Author Archive

Election Results & The “X” Factor

3
April 24, 2012 - By

First and foremost, I would like to congratulate the Progressive Conservatives on their victory in yesterday’s provincial election.  This was a hard fought victory, and candidates from all parties put a ton of time and effort into getting their messages out to constituents.  In this post, I am not advocating for any of the mentioned parties.

According to The Globe & Mail’s final tally, the PC Party won 61 seats, followed by the Wildrose with 17, Liberals 5, and NDP 4.

Of course, the seat totals make this victory look like a landslide. The popular vote shows a different story. Here is the breakdown in popular vote versus 2008:

PC: 43.9% (-8.8%)
WRP: 34.3% (+27.5%)
LIB: 9.9% (-16.5%)
NDP: 9.8% (+1.3%)

As this tally shows, the PC and Liberal parties lost significant support, with the Wildrose picking up steam over the past four years. Over that time, a chunk of the PC base became significantly disenfranchised with what seemed to be a more moderate PC party under Ed Stelmach. With Alison Redford winning the nomination by a slim margin, those who did not want another moderate in charge cemented their decision to move to [...]Read More

Categories: Uncategorized

Know Your Parties – Introduction

March 28, 2011 - By

With only 5 weeks to learn who will be running in this election, it is time for a primer on the 19 officially registered political parties.  The policies and platforms of each party will be discussed over the next few days.  Here are the list of parties running in this election:

The Big Five

Conservative Party of Canada

As the current minority government, the Conservative Party of Canada will be looking for a majority government once again.  In the 2008 election, they gained 19 seats over 2006 despite only a 1.4% increase in the popular vote.  If they manage to gain another 19, they will easily have the majority government they seek.

Liberal Party of Canada

The Liberal Party continues to lag slightly behind the Conservative Party in the polls for the third straight election, but they will hope for improvement in the coming weeks behind new leader Michael Ignatieff.  The Liberals had a massive reduction in seats from 103 to 77 last election, with a 4% drop in the popular vote.

New Democratic Party

Under [...]Read More

Categories: Uncategorized

It’s Not Always Pretty

4
October 18, 2010 - By

When you only just get home at 6 in the morning, and intend to wake up at 10 am to prepare for another beautiful day of church – the church of Football that is – waking up with a massive headache is the last thing one would want. I figured I would drink some water, relax, and read the latest on the #yycvote hash tag as I so often do. Safe to say, that didn’t make my head any better.

I honestly have loved what twitter has done for us this election. I have never been a huge advocate of twitter and I have made this very clear to those who know me. I don’t care to tell anonymous people what I had for breakfast. I’m not an attention-seeker.

I have loved how it has opened up discussions about the candidates, and remains a consistent feed for the articles being posted around the horn. If someone was going to be on QR77 or CBC Radio One at a certain time, you knew when to tune in, and you’d have a nice link getting you right there. If you wanted information and footage from the forums and debates, you had [...]Read More

Categories: Mayor of Calgary

The Final Poll

18
October 11, 2010 - By

Barring any sort of last minute desire from the media, the poll delivered today by Ipsos-Reid is most likely the last poll of this campaign season. It’s been a long stretch – and now we’re only one week from the finish line.

The most important change in the poll released today was the switch between Higgins and McIver. In the ROI poll released last week, McIver had 37% and Higgins had 33%. Now, Higgins has the 37% and McIver has 34%. And who knows how the Eau Claire land deal will affect the voting numbers – the Ipsos survey finished thursday, the day before the story broke.

Below is a graph illustrating the support of the candidates who are still polling (including Connelly due to his early Sept. support) between September 8th and October 11th.

As shown above, McIver’s support has continued to wane from a high of 43% on Sept 19th down to 34% on Oct 11th for a net loss of -9%. Higgins has regained her July numbers after losing support in August, going from 27% on Sep 8th to 37% on Oct 11th, a net gain of 10%. Nenshi’s become a formidable third place opponent, but [...]Read More

Categories: Mayor of Calgary

Analyzing The Aldermanic Polls

10
October 7, 2010 - By

Today, VoteCalgary released their All-Wards Aldermanic Poll done by O’Connell Enterprises. In each ward, 280 people were surveyed, which allows for a ±5.8% margin of error, 19 times out of 20. Here is the voter breakdown for those surveyed:

Age 18-34: 11%
Age 35-49: 25%
Age 50-64: 33%
Age 65+: 30%
Refused: 2%

Now, it’s clearly a skewed poll when you consider only 36% of the respondents were younger than a half-century, but clearly there wasn’t an age quota guideline for this poll. This was indicated by the fact that age was the LAST question instead of a screening question. Regardless, they did a solid job of matching their gender quota 50/50 split.

For the purpose of analyzing this poll, we will take “total support” as the first number and include the firm support, e.g. Candidate X – 20% (15%).

Ward 1
Dale Hodges – 37% (24%)
Chris Harper – 3% (1%)
Ric Lockhart – 2% (1%)
Bill Scott – 2% (1%)
Judi Vendenbrink – (1%)
Undecided – 43%

It looks like Ald. Hodges is well on his way to re-election, as the amount of voters for the also-rans don’t [...]Read More

Categories: Alderman - Ward 1, Alderman - Ward 10, Alderman - Ward 11, Alderman - Ward 12, Alderman - Ward 13, Alderman - Ward 14, Alderman - Ward 2, Alderman - Ward 3, Alderman - Ward 4, Alderman - Ward 5, Alderman - Ward 6, Alderman - Ward 7, Alderman - Ward 8, Alderman - Ward 9

What’s In Your Wallet? Part 2 (The Numbers)

30
October 3, 2010 - By

For those who have not read the introductory article about the information being provided in the following post, please click here.

Below we will be comparing three measures. The first will show the personal and corporate donations of each candidate. Afterwards, we will compare all three candidates’ donation totals together. The third and final measure will be to evaluate the percentage of donations that each candidate received per industry sector. For colour representation, Ric McIver will be blue, Naheed Nenshi will be purple, and Barb Higgins will be green. Sorry, Barb.

Before we start, once again, this only included donations over $1000. Thus, here are the donation totals we have over $1000:

McIver: $524,494

Higgins: $180,250

Nenshi: $97,750

What we can tell instantly from these numbers is that Higgins has received a higher average dollar per donor, where as Nenshi has capitalized on the smaller range donations ($1000 and under). In actual campaign figures, McIver’s dollar figure ranges at around $700,000 while Higgins and Nenshi are fairly closely matched over the $200,000 mark.

Measure One: Corporate/Personal Donations by Candidate

The first and most telling [...]Read More

Categories: Fact Check

What’s In Your Wallet? – Part One, Intro

2
October 1, 2010 - By

On September 20th, mayoral candidate Naheed Nenshi released his donor list on his accountability sub-section of his website.  Following suit with the challenge, Ric McIver released his list on September 25th.  Reluctantly, Barb Higgins’ camp joined in on the 26th.  Much has been said about the big names listed on the candidates’ donor lists.  Somewhere, someone went through the lists, saw a couple known names and wrote an article about it, and every news source thereafter followed.  For me, that’s not good enough.

I replicated the donor list of all of the Big Three, line by line.  This was crucial in reading McIver’s donor list, as many of the donors contributed on multiple occasions.  Once this process was complete, the data was compiled of all donors who donated at least $1,000. Then, the research began.  After spending the past few days focusing on this project, we have something to present to you.  And if you care about who is giving to your favourite candidates like I do, you’ll be fascinated too.

For the information that will be presented, there were seven donation sectors and two categories.  The two categories were “Personal” and “Corporate”.  The sectors break down as follows:

Auto: [...]Read More

Categories: Fact Check