Turnout (was re: Private to everyone)

Guys, guys, guys: the comparison is not as between federal and provincial voter turnout in Newfoundland and Labrador. The comparison is between provincial voter turnout among the various provinces.

And the picture is not a very pretty one. Out of the ten provinces, in the most recent provincial general election, Newfoundland and Labrador had a voter turnout of 57.9 percent, or sixth out of the ten:

Prov	Election	Turnout	Rank
BC	2013	57.1	7
AB	2012	57.0	8
SK	2011	66.0	3
MB	2011	55.8	9
ON	2014	52.1	10
QC	2014	71.4	2
NB	2014	65.4	4
NS	2013	59.0	5
PE	2011	76.5	1
NL	2011	57.9	6

And, as noted by one of the very papers that the much-maligned (for no good reason) Samara study cites, between 1965 and 2009, Newfoundland and Labrador's provincial voter turnout averaged 71.1%... again, sixth out of the ten provinces:

Maybe there's some evidence of high voter engagement that Samara missed, and which would put paid to their conclusions.

The provincial voter-turnout record is not that evidence.

Synopsis

Count-by-count summary of the Newfoundland and Labrador Liberal leadership vote (in points):

First count:

	Points	%
Dwight	2130.05	44.4%
Cathy	1089.05	22.7%
Jim	128.05	2.7%
Danny	131.69	2.7%
Paul	1321.15	27.5%

Second count:

	Points	%
Dwight	2257.15	47.0%
Cathy	1144.99	23.9%
Jim
Danny
Paul	1397.86	29.1%

Third count:

	Points	%
Dwight	2832.29	59.0%
Cathy
Jim
Danny
Paul	1967.71	41.0%

Reallocation of points:

	1 to 2	2 to 3
Dwight	127.1	575.14
Catty	55.94
Jim
Danny
Paul	76.71	569.85

Grassroots

To put the truly astonishing Newfoundland and Labrador Liberal leadership vote into perspective, here is a table of "open" party leadership contests in Canada, both federal and provincial, since the Parti Québécois leadership race of 1985.

These include party leaderships decided by open, one-member-one-vote member- or supporter-based voting, or conventions which were open to all party members. It also includes party leaderships which were geographically weighted one-member-one-vote, but excludes internal party votes for delegated leadership conventions.

Colours follow the traditional partisan colour scheme, with the addition of purple for Quebec sovereigntist parties, and green for non-"Conservative" right-of-centre parties.

The "votes" figure takes the total number of valid votes on the largest ballot (or count, in the cast of preferential ballots.) The per-capita figure expresses the total number of leadership votes in the largest ballot as a percentage of the voters list in the province (or Canada) at the chronologically nearest federal election. (One exception: the 1990 Ontario PC leadership is expressed as a percentage of the 1990 Ontario provincial voters list.)

Since 1985, the average open provincial party leadership has attracted about 1.5% of that province's electors. At 5.8%, as a pure exercise in voter-mobilization, the NL Liberal leadership is a runaway success.

Additions and corrections are welcome.

Despite the wrinkles and gremlins, the NL Liberal Party, and the teams behind the five candidates, deserve full credit for driving this leadership process, which, adjusted for population, is one of the biggest exercises of grassroots party democracy in recent Canadian history.

Party	Jurisdiction	Year	Votes	Per-capita
PC	AB	2006	144,289	6.2%
Liberal	NL	2013	23,873	5.8%
Liberal	PEI	1996	4,329	4.4%
PC	AB	1992	78,251	4.2%
Liberal	PEI	2003	3,969	3.6%
PC	AB	2011	78,176	3.1%
NDP	SK	2001	19,465	2.8%
Liberal	NB	2012	14,672	2.5%
Parti Québécois	QC	1985	96,974	2.1%
Parti Québécois	QC	2005	105,259	1.8%
Liberal	BC	2011	54,879	1.8%
NDP	SK	2009	9,444	1.3%
NDP	SK	2013	8,719	1.2%
PC	MB	2006	9,143	1.1%
Liberal	NS	1992	6,998	1.0%
Bloc Québécois	QC	1997	48,437	0.9%
Wild Rose	AB	2009	16,400	0.7%
PC	NB	2008	4,029	0.7%
NDP	BC	2011	20,016	0.6%
Social Credit	BC	1993	14,833	0.6%
Liberal	AB	1994	11,004	0.6%
PC	ON	2002	44,188	0.6%
Canadian Alliance	Can	2000	120,557	0.6%
Saskatchewan	SK	1998	3,344	0.5%
PC	SK	1994	3,298	0.5%
PC	NS	1995	2,985	0.4%
Conservative	Can	2004	97,397	0.4%
Liberal	Can	2013	104,552	0.4%
Liberal	AB	1998	7,636	0.4%
Canadian Alliance	Can	2002	88,228	0.4%
PC	ON	2004	32,390	0.4%
Liberal	AB	2011	8,640	0.3%
PC	ON	2009	25,429	0.3%
NDP	Can	2002	58,202	0.3%
Liberal	BC	1993	6,540	0.3%
NDP	Can	2012	65,108	0.3%
PC	ON	1990	15,850	0.3%
Bloc Québécois	QC	2011	12,846	0.2%
Liberal	AB	2008	4,860	0.2%
PC	Can	1998	30,100	0.2%
NDP	ON	2009	11,150	0.1%
Liberal	AB	2004	2,733	0.1%
ADQ	QC	2009	3,912	0.1%
Wild Rose	AB	2005	1,128	0.1%

Trending topic

In response to a sudden blurst of interest in the subject on the twitters earlier today, here is a canonical listing of political contributions made by local governments since the dawn of time in 1996.

All contributions have been made to parties outside of writ periods, with the exception of the first two in the table, which were election-period contributions to an independent candidate in The Straits and White Bay North.

[Edited to add....] Also in 2004, the Progressive Conservative party receive a contribution of $150 from th Western Health Care Corp. This would seem to be the only such contribution on record from any of the regional health care authorities to any party or candidate.

Year   Donor                              Candidate/Party   Amount 

1996   COMMUNITY OF GREEN ISLAND BROOK    COATES, Dennis    $353.41
1996   SANDY COVE COMMUNITY               COATES, Dennis    $111.00
1998   Town of Musgravetown               Lib               $150.00
2001   Town of Cottlesville               Lib               $150.00
2001   Town of Cottlesville               Lib               $ 50.00
2004   Town of Stephenville               PC                $750.00
2005   City of Corner Brook               PC                $750.00
2005   Town of Stephenville               PC                $750.00
2006   City of Corner Brook               PC                $750.00
2007   City of Corner Brook               PC                $750.00
2008   City of Corner Brook               PC                $750.00
2009   Town of Carbonear                  PC                $400.00
2009   Town of Harbour Grace              PC                $160.00
2009   Town of Marystown                  PC                $375.00
2010   Town of Badger Incorporated        PC                $400.00
2010   Town of Carbonear Incorporated     PC                $150.00
2010   Town of Carbonear Incorporated     PC                $100.00

Torngat turnout

With a nod to Nain Bay for highlighing this interesting fact, the district of Torngat Mountains had its largest-ever absolute vote turnout on Tuesday. In fact, it has set new high-water marks for total vote in each of the past three elections:

         Total      % turnout
1979       848      ?
1982      1139      ?
1985      1151      81.7%
1989      1327      90.4%
1993      1218      83.0%
1996      1134      84.6%
1999      1223      80.2%
2003      1368      67.6%
2007      1480      71.2%
2011      1516      71.2%* (unofficial)

While highest in absolute numbers, it wasn't the highest in relative turnout as expressed as a share of eligible electors. Still, Torngat Mountains has a long history of consistently high turnout. In eight provincial elections since 1985 inclusive, Torngat Mountains has had higher-than-provincial-average turnout in all but two of them, and was only off by 0.6% in 1993. Remarkably, in four of the past five elections, turnout in Torngat has been 10% or more above the provincial average.

The provincial electoral history of this district, which consists of six isolated, mostly Inuit and Innu communities along the North Coast of Labrador, defies the stereotype (and, sadly, too often the reality) of low participation in the electoral process by Aboriginal people.

Not only is turnout in Torngat quite healthy, so is participation by Aboriginal people as candidates. Since 1993, Torngat Mountains has been consistently represented by a native-born Aboriginal person (William Andersen III, Wally Andersen, Patty Pottle, now Randy Edmunds.) This was the first election in which all major party candidates were Labrador Inuit. There has been at least one Innu candidate in the district, Simeon Tshakapesh in 1999. Inuit candidates also presented themselves under the Labrador Party banner in 2003 and 2007.

If anyone has the total vote-list figures for 1979 (when the district was first created) and 1982, which would allow for the completion of this table, pass'em on.

Numbers

An excerpt from Saturday's letter to the Telegram by Richard Cashin, Ed Hearn, and Dennis Browne, one of a flurry of lengthy Muskrat Falls-related letters which, sadly, do not make it to the paper's public web site:

All this comes at a time in which our population growth is declining and aging. The burden of Muskrat Falls will be heavy on our taxpayers as well as our ratepayers. Here are some population figures.

     1989.......................576,000
     1992.......................580,000
     2000.......................527,000
     2004.......................517,000
     2015.......................520,000
     2019.......................514,000
     2025.......................513,000

It's not entirely clear where Cashin the authors got those "figures", but they are already more optimistic than the population projections which Nalcor submitted to the Public Utilities Board, which are.

     2011.......................513,000
     2015.......................515,000
     2019.......................510,000
     2025.......................507,000

As this corner has previously noted even these figures are already over-optimistic and out of date: the latest Statistics Canada estimate pegs the population of the entire province at under 511,000. The truly relevant population — that of the Island Interconnected service area — is even smaller, excluding, as it does, 25- to 30,000 in Labrador, plus several thousand more living in isolated diesel communities in Newfoundland.


[Edited to credit all the authors of the letter.]

But what does it mean?

According to statistics published Wednesday by Elections Newfoundland and Labrador, 4% of the voters list, almost on the nose, voted in advance polls. (This does not include other early voters who voted through special ballots or in the local returning office.)

Twenty districts had advance-voting rates higher than 4%. Most of these were in the greater St. John's area:

Grand Falls-Windsor–Buchans      8.00%
Signal Hill–Quidi Vidi           7.67%
Cartwright–L’Anse au Clair       6.52%
St. John’s West                  6.46%
St. John’s East                  6.39%
Carbonear–Harbour Grace          5.61%
St. John’s South                 5.50%
St. John’s Centre                5.44%
Port de Grave                    5.30%
Virginia Waters                  4.94%
Mount Pearl South                4.88%
St. John’s North                 4.67%
Humber Valley                    4.61%
Mount Pearl North                4.60%
Conception Bay East–Bell Island  4.58%
Humber East                      4.37%
Gander                           4.32%
Conception Bay South             4.32%
Cape St. Francis                 4.30%
Burin–Placentia West             4.20%

Bringing up the rear were Torngat Mountains (1.36%), Bay of Islands (1.9%), Burgeo–La Poile (1.91%), Trinity–Bay de Verde (2.08%), St. Barbe (2.14%) and Fortune Bay—Cape La Hune (2.15%). The remote coastal districts in northern Labrador and the south coast of Newfoundland were the target of Elections Newfoundland and Labrador special ballot efforts, which may have diverted early voters from the "Advance" line to the "Special Ballots" one.

In the current election, six of the ten highest advance-vote districts were in metro St. John's. In 2007, only three were. The top ten, interestingly enough, were almost all seats heavily targetted by Danny Williams-Government for pickup or hold, starting with Signal Hill–Quidi Vidi (7.7%), then on through Carbonear–Harbour Grace, Grand Falls–Windsor–Buchans, Port de Grave, Exploits (Liberal in 2003, picked up by the PCs in a by-election), Lake Melville (a narrow margin in 2003), Humber Valley (a Liberal by-election pickup in 2007), St. John’s East, Torngat Mountains (a narrow PC pickup in 2007), and St. John’s West.

Most of the rural target seats this year, for any of the parties, and for pickup or hold, have below-average advance turnout rates: Lake Melville, Baie Verte–Springdale, Grand Falls–Windsor–Green Bay South, The Straits–White Bay North, Bonavista North, St. George’s–Stephenville East, The Isles of Notre Dame, Labrador West, Bellevue, Fortune Bay–Cape La Hune, St. Barbe, Burgeo–La Poile, Bay of Islands, Torngat Mountains.)

This may mean that the Tories and NDP are pumping GOTV resources into St. John's, and that the Tories are doing so at the expense of the formerly strenuous GOTV efforts in potential rural battleground districts in the Williams-era general and by-elections.

Alternatively, in rural areas, GOTV efforts may have focused instead on the special ballot mechanism rather than advance voting.

Or... it may all mean nothing at all. We shall see soon enough.

"Have" municipalities

There is all kinds of Fascinating to be found in Wade Locke's report on Municipal Fiscal Sustainability, released on Tuesday by the commissioners of the report, Municipalities Newfoundland and Labrador. The full report is available on MNL's website.

By way of nibbling into the Fascinating, take this, a mathematical riff off one of Locke's supporting tables. In the original table, Locke lists a large cross-section of municipalities (though not quite all) according to the population of the municipality, and by how much the residents collectively paid in provincial income taxes in 2006 (the most recent census year.)

To this data, yours truly has added the unincorporated community of Churchill Falls, plus other localities in Labrador not included in Locke's original sample. His (and my's) source data is available at Community Accounts. The communities are then sorted in descending order by the ratio between the community's share of provincial income tax, and its share of the provincial population.

Out of 236 communities (Locke's 227 sample plus the other Labrador communities added after the fact), there were 27 where the city, town, or community contributed a larger share of provincial income tax, than would be expected if the distribution of provincial income tax was perfectly uniform across the province.

At the very top of the scale — somewhat inexplicably; possible explanations are welcome as comments — is Trinity, Trinity Bay, which contributed 0.16% of PIT with 0.04% of the provincial population. Next up are Wabush and Labrador City, both pulling about double their demographic weight in PIT.

Here's the full list of the 27 "have" municipalities or localities, showing the total dollar amount of provincial income taxes paid in 2006, their share of total PIT paid province-wide, and the ratio of share of PIT paid to share of 2006 provincial population:

COMMUNITY                             PIT paid        %     ratio
================================================================
Trinity, Trinity Bay                   $1,406,000    0.16%  4.32
Wabush                                  6,029,000    0.70   2.01
Labrador City                          24,690,000    2.85   2.00
Logy Bay‐Middle Cove‐Outer Cove       5,534,000    0.64   1.77
Churchill Falls                         1,925,000    0.22   1.68
Happy Valley‐Goose Bay                19,790,000    2.29   1.52
Long Harbour‐Mount Arlington Heights     543,070    0.06   1.51
Paradise                               32,408,000    3.75   1.50
Portugal Cove‐St. Philip's            15,988,000    1.85   1.42
Torbay                                 15,001,721    1.73   1.39
Steady Brook                            1,036,029    0.12   1.39
Massey Drive                            2,786,560    0.32   1.39
St. John's                            234,652,000   27.12   1.36
Gander                                 22,536,000    2.60   1.33
Sunnyside, Trinity Bay                  1,031,000    0.12   1.28
Trepassey                               1,638,000    0.19   1.26
Mount Pearl                            52,372,000    6.05   1.23
Pasadena                                6,490,000    0.75   1.19
Miles Cove                                273,000    0.03   1.18
Conception Bay South                   43,129,000    4.98   1.15
Flatrock                                2,341,000    0.27   1.15
Come‐By‐Chance                          759,000    0.09   1.14
Arnold's Cove                           2,016,000    0.23   1.14
Clarenville                            10,178,728    1.18   1.13
Harbour Main‐Chapel Cove‐Lakeview     2,066,000    0.24   1.11
St. Anthony                             4,577,710    0.53   1.08
Goose Cove East                           434,651    0.05   1.08

Sixty years ago today

Sixty years ago today, residents of Labrador cast a ballot for only the third time in history, in the second and deciding round of the 1948 referendum.

The previous two had been the June referendum, in which continuing Commission of Government was eliminated as an option, and the 1946 National Convention election, in which Labrador sent Confederation supporter Rev. Lester Burry as its representative.

During more than a century of responsible government in Newfoundland, the elected government of Newfoundland never saw fit to extend the democratic franchise to Labrador.

By some quirk of administrative history, the poll-by-poll results for the referendum in Labrador have survived. For the interests of posterity, they are reproduced below in modified form from the table published in Them Days 10(2), 1984.

                  Confederation     Responsible
                   with Canada       Government

L'anse au Clair          74             0
Forteau                  91             6
L'anse Amour             17             6
L'anse au Loup           60            14
Capstan Island           32             1
West St Modeste          55            10
Pinware                  46             9
Red Bay                  76             3
Barge Bay                29             0
Henley Harbour           61             6
Cape Charles             51             7
Battle Harbour           35            32
Indian Cove              36             0
Trap Cove                63             1
St. Mary's River         20             1
Fox Harbour              64             1
Port Hope Simpson        49            10
William's Harbour        24             6
George's Cove            49            16
Square Islands           17            11
Frenchman's Island       28            14
Batteau                  35            10
Black Tickle             21            43
Spotted Islands          57             5
Indian Tickle            21            17
Grady                    14            14
Cape North               12             6
Pack's Harbour           21             5
Cartwright               67             0
Independent              63             5
Old Man's Cove           19             2
Fox Point                15             0
Separation Point         30             1
West Bay                 15             0
Rigolet                  61             1
North West River        155             1
Mud Lake                 13             0
Goose Airport (Can.)     55            12
Goose Airport (US)       63           114
Hamilton River           91            13
Cape Harrison            23             0
Aillik                   38             5
Three Rapids             17             0
Davis Inlet              23             1
Voisey's Bay             19             0
Nain                     64             1
Queen's Lakes            59             3
Hebron                   86             7
Nutak                    58             7
Saglek                   30             2

Not only did Labrador vote overwhelmingly for Confederation — it had the highest Confederation with Canada vote in the June round; the fifth-highest in the second — all but three polling divisions voted for the Confederation option.

One poll was tied.

Not only that, but there were only nine polls where the Responsible Government side got more than 25% of the vote.

Not only that, but in 28 of the 50 polls, Responsible Government got less than 10%.

And not only that, but in fully a fifth of the polls, the RGL got blanked.