’s performance  declined only 7% over that same time.

To conclude, we see a continued decline in the Liberal brand in Saskatchewan. At the federal level (which historically outperforms the provincial party) the Liberals are now at 5%. I believe this supports my prediction from Dead Grits – Party One of a <5% performance for the Saskatchewan Liberal Party in the provincial election later this year.

I suppose the good news is that at 5%, there isn’t much further to decline.

* Note: this analysis uses the currently available Elections Canada results, which are the May 5 Preliminary Results.

All three main political parties can claim credible chances in this riding, with the NDP holding it federally in 1997, and the Liberals and Conservatives at different points since then. Since 2008, it has been a Conservative seat, with the incumbent defeating his next nearest challenger (Liberal, David Orchard) by a sizeable 3,148 votes. This time, the Liberal candidate is Gabe Lafond. He lacks the name recoginition of Mr. Orchard, and I doubt he’ll do as well.

The NDP is running Lawrence Joseph, the former head of the Saskatchewan Federation of Indian Nations. Mr. Joseph has a long career in politics and the municipal and provincial levels and has very high name recognition. Of course, that name recognition isn’t always good, and Mr. Joseph hasn’t been free from controversy. But I expect he’ll do much better than the NDP’s previous candidate. This effect, combined with the apparent Orange Crush phenomena and the low-profile Liberal candidate, puts this riding into play. Adding together Liberal and NDP votes from last election would surpass the Conservative numbers. But that’s a tall order.

My prediction* – a Conservative hold.
CON: 42%
NDP: 39%
LIB: 14%
OTHERS: 3%

* Nothing scientific here, folks, just my gut-feeling guess.

Basically, I’m interested in the province-wide aggregate Liberal results, as well as the riding-by-riding performance, looking for changes over the previous election. And potentially how that compares to the national results on eleciton day.

Here’s where the Liberals came out in 2008:

There are several ridings where I expect the Liberals to improve their performance, such as Saskatoon-Humboldt where they are running a higher-profile candidate in Darren Hill (although the presence of Jim Pankiw’s candidacy in that riding shakes things up a bit from last time). Repeat candidates, like Patricia Zipchen in Saskatoon-Wanuskewin, can also improve their showing over 2008. Other ridings, I expect to see a decline. Of particular interest will be the northern riding of Desnethe-Missinippi-Churchill River, where the Liberals have a fairly good electoral track record. But they are onto yet another candidate in that riding (I’m not sure where David Orchard, the 2008 candidate, went to).

Over at threehundredeight.com, Eric’s model is currently (as of April 12) predicting a higher return for the Liberals in every riding. And as much as I enjoy Eric’s model, this seems like a rather mechanistic and simplified distribution of Liberal support in Saskatchewan.

Unfortunately, I’m not a statistician and I don’t think I can mount much more than an enlightened guess into the possible outcomes in each of these ridings. But I’ll take a shot at it, just to see how my gut compares to reality.

In the meantime, polls coming out on the eve of Good Friday promises anything but for the Liberals tomorrow: apparently, the NDP is surging so powerfully in Quebec, that the sheer hydraulic power is floating their brand boat nationally too, with two polls placing the NDP in second-place nationally (that’s above the Liberals).

In Saskatchewan, this shouldn’t have much of an impact, as they were already well ahead of the Liberals here. Nevertheless, a further collapse of the Liberal vote could make a difference in a few ridings; but it is hard to imagine it making a difference in Saskatoon-Rosetown-Biggar, where last round the Liberal candidate could only muster 4.4% of the vote there. It is hard to imagine a lower number in 2011.

War is tragic.

This is the more common refrain. It is certainly more in line with our modern zeitgeist. It’s the default setting, it seems, for all education about war. But for all of that, I don’t believe it is fully or deeply understood. For one, I believe that a complete knowledge of war’s tragedy requires an understanding of its glories, as I discussed before. But, like much about being human, attaining true wisdom of this is a process. And here I’ll simply mention that it isn’t necessarily obvious just how horrible it is to lose a child – a victim of war, perhaps, or a still-young participant – until you hold a child of your own. Sure, there is an abstract sadness to the death of children, or young people. I just think the empathy isn’t fully realized until it is learned.

At least not for me.

I was at a funeral for a young child. A girl, less than two years old. It was a cold day in Saskatoon. The funeral parlor was filled with mourners – but Death was undeterred by this solidarity. The anguished mother was as a skeleton herself, her skin translucent with grief. But only now, and having just tucked my young son into his bed, can I truly conceive of that terror.

So it is with death. It’s inevitability never finding a comfortable spot in our minds. War is an occasion to hasten that inevitability. That the ethos of the warrior seeks those occasions is difficult for most people to understand. Maybe it’s Todestrieb. I think it is actually more about life, than death. In any case, the tragedy of war is that it is not conducted by old men, but by the young. And when the young die, whether in glory afield or not, they take with them an incalculable Hope and Joy.

And the world, its light already dimmed, darkens still more.

I’ve written about this before. I figure I’ll write about it every year until I’m gone. In any case – although I tried mightily hard to avoid doing so – here’s this year’s two cents. It isn’t really about Remembrance Day, actually. It’s really a rather nuanced take on whether or not war is glorious and why it seems that Remembrance Day is always accused of glorifying it.

At least it is in brief. Really, this came from a comment I wrote over at the Commons. I suggest you check out that awesome blog. Here are my words:

How come no one wants to glorify war any more? It’s so boring to all be singing from the same hymn book (Onward Christian Soldiers anyone? anyone?).

It seems the objection – raised via nationalism and militarism – is that war is too easy to glorify. All it takes is a few dozen poppies and a marching band.

But perhaps the nagging nut of truth behind the protestation is that war *is* glorious.

Think about it, if it weren’t glorious in some way, why would men (and women) worldwide sign up for it every year by the millions? Why would we continue to year-after-year (for thousands now) smash armies together?

Is it so unfathomable that there might actually be some sort of beauty in the massing of men thusly? In the countless acts of courage? In the severest of adversary overcome? Or not, and death comes – as it surely does to us all – but comes not with a cancer diagnosis or with a speeding bus, but with an explosion, or bullet, or blade. Could it really be that there is nothing of substance in the him-or-me existential moment of hand-to-hand combat?

The capacity for violence is just as much of human nature as empathy. Castigating out of hand the storied history of that violence is to misunderstand it.

Much like the Victorian disdain for sex, or the Temperance Society’s attack on booze, the pacifist’s assault on war works against human nature, not with it.

I submit the (counter-intuitive) assertion that the odds of peace would be much improved if the peace movement acknowledged – embraced even – the glories of war. To paraphrase Sun Tzu: know thy enemy.

I highly suggest folks take a look at the article in full over at the Commons – and stay and read some of the other well-written and intelligent posts.

To give you a taste, here’s a sample from my article “Killing Citizen Williams”

I give you the Russell Williams serial murder case. Here the accumulated forensic evidence leaves no doubt as to guilt. There is also a very clear and sane confession. Williams even led investigators to one of the bodies. In consequence, he will never leave prison. Williams even attempted suicide. His life is completely over.

And yet, the families of his victims will be paying for him to live a comfortable, if extremely boring, life for twenty, thirty, even forty years. Their tax dollars unavoidably contributing to the approximately $150,000 per year it will cost to house Williams. This is money that could be funding scholarships, or buying hospital equipment. This is money that could go into a fund to help the victims of crime recover from traumatic events. This is money that could go to compensate those who have been wrongly convicted in the past.

And I’ve got to wonder: why?

This post examines the fallout from the recent by-election in Saskatoon Northwest.

This was the second contest (out of four by-elections) the provincial Liberals have entered since the last general election. Eric Steiner, the Liberal candidate, had a result consistent with the last by-election, garnering 3% of the vote. In the previous byelection, Eileen Gelowitz ran under the Liberal banner in Saskatoon Riversdale and earned 2.6% of the vote.

The current state of Liberal support in this riding is perhaps more significant than in other ridings, such as Saskatoon Riversdale. Saskatoon Northwest was briefly represented by Liberal MLA and party leader Jim Melenchuk only ten years ago. Since then, support for the Liberal brand in that riding has declined from more than 36% of the popular vote to just over 3%. The decline has been precipitous. Luckily for the Liberals, there isn’t much further down to go.

Granted, the Liberals were not going to win in Saskatoon Northwest, but there are several significant signs of problems for the Liberals in these two by-elections.

First, they have been unable to convince candidates of any note to come forward to run. In Riversdale they ran a candidate who was a refugee from the SaskParty. In Northwest, they ran a member of the Liberal party executive (Steiner is the party’s Communications chair). Where the Liberals ran decent campaigns in the last general election they ran high-quality candidates, such as Zeba Ahmed in Saskatoon Greystone, who achieved nearly 17%. An inability to entice quality candidates to run under the Liberal banner will seriously hurt their performance in the next general election.

Secondly, the next general election is only a year away – if the Northwest by-election was a dry run for the Liberals campaign machinery, it doesn’t bode well for them. In particular, based on these by-election numbers, it will be difficult for Ryan Bater to argue that he deserves a spot in any televised leaders debate. Meanwhile, the Green Party maintained their small share of the vote (2.3%). And the PC party also continued along their zombie-like return, placing fourth (2.5%). But in these cases, I believe that the Green Party has a greater potential to grow – while the appeal of the PC party is limited. If the Green Party can run candidates in every provincial riding next time around, they have a shot at unseating the Liberals as the third party – though this is unlikely. For all its limitations, the Liberal can recruit more professional-level politicos from their Federal counterparts.

On a related note, Murray Mandryk had an interesting analysis of problems the Liberal-vote collapse has for the NDP.

Based on this by-election support, I see no reason to adjust my prediction of a <5% provincial-wide popular support in the 2011 general election for the Liberals.

The more interesting question is: who benefits from the decline of the Liberal party – they SaskParty or the NDP. I think conventional wisdom would say there are several ridings where SaskParty can potentially make gains at the expense of the NDP. In particular, in David Karwacki’s riding: Saskatoon Meewasin, possibly The Battlefords, and even Saskatoon Eastview.

According to National Post reporter, Andrew Duffy, the judge – LCol Jean-Guy Perron – noted that Semrau was a first time offender and had a stellar record as a soldier and leader. I suspect that Semrau’s outstanding performance record strongly influenced the sentence. Judge Perron also rejected comparisons between Semrau’s actions and the murder of Somali teenager Shidane Arone.

And in keeping with my outlook on the US military deserters, I feel that Semrau should not appeal: he should take his lumps.

Semrau would always be a distraction in the forces. A living symbol of the warrior-ethic that doesn’t entirely mesh with the soldier-ethic officially embraced by the Canadian Forces (of which I may perhaps write about at a later time). Unlike other military officers who fought to keep their military careers, Semrau does not seem to be the type of person content to linger in backroom offices toiling on procurement projects or research. Semrau wants to lead. Unfortunately – even if they let him back in – he won’t be able to do that in the Canadian Forces.

I suspect that Semrau would be welcomed back to Saskatchewan with open arms. I believe there are many opportunities for him in this province. This is where he was born, and support for soldiers here is strong. And the nuances of battlefield law not widely understood.