Tuesday, October 04, 2011

It's hard to get re-elected during a recession...

...except in 2011 in Canada.

Add the Manitoba NDP to the growing list of parties re-elected with a strong, stable majority government.

The Newfoundland PCs and Saskatchewan Saskies will join then shortly. We'll find out about Ontario on Thursday.

posted by calgarygrit at 10:18 p.m.

6 Comments:

  • Just think where the Glorious Coalition would be by now!

    By Blogger Calivancouver, at 11:12 p.m.  

  • The thing is that we haven't been in a recession since 2009. We're in a recovery, and it is easy to get re-elected in recoveries because growth tends to be high (though the weaknesses of the US financial system are preventing much of a recovery there).

    By Anonymous hosertohoosier, at 10:50 a.m.  

  • No recession since 2009? Tell that to my retirement savings. :(

    By Blogger Robert Vollman, at 4:15 p.m.  

  • The technical definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative growth. Now, other indicators may perform poorly at the same time. Canadian employment has also improved rapidly, surpassing the pre-crisis peak.

    While the TSE is still below its 2008 levels, it is up 48% from its trough in early 2009, despite the recent stock market trouble.

    And for people with real-estate heavy portfolios, that is doing well too (perhaps unsustainably so).

    So if people have short time horizons, and I think they do when it comes to assessing the economy, they have a lot to be happy about. Of course if they think back more than 3 years, or think ahead just a few years, they may not.

    By Anonymous hosertohoosier, at 5:40 p.m.  

  • Good counterfactal, Calivancouver.

    I'm not sure if things would have gone so smoothly for the coalition. Harper had the advantage of being able to craft a stimulus that was beneficial to swing districts. That not only helped secure his re-election, but may have helped re-elect provincial governments, who also rely on swing districts to stay in power.

    A coalition stimulus would probably have emphasized different things from the Harper stimulus. First, due to the Bloc, there would be more money to Quebec, which had few swing districts in the world of 2009.

    Second, more of the stimulus would likely have gone into program spending, at the insistence of the NDP. Program spending is less regionally specific than infrastructure spending, and also has a lower multiplier effect.

    Third, you probably would have gotten something like a watered down green shift which, while having long-term benefits, would have transitional costs.

    Fourth, Harper was able to maintain his minority premiership till 2011, when the economy had clearly recovered. Things might have been dicey for them if an election had been called earlier.

    The coalition had an end-date of June 30th, 2010, when the Bloc guarantee on confidence motions was set to run out - assuming A. that it could keep its three very different constituent parties together even that long and B. there were no significant defections from the Liberals to the Tories (I find that implausible, because campaigning for the Liberals after the coalition would be a death sentence for at least some Liberals).

    By Anonymous hosertohoosier, at 5:51 p.m.  

  • This can't work in fact, that is exactly what I consider.

    By Anonymous www.lamparas.biz, at 2:33 p.m.  

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