The Conservatives can’t blame the PPC for falling short of the Liberals in key Ontario ridings.
Before the election campaign, there were lots of concern that the PPC could ‘cost the Conservatives the election,’ by giving the Liberals a narrow margin in the decisive ridings.
Firstly, no party is owed votes, so if the Conservatives had lost votes to the PPC it’s not as if those votes were ‘stolen,’ they were the choice of free Canadians at the ballot box.
Secondly, fears of the PPC costing the Conservatives the election simply didn’t happen.
In the key Ontario ridings that decided the result, the Conservatives were decisively defeated by the Liberals, and the PPC vote had little impact on the margin.
In fact, according to an analysis by the Canadian Press, the People’s Party vote only made the difference in 7 seats.
If – and it’s a big if – all of the PPC votes in those ridings went to the Conservatives, the Liberals would have lost an additional 6 seats, and the NDP would have lost 1 additional seat, with the Conservatives winning 6 more.
That would not have impacted the final distribution of power in the election, in which the Liberals won a majority government mainly due to a dominant performance in the Greater Toronto Area. The Conservatives failed to make inroads there, actually losing support when compared to 2015. Even if every PPC vote went Conservative, that wouldn’t have changed what happened.
Spencer Fernando
Photos – YouTube
