How many Torontonians does it take to change a light bulb?
One, he or she just holds it up and lets the world revolve around them.
OK, OK, it’s an oldie, but I need to make a point here.
Everyone is still talking about the urban/rural split in the election. I criticized those promoting this hogwash once when I wrote about urban sprawl. This time I have a little help from Kerry Diotte.
| Complainers should venture onto the Elections Canada website to check the voting results.
That site declares there were eight Conservatives elected in Calgary and eight in Edmonton. Last I checked, citizens in those cities aren’t allowed to keep pigs and chickens in their backyards – and both burgs have a metro population of roughly one million people. According to Elections Canada there were also three Conservatives elected in Winnipeg, five elected in metro Ottawa, four in Quebec City, three in Regina and three in Halifax. Don’t those qualify as urban seats? It is so typical that people in Toronto would make a criticism about this phony urban-rural split simply because they didn’t elect Tories. |
You see, this is exactly how I feel. I lived in Toronto the first 26 years of my life. It’s home, and I visit regularly. But until I moved to Ottawa over 10 years ago, I thought Toronto was the cat’s meow. But it didn’t take long after I left the Big Smoke to realize that it wasn’t “all that”.
But taking Kerry’s advice, I did venture over to the Elections Canada website. One I am all to familiar with. And from their data, I created the following spreadsheet.
click to enlarge
Every city listed is an urban center. Just looking at the three biggest cities is not giving a true indication. If you include them all, the Liberal/NDP combination is 2.46 Million Votes. The Conservative total is 1.58 million. When you think about how lopsided the three biggest cities are, the rest stack up nicely and even put the Liberal/Conservative vote ratio at almost 50/50.
If you add up all the smaller urban centers of 100,000 or more people, and toss in the urban sprawl of places like Oakville, Coquitlam, and Whitby/Oshawa, you can quickly see that the urban total would shift pretty quick.
I would also like to point out that the % who voted in each urban area was a dismal 64%. Ottawa, however, blew the national average away with a voter turnout of 74%. Well done Ottawa!