Liberals cruise to majority government

The party atmosphere slowly building at La Place Rendez-Vous here last Thursday night as NDP supporters awaited election results quickly was replaced by the quiet murmur of people asking “what went wrong” as the tallies became known.
And while a cheer erupted when it was projected that local MPP and NDP leader Howard Hampton had easily won here, the dejection from the crowd, and from the leader himself, came from the knowledge their party had taken a hit province-wide.
“It’s absolutely the worst-case scenario,” Hampton said later that night of the NDP’s loss of two seats (nine to seven), costing it official party status at Queen’s Park.
In the days leading up to the election, Hampton had all but guaranteed the NDP would win 30 seats and, at the very least, form the official opposition to a Liberal government.
Those prognostications definitely were overstated.
The Liberals—led by Dalton McGuinty—cruised to a landslide victory, capturing 72 or the 103 seats. The outgoing Conservative government of Premier Ernie Eves salvaged just 24 seats to form the official opposition.
When Hampton was asked “what went wrong,” the frustrated NDP leader replied by indicating he didn’t feel the party had been that far away from winning at least another 10 seats.
“It’s frustrating when you improve your percentage of the vote but lose seats,” Hampton said of the NDP winning about 15 percent of the popular vote, up from 12 percent in 1999.
“We had a number of ridings we did exceptionally well in,” he added. “We had 40-41 percent of the vote in some of those places.
“With the Conservative collapse [in those ridings], it really meant we [had to get those votes],” he explained. “The reality is most of it went to the Liberals.”
He added if the Conservative candidates had done better in those ridings, it would have been possible to win.
“Literally in 10 ridings across the province, 100 votes here and 200 votes there . . .” Hampton said of how close things were. “If you took 2,000 votes and redistributed them across 10 ridings, we would have won them.”
Something the NDP has been pushing for in the last two elections is proportional representation. “If you get 10 percent of the vote, you get 10 percent of the seats,” Hampton explained, though adding a threshold of five percent of the vote should be needed to win seats.
He added voter turnout continues to decline and that in the first-past-the-post system, you can “elect a majority government with less than 50 percent of the vote.”
“People are becoming frustrated and cynical,” he said. “The number of people thinking about it [proportional representation] is increasing.”