What are immigrants anyway? Conservative Progress on City Dwellers

PC - it's a brand of food at the grocery store, a type of computer, a rather dated pop culture epithet, and also a political party in Ontario. The Progressive Conservative party, under its relatively new leader, Tim Hudak, didn't manage to seal the deal for a majority government in 2011.

Rather like his transatlantic counterpart Michael Howard in 2005, the PCs failed to capitalize on fatigue with a would-be third term government, and were outshone by a third-party upstart, in that case Charles Kennedy's Lib Dems (though we all know how that turned out). 

Here is a rather extensive comparison of the 2011 Progressive Conservative platform against the NDP and the Ontario Liberals, although it all reads much like the instruction manual for a microwave.

How to Lose Toronto

One bump in the road encountered by the Hudak team was its controversial criticism of tax credit programs for hiring immigrants. Having been seen, rightly or wrongly, to boldly go after one of the sacred cows of globalization, the shifts in support between the 2011 and 2007 elections certainly reflect that:

NDP vote in the 2011 election, continued

Last time, we looked at the greatest gains in support for NDP among various segments of Ontario's voters for the 2011 election. This time we get to be the bad news bear and look at their biggest drops in support. The results are not exactly what one might expect.

Remember, we are using basic correlations (CORREL) data, the number-cruncher caveman's club, and there are a few issues with ages represented in the data: the people the census data describe are now five years older. But let's have a look anyway. Scroll down to get past the rather messy numbers.