Tory ridings encroach on Canada's biggest cities

By Norma Greenaway
Canwest News Service

The Tories made gains this election in cities such as Toronto. (Merle Robillard/Canwest News Service)

OTTAWA - After Tuesday's election, Stephen Harper has the country's two biggest cities of Vancouver and Toronto surrounded by a thicker wall of Tory MPs than he's ever built, even though he failed to capture a single seat in their urban cores.     

Political analyst David Mitchell describes the development as striking, and says the Tory breakthroughs in the suburban ridings of those rich election prizes bode well for the Conservative party's chances of swapping its minority government for a majority next time Canadians go to the polls.     

"They certainly have laid a very strong foundation for their ultimate assault on urban Canada," said Mitchell, a political historian at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., and a former Independent B.C. politician.     

"Step by step, they are becoming the only party in the land today that actually is a national party, that not only has strength in every region, but also within those regions and provinces - rural, suburban and urban."     

The ruling Conservatives emerged from the election with a minority government boasting a net gain of 16 seats, climbing to 143 from the 127 they held when the election was called.     

Surveying the political landscape on Wednesday, the prime minister indicated he was heartened by the party's enhanced reach into suburban and urban Canada.     

"We've actually broadened the nature of our vote, which is very encouraging," he told reporters in Calgary.     

Of the 143 MPs, an analysis done for Canwest News Service by Punditsguide.ca says 24 of the new Tory MPs hail from the sprawling communities that circle Vancouver and Toronto, as well as from such smaller cities as Kitchener, Ont., and Saint John and Fredericton in New Brunswick where Liberals fell to Tories.     

The party failed to score in the city of Montreal, although it managed to hang on to 10 of the 11 seats they had in Quebec going into the election.      Conservatives also finished second in 24 of the province's 75 ridings, a handful of those in Montreal and its suburbs.     

In British Columbia, the Conservatives won 22 seats, picking up five new ridings and pumping their popular vote up to 44 per cent from 37 per cent in the 2006 election.     

The only no-go zone for the Tories was the City of Vancouver, which ended up electing three Liberals and two New Democrats.

Still, in a development that has Tories cheering, the Conservatives finished a strong second in three of those seats, all of which were close.     

Four of the Tories five pickups were won in the Vancouver suburbs of Surrey, Richmond, West Vancouver and North Vancouver where two Liberal and two NDP seats were wiped out.     

Mitchell said the Tory gains in the heavily ethnic suburbs of Vancouver, as well as Toronto, were likely due to the Conservatives' aggressive outreach efforts to new Canadians and the party's conservative economic and social platform.     

Ontario, the biggest electoral prize on the map, proved more fertile for Harper than ever before.     

The party boosted its popular vote in 90 of the 106 ridings, and gained 10 seats to elect 51 MPs, none of whom come from the Greater Toronto Area.     

The Liberals won 19 of the city's 21 seats, while NDP power couple of Jack Layton and Olivia Chow took the other two.     

Voters in the notorious 905 suburbs of Toronto turned away from the Liberals, allowing Tories to capture the western bedroom communities of Mississauga-Erindale and Oakville, and the northern suburban ridings of Newmarket-Aurora, Oak Ridges and Thornhill.     

The Conservatives also stole the Ontario ridings of London West from the Liberals, along with the two Kitchener seats.     

Mitchell said the election shows how significantly the Conservatives have broadened their base since the 2004 merger of the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservative party.     

"The Conservatives have gone from being primarily a rural-based party, based on the old Reform-Alliance foundation, to a suburban- and rural-based party with strong support around the major urban centres," he said.