Canadian federal polling division files

[Linus Van Pelt]

Just to avoid duplication, I'm going to have a go at B.C. Southern Interior next, even though it'll be a while since I'm pretty busy at the moment.

Having just downloaded the spreadsheet, I note the humorous results for the community of Vallican, BC:
NDP 226 (75.1%)
Green 44 (14.6%)
Conservative 26 (8.6%)
Liberal 4 (1.3%)
Marxist-Leninist 1 (0.3%)

A mere four communists away from an epic win. This is in the Slocan Valley, which is known for its high population of, shall we say, Canadians from the noted American immigration of 1965 to 1973

[Linus Van Pelt]

Queens County is interesting considering the provincial NDP only barely won the seat there in 2006 while running a close second province-wide and without a Liberal candidate.

Yeah, the NDP's recent gains here are quite interesting, considering it's traditionally Tory and the party's other areas on the north-central mainland remain quite strong. The area is very WASPy:  South Shore-St. Margaret's is 307th out of 308th in % of Catholics, with only Abbotsford lower. (which, given the levels of non-religion in B.C. compared to the Maritimes, is saying something).

[Linus Van Pelt]

Well clearly the way to win Nunavut is to have a candidate with deep personal roots in all regions at once.

[Linus Van Pelt]

B.C. Southern Interior (turned out I didn't end up having as much else to do as I thought)
Four insets follow, outlined in red on the main map.


Similkameen. Princeton in the northwest, Keremeos in the southeast.


South Okanagan. Osoyoos in the south, Oliver in the north. The NDP poll is a reserve.


Boundary country. Main town Grand Forks.


West Kootenays. The town in the northeast is Nelson, the one just left of the centre of the map is Castlegar, and then the row on the bottom from left to right goes Rossland, Warfield, Trail, Montrose, Fruitvale, Salmo.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Why are the Kootenays so NDP, and is that pattern continued in Kootenay--Columbia?

The Kootenays in Kootenay-Columbia are very Conservative, quite the opposite.  You see the same provincially where East Kootenay went strongly BC Liberal and if you add the BC Conservatives over 60% voted centre-right, whereas Nelson-Creston and West Kootenay are both solid NDP ridings provincially.

It is sort of a weird combo, but here is my best guess

Grand Forks and Castlegar have a large Dhukobor population who are pacifist and communalist in lifestyle

Trail has a large smelter so heavily unionized

Rossland is a ski resort so your liberal attitude not unlike Sun Valley and Jackson in the US.

Nelson is a hippie enclave, has a large draft dodger population from the Vietnam War in the 60s.

In fact in Kootenay-Columbia, the northern parts of the riding up around Golden and Revelstoke are the most competitive parts, the Southern parts are staunchly Conservative.  In Cranbrook, the Tories got 64%.

I think this basically captures it, except that Castlegar is also a unionized paper mill town, and Grand Forks also has some forestry. Though I don't mean to deny the religious-left influence (Doukhobors are a Quaker-like pacifist sect who fled Czarist Russia for western Canada in the 19th Century).

The heavily NDP area north of Castlegar and Nelson is the Slocan Valley, which was originally a Doukhobor farming area but became a major Vietnam draft-dodger area. The rural areas in the southern part of the inset are more working-class resource-based, but there's still something of a countercultural vibe.

So basically you've got a kind of unique combination where the working-class is very unionized in a few large resource operations, the traditional rural religious population is unusually left-wing, and the middle-class is at the far left end of North American middle-class culture.

[Linus Van Pelt]

One other random and slightly amusing note is that the NDP reserve in the Okanagan is the Osoyoos band, whose chief Clarence Louie is something of a darling of the national right for going around telling everybody about how natives need to get off their dependency on federal welfare, forget about old treaties, and succeed in private business.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Just a side question, I know Victoria has a lot of British immigrants so I wonder what part of Britain most came from as I know the Industrial North is quite left wing, but the South is more Conservative, so I wonder if a lot came from the Industrial North.  Off course the strong NDP Victoria probably has more to do with the large civil servant population, never mind Sidney which is quite Conservative I believe has a large British immigrant population.

British immigrants (as opposed to just people of British origin) tend to be old, in Canada for a long time, and better integrated (to the point that there isn't really a "community" of them) than any other immigrant group, since immigration from Britain was mostly from the post-WWII period and earlier, when things were still pretty grim in much of the UK. I doubt there's much concentration either politically or geographically, except that the posh didn't need to emigrate, and probably they're a bit more NDP/Con than average because of the British party system. I don't think they particularly came to Victoria more than anywhere else, but Victoria just has a lot of Waspy retirees, a group in which people born in Britain are over-represented.

In fact, the demographics of people who retire to the Victoria area are pretty similar to those who retire to the rest of eastern Vancouver Island (i.e. middle-to-upper-middle-class white people from the western part of the country), but there's a huge difference in the political outlook of someone who wants to retire in an artsy Victorian provincial capital/university town and someone who wants a weird pseudo-Florida planned community north of Nanaimo where you have to drive everywhere.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Jasper (Yellowhead riding). All non-reserve polls outside the national park strongly Conservative. Greens are quite strong here too, second place in a few polls.

[Linus Van Pelt]

And now Banff. Green/Con tie in the big southern one. We thus have our Opportunity for Totally Uninformed Speculation for the night: of the two Alberta Rocky mountain national park towns, both of which are basically entirely tourism and park-dependent, why is the non-Tory vote in one NDP and the other Green? Maybe due to physical locations Banff draws more from Calgary and Jasper more from Edmonton for young park/tourism employees?

[Linus Van Pelt]

I thought of having a look at Calgary, but by my quick scan the poll counts in the two most liberal, inner-city ridings in the city are Lee Richardson 217, Green 2, Liberal 1, and Jim Prentice 234, Green 1 NDP 1, so I think I'll give it a miss.

[Linus Van Pelt]

I can also do one of British Columbia by Regional District if anyone is interested. 

Yes, this would be interesting.

In the central area, those are around Mount Royal, thus most Anglophone or Allophone as well as they are wealthy and have a large Jewish community.  The Bloc Quebecois got absolutely clobbed here while the Tories got over 30% in both Hampstead and Cote Saint Luc (I believe both have a large Orthodox Jewish community) whom the Tories did well amongst.

The Jewish communities here aren't particularly Orthodox - there are definitely some in CSL which is quite diverse along economic, Ashkenazi/Sephardi and secular/Orthodox lines, but Hampstead is just a standard rich North American suburb where almost everyone happens to be Jewish, like some places the north shore of Long Island. The main Hasidic community is actually in a specific corner of Outremont of all places. (There's a Hasidic bus that goes non-stop from Outremont to Brooklyn, which people take to avoid gender-mixing, non-kosher food, etc., that is having perpetual licensing problems because of not going through the regular bus terminals )

The Town of Mount Royal proper, meanwhile, is actually a lot more Francophone than people assume just looking at the riding results, 44% at the last census. Like Francophones in the rest of the more Anglo enclaves, it's a well-off, business-conservative type group, very federalist.

[Linus Van Pelt]

The main Hasidic community is actually in a specific corner of Outremont of all places.

Isn't Outremont close to where the original Jewish parts of Montreal were? Because Hasidim in Britain have tended to stay fairly close to such areas - Stamford Hill is close to the old East End, Broughton Park is close to Cheetham Hill and I don't think the ones in Gateshead have ever moved out of Bensham (probably something to do with the yeshiva there).

Yes, the traditional Jewish community was around the western end of the Plateau and in Mile-End (i.e. NW* Laurier-Ste-Marie & SE* Outremont riding). I don't know how back the Hasidim go in Outremont, so I don't know whether it's just a natural progression north out of the old area or has some other origin.

*(here, as is universal in Montreal, using the geographically inaccurate arrangement according to which the river and downtown are the south, Laval is to the north, la-point-de-l'ile is the east etc., so Boul. St-Laurent is the "western" end of Laurier-Ste-Marie).

[Linus Van Pelt]

Huron-Bruce, 2008.


towns:
top row, left to right: Southampton (top)/Port Elgin (bottom); Kincardine; Walkerton.
middle row, left to right: Goderich, Clinton(left)/Seaforth(right); Wingham.
bottom: Exeter


I can't really figure out the rural pattern. As far as I know the whole riding is basically your standard Anglo-with-some-Irish-and-German, and the former socially conservative Liberal MP Steckle was from the more Tory south end of the riding.

The tie in Goderich is Con/NDP, the others Con/Lib.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Huron-Bruce is interesting. What's up with that NDP poll? I think the NDP candidate was the former MPP...

It's the former Clinton air force base (of Steven Truscott notoriety), which was decommissioned and made into a civilian town in the 1960's. Given what military housing tends to be like (not bad exactly, but small and standardized), it wouldn't surprise me if it's quite low-income.

In Churchill, there's a surprising number of places whose Tory % shows they're clearly Native but that voted overwhelmingly for Niki Ashton. A few examples...
#39 (Thicket Portage) - NDP 25 Liberal 5 Conservative 1
#41 (York Landing) - NDP 62 Liberal 12 Conservative 0
#44 (Ilford) NDP 31 Liberal 3 Conservative 0
#116 (Pauingassi First Nation) - NDP 128 Liberal 25 Conservative 4
#118 (Little Grand Rapids) - NDP 180 Liberal 60 Conservative 10

Then there's some with the reverse, like:
#107 (Waasagomach) Liberal 80 NDP 24 Conservative 1 Green 1
#108 (Garden Hill) Liberal 122 NDP 15 Conservative 6
#124 (Fort Alexander) Liberal 199 NDP 49 Conservative 6 Green 4

and then some Native areas where they're actually quite close, like:
#5 (Brochet) NDP 41 Liberal 38 Green 2 Conservative 0
#109 (Red Sucker Lake) Liberal 50 NDP 37 Green 3 Conservative 0

[Linus Van Pelt]

You will find that the rural poll vote displays a tendancy for German/Catholic polls to vote Liberal, near the village of Mildmay in Bruce . Normanby township (and Hanover town), on the other hand, are German Lutheran and quite Conservative in County Grey.

Aha, nice. I had wondered about something like that, since I have noticed that when you drive inland on Hwy 9 from Kincardine there are certain stretches with an increase in signs like "abortion stops a beating heart" and more German names on farms and businesses and so on, but I didn't know well enough to match it with the polls, and I didn't know they were Catholic rather than evangelical.

[Linus Van Pelt]

One (anecdotal, I admit) thing re Churchill as well as Kenora and Desnethe-Missinippi-Churchill River: I distantly know a guy in Toronto who's from a tiny place way up at the north end of Kenora riding, and he calls both his people and his native language "Oji-Cree", because, he says, the boundary between the more central-Ontario Ojibwe and the more northern Cree is pretty vague up there, with dialects gradually becoming more similar and nobody paying too much attention to who's in which group. Which suggests to me it's unlikely that "tribal differences" would be causing such big differences in voting.

This is really just a guess, but what I would guess instead is that when a local chief supports a particular party, this can become very influential in the community. The one case where I know the party affiliation is Grand Rapids, because the chief is Ovide Mercredi who used to be national Grand Chief of the AFN, and is an NDPer, and at least the polls in the place name Grand Rapids (which I'm not sure lines up completely with the First Nation) were 70% for Ashton to 21% for Keeper.

The thing to remember about most of these places is that they're north of the road network, with the only outside access by bush plane, so a whole order of magnitude more isolated than even very remote places in most first-world countries. It's not like it's easy to hop over to the next reserve on Sunday afternoon to have a little chat about who to vote for.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Kamloops - this will turn into a real swing seat like V. Island North when the BC riding sizes get reduced to the national average, since 86,000 of the current 115,000 live in Kamloops.



Off the map, the rest of the riding is basically all Conservative, and generally by large margins, except a tie in the lumber-mill village of Avola, plus the Simpcw of the North Thompson whose one poll was 77% NDP and only 4% Conservative.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Montreal island polls with no BQ votes.
EDIT just to be clear: the red polls are those polls in which exactly 0 votes were cast for the Bloc Quebecois. The east end of the city is cut off at the top, but there are no such polls there. Riding boundaries off the island are not shown.



It's kind of surprising there aren't more, but one thing I've learned from doing all this is that it's extremely hard to actually get to zero for a major party.

[Linus Van Pelt]

I don't understand what is going on here

I looked at it for a while, too, but I think Blue is a poll in which the Bloc received at least one vote and Red is a poll in which the Bloc received no votes whatsoever.

Yes, this is what it is. Sorry for not being more explicit, I'll go back and edit it. (That blue is just what the files come in in QuantumGIS - I've been filling it in always, but here it would have been a pain).

[Linus Van Pelt]

Do we have maps for the 4 ridings having by-elections?

Save for CCMV, yes. It's been asked, oh, a million times.

It's not that interesting, in 2006 the NDP and Liberals have just a couple of polls each around Truro. In 2008 Casey won every non-Micmac poll.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Hey, great, 506!

Is there really a Green poll in Cape Breton-Canso? Strange.

As Hashemite noted, the Haute Gaspesie-Matapedia-etc. riding has an odd pattern. Actually, this whole result is kind of odd - why would Nancy Charest be so personally popular as to almost carry the riding in a terrible election for the PLC and yet have lost her provincial riding (where the ADQ wasn't even all that strong) in a PLQ victory the previous year?

I think there's a reasonable chance that otherwise inexplicable Liberal polls in the middle of Bloc territory may be heavy on seniors. I say this because if you look at the lists for 400+ polls, seniors' homes (which aren't on most of our maps) sometimes went Liberal even in typical franco BQ areas.

[Linus Van Pelt]

In the case of Mississauga, asides from Mississauga South, my guess, although I could be wrong is the Tory polls are the predominately WASP areas whereas the Liberals did better in areas with large immigrant and visible minority communities.  

The Liberal parts of Mississauga South are basically white working-class (though not poor) areas - in the west is the old town of Clarkson which is the traditional bedroom community for Oakville Ford Assembly across the city line, and the eastern end bordering Etobicoke is sort of Continental/white/Catholic - Portuguese, Polish etc. (though like Woodbridge for the Italians, mostly a bit younger and more affluent than those who still live in the original European-immigrant areas on the west side of Toronto proper.)

Edit: Ayah, Linus, read: yes, you said "aside from Mississauga South", not "in" it. So let's just say my post complements yours rather than correcting it.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Any more requests for maps by municipality or region.

Do you have BC by municipality?

[Linus Van Pelt]

bump - Sarnia-Lambton, except for the outer rural parts. There's one Liberal poll downtown - sorry, I realize the pink/orange contrast isn't great with polls this small. Also, both grey ties are Con/NDP.


All right, challenge of the day: even if you don't know the city at all, you should be able to look at the picture at the top of the Wikipedia page for Sarnia and be able to tell roughly on this map where it's taken from and where it's looking.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sarnialakeshore_02_2004_0717AB.jpg

[Linus Van Pelt]

Great map! Are the two small towns to the east Oil Springs and Petrolia?

Thanks! The larger town in the east is Petrolia, and the one north of it with four dark (60+) Conservative polls is Wyoming. The map doesn't really extend to cover Oil Springs, though the smaller rectangle at the bottom right is the start of it.