Turns out, the Liberals are holding steady

Github code here (dataset here)

I’ve previously mused out loud whether the gradually decreasing vote shares for the Liberal Party reflected genuinely waning popularity among each segment of the Canadian electorate, or whether the anti-Liberal regions (the West) were gaining in population.

The question about regions is easily answered. I’ve looked through Wikipedia’s province-by-province vote shares going back to the 1950s and found the average vote shares for the Liberals in the Pearson/Trudeau père era, Chrétien/Martin eta, and Trudeau fils era. The outcome at first glance? It’s a between-effect, rather than a within-effect.

As I wrote in that previous post, while this state of multi-party politics in a majoritarian system feels very unstable, generating frequent minority governments, this does in fact seems to be a long-term equilibrium; the only significant changes within provinces since then are the shift from Québec from a Liberal fortress to Liberal-Bloc competition, and the shift of Sasketchewan towards voting like Alberta. Neither is unlikely to be a significant problem for the Liberals moving forward.