CANADIAN FEDERAL ELECTIONS
PARLIAMENT 03
1874
Welcome to my playlist describing the Canadian federal elections from 1867 to the present. These videos will be dealing with how the voting went at the provincial level, with the seat divide given for each province. There will be little discussion of the issues involved except where absolutely necessary. This is not intended to be a partisan platform whatsoever, and I do apologise if my own personal views, which I do have, leak out into my descriptions of the seat count for each province. In most cases, I will list only the parties to actually win a seat for each province, although on some rare occasions there may be times when a third party needs to be included. With that, let’s sit back and enjoy the returns.
It had only been two years, but Sir John A. Macdonald’s Conservative / Liberal-Conservative coalition had been defeated in Parliament by Alexander Mackenzie’s Liberals. Mr. Mackenzie, quite honourably, called an immediate election to see if this was indeed the will of the Canadian people. Also to hopefully break a near tie in the House of Commons in his favour. Or possibly not, if the wily Sir John got his way instead. The cause of this fairly quick election had been the Pacific Scandal, wherein the Conservative parties had accepted sums of money from private railroad interests. These monies were then used to help fund the Conservative election campaigns. In return, the rail interests hoped for favourable contracts in the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway across Canada to Vancouver in British Columbia. Instead, this obvious breach of ethics from a party in power with only the thinnest of mandates, led to the fall of Prime Minister Macdonald’s government. Could he get it back?
The Dominion of Canada was up to seven provinces by now, with Prince Edward Island finally throwing its might behind the fairly young country. We’ll start with the beginning of the alphabet, though, at British Columbia. Once again, the fight across Canada was to be one of the ruling Conservatives and Liberal-Conservatives against the challenging Liberal Party. British Columbia had only six of the total 206 seats on offer, but the results were promising for those who wanted a change in government. Three of those six seats went outright to the Liberals, and another to a member styling himself as an Independent Liberal. This left just two more seats in British Columbia, which the Conservatives and Liberal-Conservatives split between them. This was essentially a reversal of the parties’ fortunes in BC just two years before. In terms of popular vote, the Liberals garnered 34.1% of votes cast, plus 15.4% for Independent Liberals, far outshining the Conservatives and Liberal-Conservatives with 4.5% and 16.9% respectively. Of course, the Unknown juggernaut weighed in with its 29.2%, keeping the Liberal Party from claiming an absolute majority in the province.
Moving east across the Prairies we come to Manitoba, which still had just four seats up for contest. No one party dominated these four. In fact, the Liberals won just one seat, tying with the Conservatives. This left two seats to go to Independents. One of these held firm to his independence and declared as just that: Independent. The other, however, declared himself to be an Independent Conservative, giving honours, however slightly, to Sir John A.’s government. The popular vote, however, was interesting. The Liberal Party captured the votes of 47.0% of Manitobans at the polls, with the Independent Conservative at 15.9% and the Conservatives at just 13.8%. Even the Independent managed 9.5% of the province’s total votes from his one riding. Unknown, as per usual, rounded out the field with 13.8% of votes cast. From these counts, it appears that the Conservatives may have been lucky to have done as well as they did. The Independent, by the way, was a name extremely well known in Canadian history. It was Louis Riel, who captured 73.86% of votes cast in his riding of Provencher.
[CONTINUED IN COMMENTS]
19 сен 2024
