Party nominations for the 40th General Election being updated tonight:

• Vaughan, ON Conservatives have acclaimed Richard Lorello, after previous candidate Richard Majkot decided to withdraw his name from the race. Majkot had been listed here as the candidate on the basis of a March 28, 2006 nomination meeting reported to Elections Canada, but I have changed the reference to Lorello now.
• Scott Andrews has won a hotly contested race for the Liberal nomination in the Newfoundland riding of Avalon.
• Joe Comuzzi is vigourously disputing reports that he is not planning to run again in his northern Ontario seat of Thunder Bay – Superior North. However, Elections Canada lists previous candidate Beverly Sarafin as the nominated Conservative standard-bearer after a meeting held March 10th of last year. Comuzzi joined the Conservative Party in June, 2007 after being expelled from the Liberal caucus by Liberal Leader Stephane Dion on March 21, 2007 for voting in favour of the federal budget ... 11 days after the Conservative nomination meeting was apparently held. Notwithstanding the reporting in both these stories that Comuzzi had been planning to step down after his current term in office, it now appears that either he may be changing his mind, or else the original reporting was not correct (although I'm pretty sure I heard him tell Mike Duffy he was looking forward to retirement). Meantime I can't find any reference to Beverly Sarafin stepping down, so I'll just leave that entry there until I learn otherwise.

A number of contested nominations are also on tap:

• the Liberals this coming Tuesday February 5 in St. John's East, Newfoundland (currently held by retiring Conservative M.P. Norman Doyle)
• the Conservatives in Calgary Northeast, Alberta (currently held by retiring Conservative M.P. Art Hangar) on Saturday February 23, 2008
• the NDP in Thunder Bay – Rainy River, Ontario, to take on Liberal M.P. Ken Boshcoff, during a two-day, three-city travelling ballot to be held March 29-30, 2008
• Portage-Lisgar, Manitoba Conservatives some time in April, to replace retiring M.P. Brian Pallister

Labels: 40th General Election Nominations, Conservatives, Liberals, NDP

Here's what I've really been waiting to see for a long time, and I hope you have too.

I've been able to scrape, clean and normalize the Candidates' Returns from the 2006 General Election, and make them available from the profile page of any given riding (let's pick South Shore – St. Margaret's in Nova Scotia).

Notice there is a new tabstrip on the riding profile page that allows a user to select either "Riding Results" or "Financial Metrics", and which works just like the tabstrips on the pages for Browsing Regions, Elections or Parties.

As before the "Riding Results", now on the first tab, show us that the riding is currently held by Conservative M.P. Gerald Keddy, but switched (just barely) from a Conservative-Liberal contest in 2004 to a Conservative-NDP contest in 2006. All 4 major english party candidates have been nominated there for the forthcoming election, including former Halifax West M.P. Gordon Earle for the third time in this new redistributed riding for him.

Now, let's click on the second tab called "Financial Metrics" to see what's new. You can see that all 5 candidates from 2006 have submitted Candidate Returns to Elections Canada. However the returns for Keddy, the former Green candidate Katy Morris Boudreau, and the Christian Heritage candidate Jim Hnatiuk, have not yet been reviewed by Elections Canada, which is why they are shown in italics (tech speak: or at least I used the '<em>' tag, in case your browser doesn't show "ems" in italics).

The new Metrics are quickly described on the Pundit Metrics page, although I plan to expand those explanations as time permits. Notice that you can click on any metric title in the table to take you directly to its definition.

So, what can we tell from the financial metrics? The first thing that jumps out here is the fact that Keddy's return shows him over the spending limit. Liberal candidate Darian Huskilson and NDP candidate Gordon Earle both raised and spent almost the same amount of money (52% of the limit), although Earle's campaign was supported 3 1/2 times more by his national party's campaign than his Liberal competitor's was.

The cost per vote is a metric that should be compared across campaigns, however the earlier data is not yet added to my database (soon though; stay tuned). It can also be compared to the amount of public financing now extended to registered parties for each vote they receive (the figure of $1.75 per vote is what parties are now getting, based on the 2006 election results).

In the near future, I will be adding the campaign financials for recent by-elections, and then start working backwards through the previous general elections and by-elections. Also, I plan to show more details from the financial data in additional tabs on the riding profile pages, and add similar tabs to the candidate index pages.

Next, I will add some aggregates of this data to the Summary grids in the Browse Regions, Browse Elections, and Browse Parties pages. Finally, I will assemble the Browse Candidates page, including some new "Pundit Candidate Queries" that I hope readers will find interesting (e.g., candidates receiving the biggest transfers from their parties, having raised the most money, having the greatest number of individual contributors, having transferred the greatest amount from their local riding association, etc., etc.). Then eventually I'll include the political parties' campaign fund-raising and spending to round out the picture.

Please let me know if this format is useful, and/or if there are other details or metrics you would like to see. I hope to add a link directly to each candidate's return online, but that will take a bit of time to compile.

Labels: 39th (2006) General Election, Election Expenses, Election Finance

A couple of recent announcements have put the issue of women in Canadian politics top of mind once again.

First is the Liberal Party's caucus retreat announcement that they are on track to meet Stéphane Dion's goal of running 33% women candidates. Campbell Clark's story in the Globe uses the numbers "78 women among their 209 nominated candidates - or 37 per cent"; the Liberals are using the number 210 but haven't published an official list of candidates; and I had the numbers 76/213 - or 35.6 per cent, but have now confirmed that two previously nominated male Liberal candidates have withdrawn since the expected election did not materialize (Skid Crease in Dufferin – Caledon and John D. Waite in Simcoe North). So I'm now showing 76/211 for the Libs in my counts.

Second is the announcement by NDP Leader Jack Layton and his new Québec lieutenant Thomas Mulcair that they have attracted the Bishop's University Sociology Department chair and feminist academic/activist, Cheryl Gosselin, to run for them in Sherbrooke.

So, here are the latest nomination totals by party and province:

	1	1	1	36	28	14	14	106	75	10	11	4	7	308
Party	YT	NT	NU	BC	AB	SK	MB	ON	QC	NB	NS	PE	NL	Total	Pct	Wom	Pct
BQ									57					57	19%	18	29.8%
Cons	1	1		32	27	11	10	93	54	7	7	2	4	249	81%	38	15.7%
Grn	1			10	9		2	53	15	3	7			100	32%	25	26.0%
Lib	1		1	27	22	6	9	87	32	9	9	4	4	211	69%	75	36.0%
NDP		1		27	17	10	6	54	32	4	8	1	3	163	53%	60	36.8%
Rest				2	11	1		21	3	1	2			50		3

The advocacy group Equal Voice was founded to advocate for the nomination of more women in party and electoral politics. It maintains its own dataset, the most recent report of which can be found here (last update at time of writing was November 2007).

Another interesting analysis of where the Liberals will have to make up the remainder of their woman candidates to sustain their target can be found here (undertaken by Steve Janke in early December).

Here are my latest nomination counts by party standing in the seat at the last general election:

Party	Seats	2nds	Less	Plus	Current Standings		Nom Inc	%	Nom 2nds	%	Nom Oth	%		TOT Nom	%
BQ	51	20	-4	2	49		49	96%	8	40%				57	19%
Cons	123	117	-2	3	125		119	96%	84	72%	46	69%		249	81%
Grn		1							1	100%	99	31%		100	32%
Lib	103	116	-9	2	96		95	92%	78	67%	38	43%		211	69%
NDP	29	53		1	30		28	97%	39	74%	96	42%		163	53%
Ind	1			3	4		1
VAC				4	4

And as promised in an earlier post, I have now pulled out the numbers of women nominated accordingly to party standing in the seat, as shown below:

Party	Seats	2nds	Current Standings		W/Nom Inc	W/Nom 2nds	W/Nom Oth	W/TOT Nom
BQ	17/51 33%	20	17/49		17/49 35%	0/8 0%		17/57 30%
Cons	14/123 11%	117	14/125		15/119 13%	17/84 20%	7/46 15%	39/249 16%
Grn		1				0/1 0%	26/99 26%	26/100 26%
Lib	21/103 20%	116	21/96		22/95 23%	38/78 49%	16/38 42%	76/211 36%
NDP	12/29 41%	53	12/30		12/28 43%	16/39 41%	32/96 33%	60/163 37%
Ind	1		1/4		1
VAC			4

It's probably fair to conclude that the NDP is concentrating its recruitment of women candidates in the 53 seats in which it came 2nd last time, having already elected a 41% caucus, while the Liberals are concentrating fairly equally on their 2nd-place and other-place seats. The Conservatives are trying to step up their numbers a bit in the 2nd-place seats; and at 26%, the Green Party is somewhere between its best-ever and worst-ever showing on this metric.

-----

In an unrelated note to the above data, the number of "Other" party nominations has also jumped from 18 to 50, reflecting the list of Canadian Action Party (CAP) candidates I came across the other day. Notably absent from the list thus far is that party's (woman) leader, Connie Fogal, who has run in one of a number of Vancouver ridings in the past 4 elections.

CAP has also recruited candidates for 3 out of the 4 St. Paddy's Day by-elections.

Labels: 40th General Election Nominations, Bloc Québécois, Conservatives, Greens, Liberals, March 17 2008 By-elections, NDP, Women Candidates

We learned this morning that the Green Party's deputy leader, Claude William Genest, was chosen to be its candidate in the riding of Westmount – Ville-Marie at a contested nomination meeting. Given that incumbent M.P. Lucienne Robillard's resignation is set to take effect next week, leading to a possible additional by-election call, this makes Genest the only announced candidate besides Liberal Marc Garneau in a riding that will be watched very closely .

Has Genest run before? How could we find this out using the Pundits' Guide?

From any page, you can launch a "Quick Search" on his name. This search will look at any part of the name and is not case sensitive, but let's say we search on the last name "Genest". Claude William Genest is returned as the first Genest in the database, so selecting his name and clicking the Go button (or just double-clicking on the name) will bring the user to the Candidate index page for Claude William Genest (found here).

From the Candidate index page we can see that, in addition to being nominated in Westmount, Genest has run federally at least twice before (data prior to 1997 are not included); in the Québec ridings of Saint-Jean in 2004 and in Jeanne-Le Ber in 2006, both Bloc-Liberal contests. We can see that he ran for the Greens both times, placed 5th, and increased his vote percent from 3% to 5%. Following the hyperlinks to either of those ridings, we can look up the biographical details he supplied to the CBC web-sites (there are 2 CBC icons for the current set of ridings, one each from their 2004 and 2006 election pages).

Or, following the link to the riding of Westmount – Ville-Marie, we notice that Marc Garneau is the designated Liberal candidate, and then following the hyperlink on his name there, remind ourselves that last time he ran in Vaudreuil – Soulanges, losing to Bloc incumbent Meili Faille by a raw margin of over 9,000 votes.

Every resource in the Guide is or will eventually be hyperlinked to every other resource, and so there are multiple ways to arrive at any page. Should you want to bookmark the page you've finally arrived at, don't forget to click on the link called "Permalink" first before copying any address from the address bar, or adding the page to your favourites.

Clearly there is more than can and will be added to the Candidate Index pages ... links to Wikipedia pages, Parliamentary pages and votings records, party leadership and/or cabinet membership. It's all on my to-do list, along with a "Browse Candidates" page similar to the pages that now permit the browsing of parties, elections and regions. But first, I've got to finish the campaign finance and expenditure work.

Labels: 2_How to Search the Database, 40th General Election Nominations, Greens, Liberals, Westmount-Ville Marie

Bloc Québécois M.P. Caroline St-Hilaire (Longueuil – Pierre-Boucher) has announced she will not run for re-election, which is perhaps not too surprising, given that she is married to Saint-Lambert M.P. Maka Kotto, who was recently nominated to run provincially for the P.Q. in the riding of Bourget.

Meantime, NDP Leader Jack Layton has announced three Québec candidates with a labour background, including first-time candidates Jean-Claude Rocheleau from the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union (CEP) in Hochelaga and Alexandre Boulerice from the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) in Rosemont – La Petite-Patrie, while Réjean Bellemare a labour economist and former Steelworkers' staff rep will run for a third time in Repentigny.

The ridings are interesting choices because, after Laurier Ste-Marie (Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe's riding and the only Québec riding in which the NDP came second in 2006), Hochelaga and Rosemont – La Petite-Patrie have the 2nd and 4th highest proportion of tenants of any ridings in the province (Outremont ranks 3rd) according to the 2001 census. Moreover in making these choices, the party is targetting incumbent Bloc M.P.'s with whom it has historically had very close working relationships in Parliament, particularly Bloc M.P. Réal Ménard in Hochelaga.

They are also interesting, because they allow me to highlight the use of a "party pundit query" (seats in which a party placed 2nd) and a "region pundit query" (top 10% of ridings by greatest proportion of tenants) when browsing the Pundits' Guide database.

Labels: 40th General Election Nominations, Bloc Québécois, Labour, NDP

The nomination totals below exclude nominations for the four by-election ridings, but include another review of the Elections Canada Nominations Database, the party web-sites, Wikipedia and various news sources.

Labels: 40th General Election Nominations, Bloc Québécois, Conservatives, Greens, Liberals, NDP, Wild Rose, Women Candidates

A lot of the commentary on the situation in the by-election riding of
Desnethé – Missinippi – Churchill River has focussed on the tight margin in the 2006 general election race (67 votes, or 0.4 votes per poll) as compared with the 2004 general election (here are this morning's examples) .

But margin is not the whole story, as demonstrated below in a summary results table of DMCR and its predecessor riding Churchill River.

	1997 GE	2000 GE	2004 GE	2006 GE
Lib	5,994 (28.3%)	9,856 (41.6%)	5,815 (29.8%)	10,191 (41.2%)
NDP	7,288 (34.4%)	5,141 (21.7%)	3,910 (20.0%)	3,787 (15.3%)
Cons/CA/Ref	6,750 (31.8%)	7,679 (32.4%)	7,279 (37.2%)	10,124 (40.9%)
PC	1,077 (5.1%)	755 (3.2%)
Grn			539 (2.8%)	534 (2.2%)
Ind			1,923 (9.8%)
Oth		143 (0.6%)
TOTAL	21,109	23,574	19,466	24,636
ELECTORS	37,059 (57.2%TO)	39,807 (59.5%TO)	41,216 (47.4%TO)	42,315 (58.4%TO)

The Conservatives won in 2004 with a higher margin (8.7 votes per poll), but an uncharacteristically low turn-out (47.4% vs. an average of around 58%).

This distinction should be important to pundits wanting to handicap the race during the current set of by-elections. It's anyone's guess what effect the current controversy will have on the turn-out, but whichever party guesses right (or influences it to their benefit) will clearly have the advantage.

Labels: Desnethé-Missinippi-Churchill, March 17 2008 By-elections

Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion has just appointed recently-reelected Saskatchewan NDP MLA Joan Beatty to be the federal Liberal candidate in Desnethé – Missinippi – Churchill River. The nomination totals are now updated accordingly. There are now 7 women running out of 14 identified candidates to date in the 4 by-election ridings (3 Libs, 2 each NewDems and Conservatives, and 0 Greens). Click here to see the nomination details.

Trivia item: the NDP's candidate in the same riding during the 2006 General Election, Anita Jackson, was none other than Joan Beatty's constituency assistant. From the riding profile page, follow (for example) the CBC links to read the biographies of all the candidates from the last federal election.

Meantime, I've done a bit of work to try and accomodate the Safari 2.0 Mac browser, and I think the layout is working better overall. Internet Explorer 6 and Firefox 2.0 for Windows are working as intended. I still need to test on Safari 3.0 for the Mac and PC. Internet Explorer 5.2 for the Mac is a lost cause though, and I might just give up on it altogether.

Labels: Desnethé-Missinippi-Churchill, Liberals, March 17 2008 By-elections, NDP, Women Candidates

Although I haven't seen any reference to this in the Ottawa-based media, there is another candidate already in the field besides David Orchard, vying for the Liberal nomination in the Saskatchewan riding of Desnethé – Missinippi – Churchill River (hat-tip to commenter "mushroom" on the Calgary Grit blog). John K. Dorion of Prince Albert was appointed to the National Parole Board in 2004 (UPDATE: for three years until 2007, and he has also been Chief of the John Cochrane First Nation north of Prince Albert for the past five years). More background to the nomination race can be found here (UPDATE: and here; FURTHER UPDATE: here and here too; LAST UPDATE: and here).

Elections Canada published preliminary estimates of eligible voters ("number of electors on the preliminary list") for each of the four by-election ridings in the Canada Gazette on December 28th, which have now been added to the site.

Meantime, your Guide has been doing more plumbing work on the site, to make sure it displays and functions properly in Mac-based browsers, and to address some of the MySQL performance problems in a more permament way. At some point in January she will take a breather from winter in sunnier climes, but will be back in time to see whether a fifth by-election does indeed get called for Westmount-Ville Marie in Montréal.

Labels: Desnethé-Missinippi-Churchill, March 17 2008 By-elections