Departures

BondPapers very annoyingly starts noticing some things about by-elections, prompting Jason Hickman to very annoyingly start asking questions:

The stat that you didn't include, which I'd be interested in seeing (for both the current 6-year period, and the previous one), is: whether the seat-leavers who caused the by-election were from the government side, or the opposition, and whether there was a switch in parties after the by-election.

Annoying, because this corner has been collating exactly such statistics for postification purposes.

When the curiously delayed by-election in Terra Nova is finally called, it will be the ninth by-election call precipitated during the Williams era by the resignation of a sitting member of the Government caucus.

This excludes departures of non-Government MHAs, vacancies caused by death, and vacancies which were late enough that a by-election wasn’t required. (It includes the Paul Shelley case.)

By way of comparison — and stark contrast — Wells, Tobin, and Grimes between them lost nine caucus members to resignations, and early enough in the political calendar that a by-election was required.

Furthermore, there were also nine similar departures during the Smallwood, Moores, and Peckford premierships combined — with the caveat that in the Smallwood years vacancies often went unfilled until the next general election. This was particularly the case leading up to the 1956 election.