Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from June, 2014

Electoral "lone wolves:" a male phenomenon

I promised I would come back to the number of women who ran for minor parties.  25 out of 177 total minor candidates (not including the Greens, but including independents) Certainly those running for such parties are very unlikely to be elected. The point is not about electoral success but about spreading a message. I'm not including the Green Party of Ontario in this group because unlike the minor parties the Green's ran candidates in all 107 ridings and generally posted returns of over 1000 votes. While not contenders for electoral success they can make a much more significant impact on the returns of the three main parties and have consistent generalizable support. Minor parties don't have the same generalizable support and are less likely to significantly impact on the competitions between the Liberals, P.C.s and NDP, unless its a very, very close race. An argument can be made that ALL of these parties (as there is one that runs under the moniker of none-of-the-abov...

Ontario Provincial Election: Not Bad for Women

I'm opening this blog by dealing with big-P Politics, that is the politics of government, the state, and elections. I want to break down the results of the Ontario provincial election held on the 12th of June to see how women fared. It was a good election for women, not least because women now make up 55% of the NDP caucus. That's 11 out of 21 elected MPPs. Here's how this breaks down. I am using the "unofficial" results from the Elections Ontario website which I printed and counted by hand. Please forgive any miscounts on my part, and to quote Elections Ontario, "These results are being provided for purposes of convenience. They are unofficial and the official results will be published by the Chief Electoral Office at a later date." The best place to start is with how many women the main parties ran. The Ontario Liberal Party ran 37 women, which is down from the 42 which ran in 2010. This is roughly 34.5% of the total Ontario Liberal Party candi...