For some time I've been hoping to conduct an analysis of the rate of the political parties' nominations progress, and I think I finally have a complete enough dataset from all the parties now to make the comparison reasonably valid.



From the above chart, we can see that the Conservatives enjoyed a substantial lead for quite awhile, but based on their having automatically renominated all their incumbents on May 4, 2009. The Green Party also devoted a great deal of early attention to nominating its candidates. The Bloc Québécois put an early push on nominations, but then took a breather over the summer before stepping up the pace again in the fall.

The Liberals went from having almost no nominated candidates at the time of their Vancouver convention last May, to having nearly 80 by the time the House of Commons first returned, and another 30 by this week. The NDP did very little nominating until its August convention in Halifax concluded, but has dramatically stepped up the pace since then, with a further 20 meetings now scheduled before the middle of November.

Here's how that progress looks in terms of regional and gender distribution at this moment in time:

	YT	NT	NU	BC	AB	SK	MB	ON	QC	NB	NS	PE	NL	Tot	Pct	Wom	Pct
Seats	1	1	1	36	28	14	14	106	75	10	11	4	7	308
Lib		1		8	5		4	49	32	1	5			105	34%	37	35.2%
NDP				10	5	5	3	34	6		2		2	67	22%	24	35.8%
Grn	1		1	14	19	6	11	57	41	2	3	1		156	51%	49	31.4%
BQ									33					33	11%	7	21.2%
Cons			1	26	28	13	11	68	19	6	4	1		177	57%	32	18.1%
Oth					1			1						2	1%	1	50.0%

I hope to periodically update this analysis over time. Please note that it excludes candidates who were nominated but then stepped down, as I had just deleted those nominations from the main table and moved them over to a separate table of deleted candidates. Thus, the line is not perfectly accurate but, to this point, we don't have too many officially nominated candidates who've stepped down in this election, so it's close enough for a first effort.

As always, if you know about any nominated candidates that are missing or who have stepped down, or if you have nomination news or nomination meeting news, or just want to pass along a candidate's website or a clipping about their nomination meeting, please drop me a line. I'm collecting the nomination/selection date (now you can see why), along with the type of nomination (contested, acclamation, appointment, protected incumbent, other) for the kind of analysis already undertaken here.

Labels: 41st General Election Nominations