Yesterday, Elections Canada published the official transposition of the 2011 General Election results onto the new electoral map. The seat changes by province are as follows:
Reconfiguration of Existing Seats
- NL: Liberals lose Avalon to Conservatives
- QC: Bloc loses Ahuntsic (now Ahuntsic--Cartierville) to Liberals, NDP loses Gaspésie--Îles-de-la-Madeleine (now Gaspésie--Les Îles-de-la-Madeleine) to Bloc
- ON: Conservatives lose Don Valley East and Nipissing--Timiskaming to Liberals
- MB: Liberals lose Winnipeg North to NDP
- SK: Conservatives lose two ridings to NDP due to former urban-rural ridings being reorganized into separate urban and rural ridings
- BC: NDP loses British Columbia Southern Interior (now South Okanagan--West Kootenay) and Burnaby--Douglas (now Burnaby North--Seymour) to Conservatives
- PE, NS, NB, AB: no resulting party change
Net: LIB +1, CON -1
New Seats
- QC: NDP +3
- ON: CON +12, NDP +2, LIB +1
- AB: CON +6
- BC: CON +5, NDP +1
Total (new): CON +23, NDP +6, LIB +1
Although ten seats changed hands due to reconfiguration, the net effect was minimal. Virtually all the action comes from the allocation of new seats, which would have heavily favoured the Conservatives in 2011. This is unsurprising: most of the seats were added in Alberta, suburban Vancouver, and especially suburban Toronto, three areas that the Tories virtually swept in 2011. However, if the Liberals keep their current strength into the 2015 elections, many of those suburban Toronto and Vancouver seats could instead fall into their hands, so the redistribution will not necessarily heavily favour Conservatives going forward. However, since the Tories win an overwhelming majority of the new seats when they do well, we can conclude that while the new seats may not make Conservative governments that much more likely, they do make Conservative majorities much more likely.
I have not been tracking polls lately, and likely won't until closer to the election. However, using ThreeHundredEight's current polling averages and applying uniform regional swings yields:
LIB - 133 (+97 from transposed 2011 results)
CON - 122 (-66)
NDP - 78 (-31)
BQ - 4
IND - 1
The fact that the Liberals manage only an 11-seat edge with a 5.9% lead is bad news for them: their vote appears to be distributed very inefficiently. (Consider that the Tories won by 63 seats with a 9.0% advantage.) This is true both in Québec and Ontario, where 4-to-5-point leads only give them virtual ties in the seat count (with the NDP and the Tories, respectively). Still, a gain of almost 100 seats is nothing to sneeze at. More importantly, Liberal support is up so strongly that its current distribution, even within each region, may differ significantly from its 2011 distribution.
