Hoisted with their own petard

NDP talking points return to haunt them.

I'm tired of hearing that 60% of Canadian voters didn't vote for the Conservatives. Jack Layton and the NDP love to repeat this fact, as if to suggest the majority government is not legitimate. Well then, best case scenario, 70 % of Canadians didn't vote for the NDP. But wait, Quebec is an anomaly in this election. Let's take them out of the equation and look at all of Canada with Quebec excluded. Now, the Conservatives receive 48% of the national votes (vs. 40% Quebec included) and the NDP drops to 20%. 80% of Canadian voters outside Quebec didn't support the NDP. Remember this, Jack!

Now the NDP is changing their tactics, not being satisfied with the 40-60 stats for the Conservatives. In the May 5th edition of the Nanaimo News Bulletin, the re-elected Nanaimo-Cowichan NDP MP Jean Crowder crowed "It's important to remember the country has a Conservative majority with less than a quarter of the registered voting population supporting it."

What about the NDP? Less than 20% of registered Canadian voters supported the NDP. Again, let's exclude Quebec from the equation. Outside of Quebec, a mere 12% of Canadians supported the NDP. You can call the newly minted official opposition "Smiling Jack and the 12% Party".

And if you want to enter into the whole quagmire about proportional representation? The NDP received 42.9% of the vote in Quebec but got 77% of the seats (58 of 75 seats) Let's take away 26 of those seats to more fairly represent their share of the popular vote. We could start with the Vegas MP without much protest!


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