Skippy the Wonderdog catches the evil Canadian liberal media doing a bit of mind reading about what voters were saying when they gave Stephen Harper a minority government last Monday.
So opines the Toronto Sun:
What voters collectively said on Monday was crystal clear.They want to test-drive a Harper government -- one constrained, but not paralysed, by the opposition.
The irascible canine is rightly suspicious of this interpretation:
The fact that their aggregated votes allow Mr. Harper a minority government does not suggest that the voters want to "test drive" a Conservative government.On the contrary: the record quite clearly shows that some 64% of Canadians would be quite happy if Stephen Harper was not Prime Minister. The suggestion made by the Sun, that voters will punish the opposition for interfering with Harper's clear mandate, is horseshit of the highest order.
In fact, the Canadian people were saying something quite different than what the Sun would have us believe.
More than half the people who voted Conservative in Monday's election did so mainly because they thought it was time for a change, according to an Environics poll conducted for the CBC the weekend before the vote.Only 41 per cent of them said they were voting for Stephen Harper's party because they wanted a Conservative government, compared to 54 per cent who said they were casting their ballots for the sake of change.
The remaining five per cent didn't know why they were voting Conservative or did not answer the question.
Now, this is not all voters we're talking about. This is just the 36.3 percent that voted Conservative. So, let's do a quick recalculation: 54 percent of the 36.3 percent of the people that voted did so because it was time for a change, not as an endorsement of Conservative Party policies or beliefs. Now I am supremely shitty at math, but to me, that reduces the number of people actually supporting the aforementioned beliefs and policies to a mere 16 percent (or so) of voters who bothered to show up at the polls. So, a lukewarm endorsement for Harper would be a generous description. A hold-your-nose-and-vote-to-throw-the-Liberals-out endorsement would be more accurate.
We thank the Toronto Sun editorial board for this insightful view into the workings of the evil liberal media.
And, since the turnout was about 64%, that's a final count of about 10% of Canadians who want conservative policies badly enough to vote for them.
Good point, GK. Indeed, a rousing mandate.
Heck, go one farther. Ridings aren't remotely equal in terms of what one person's voice means - rural votes are overcounted, remember? And guess where the Cons' support is... I'd bet that that 10% estimate gets scaled further down to about 8% or so when you take that into account. (Probably further, if one were able to break down the CBC "why did you vote Tory?" poll by urban/rural, but the data probably don't exist.)
Put that data point earlier in the sequence so it shows up as a proper ~20% or whatever, not as "a mere 2%" in the final total.
Mind you that the Senate Clause ends up weighing in for the Libs, and is a stronger factor IIRC. So it could be that that 10% of the population actually is something like 10% of the votes. Aww, shucks.