ARTS RESEARCH IN THE NEWS

UBC political scientist Max Cameron said Canadians followed the election closely because many were undecided right up to election day.

He noted that voter turnout goes up when the race is unusually competitive.

UBC political scientist David Moscrop is quoted in an article on the provincial Liberals’ plans to continue to produce a balanced budget despite Justin Trudeau’s promise to run deficits.

Moscrop said he expects Trudeau to work much better with cities than Harper did.

Similar articles appeared in The Province and Huffington Post.

UBC professor Richard Johnston discussed voter apathy, Liberals, and Kinder Morgan in a post-election interview.

Among other things, Johnston talked about the refreshing levels of participation in the election. People were deeply engaged in the issues and did not make excuses for not participating.

“Young people grasped their citizenship with both hands and went out and acted on it, so far as we can tell,” Johnston said.

UBC political scientist David Moscrop admits the election results were “shocking” and offers a few explanations for the outcome.

The Liberals ran a near-flawless campaign focused on substantive issues, while the Conservatives and New Democrats stumbled, according to Moscrop.

“I suspect folks were more concerned about jettisoning the Tories than choosing the Grits,” Moscrop wrote. “I do think the strategic vote coalesced around the Liberals over time, which is why, if you look at a graph of the party’s support between August and October, you can see a steady increase with some surge moments.”

Prime minister-designate Justin Trudeau promised to change Canada’s “first-past-the-post” voting system but he may change his mind after his party won by a landslide.

“A majority…gives the Liberals the means to make change but paradoxically, at least in this respect, diminishes their motivation,” said UBC political science professor Max Cameron. “It gives them many, many more seats than they got in terms of percentage of the popular vote. In some sense, they’ve got not a lot to gain from changing the current system.”

A similar article appeared on Yahoo.

A post-election article in The Province including UBC political science professor Max Cameron, who says the NDP suffered from the Liberal surge, with voters choosing Trudeau so they could vote out Stephen Harper.

“Over time the Conservatives shifted to mean-spirited issues like the niqab,” Cameron said. “There was a repudiation of the politics of divisiveness and the voters who wanted to move Harper out stampeded to the Liberals instead of the NDP.”

UBC political scientist Richard Johnston says the Conservative losses in B.C. were probably due to a number of factors including their position on the oilsands pipelines and their opposition to supervised injection sites like Insite.

He added that Justin Trudeau was also helped by his father’s image as “the Thomas Jefferson of Canada” to non-European immigrants in Canada.

UBC political scientist David Moscrop says the Liberals’ shock win in B.C.’s traditionally Conservative interior is linked to their success across the country.

“When you get such a surge, like you saw with the Liberals, and so unexpected a surge, you’re going to have results that are a little unanticipated and that seems to be one of them,” Moscrop said.

UBC political science professor Richard Johnston says Canada made election blackouts law in 1938, out of concern that knowing how people voted in other parts of the country would affect voters in other parts.

“The worry was either there’d be an impact on turnout, i.e. discouraging it, or that it might even facilitate strategic voting by some people as an option that wasn’t available to others,” Johnston said.

Max Cameron, a political science professor at UBC commended Elections Canada for helping people get out to vote, such as offering advance voting and plenty of information.

Cameron added that the new government should give Elections Canada more funding for the future.

A similar article appeared on Yahoo.