The original map was a static image I created to show the breakdown by political party. When it came time to update it after the results of the federal election on May 2, I decided to get a little fancier and make a more dynamic, interactive version. Without further ado then, I present electoralcartogram.ca, which shows the ridings by party for both before and after the election. It also includes an animation mode to switch back and forth, seat totals for each party, and a way to filter to see only one party at a time. I also corrected some mistakes: a couple ridings were spelled wrong, and two ridings had the wrong colour — St. John’s South should have been NDP, not Liberal, and Brossard—La Prairie should have been Liberal, not BQ.

The election of course was an astonishing event that not only brought the Conservatives the majority they sought, but all but obliterated the Liberals and the Bloc, while promoting the NDP to the Official Opposition thanks to an “orange tide” in Quebec.

The before and after view clearly reveals just how the Conservatives won their majority. Going into the election, the Liberals had a solid base of seats in Toronto and the surrounding suburbs. What we see now is how the NDP attacked the Liberals from Central Toronto, while the Conservatives attacked them from the rim. Formerly Liberal suburbs of Toronto — Mississauga, Brampton, Richmond Hill, Ajax, Pickering — all turned blue, and so did many ridings in the outer part of the city of Toronto — North York, Scarborough and Etobicoke. And that’s all it took, really. The NDP also picked up a seat in Scarborough and won four new seats in central Toronto from the Liberals, and of course the NDP wiped out the Bloc in Quebec. But nothing outside Ontario really influenced the Conservative majority. Nothing outside Greater Toronto really did in fact. The Conservatives won only two more seats outside Ontario in 2011 as they did in 2008 (−1 in BC, −4 in Quebec, +2 in Manitoba, +2 in New Brunswick, +1 in Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Yukon). And only three new seats in Ontario came from outside the Greater Toronto Area (London North Centre, Sault Ste. Marie and Nipissing—Timisaking).

View the cartogram

There are, of course, other ways of mapping results. Mark Newman of the University of Michigan garnered some attention with his cartograms of the 2008 US election results that distort the US so that the size of each state or county is proportional to its population. (Wikipedia says: “A cartogram is a map in which some thematic mapping variable - such as travel time or Gross National Product - is substituted for land area or distance.”) The effect is particularly startling on the county map, where the “normal” version is far more Republican-red than a cartogram version. Rural counties are larger and tend to vote Republican but make up much less of the population than the first map might suggest. I find Newman’s maps interesting, but I doubt such maps would appear on any newspaper since they appear so alien and unfamiliar.

The British media, however, seem to have cottoned on to the utility of proportional maps, and their efforts are a lot easier on the eyes. BBC, The Telegraph and The Guardian all published cartograms of the 2010 British electoral results, and I find they provide more useful information than the regular maps. On the geographical map, England appears to be a sea of Tory blue with a bit of Labour red and Liberal Democrat orange around the fringes of Scotland and Wales, when in reality, Labour did quite well in Northern England, in Scotland and around London.

I’ve never seen a similar sort of cartogram for Canada, despite the fact that Canada has, if anything, the “worst” relationship between land and population of any Western democracy—35 million urbanized people in tiny pockets of the second largest country on Earth. Geographically-based electoral maps of Canada, such as this effort from Elections Canada, or the CBC map at right, therefore offer almost very little value since most of the seats are dwarfed by the vast, relatively empty stretches of land. Roughly one-third of the people live in Vancouver, Toronto or Montreal, whose combined size makes up only about 0.2% of the landmass. As I say, I’d never seen a cartogram for Canada, at least not until the other day when The Globe and Mail published one, but only in their print edition, and they still decided to overlay it onto a real map.

Awhile back (before I saw this G&M effort), I had decided to try my hand at creating a cartogram of Canada that would help show how many people live in the cities, and how few live in, say, Nunavut or Northern Manitoba. I hadn’t actually intended the exercise to be specifically electoral, but the 308 seats in the House of Commons are nearly evenly divided by population and so make a fairly accurate picture. (There are exceptions—Prince Edward Island is guaranteed four seats in the constitution but would only warrant one by population, and the three territories each have one seat but barely warrant one combined).

Here’s the result, colour-coded with Canadian political colours: dark blue for Conservative, red for Liberal, orange for the New Democrat Party (NDP), light blue for the Bloc Québécois (BQ), and one grey seat for an independent. Click to zoom in, or there’s a PDF version:

Naturally, I had to take some geographical liberties to squeeze some large places into small squares, but for the most part, places that are next to each other in reality are next to each other on this map. A few things you might notice:

• Vast stretches of land have disappeared. Yukon, Northwest Territories, Nunavut and Labrador are four seats squeezed at the top. I chose to let Saskatchewan maintain some width to keep geography more consistent, which means it has some weird gaps.

• Ontario and Quebec are really big. In fact, together, they make up nearly two-thirds of Canada’s population, so it is what it is. Similarly, the 49th parallel, which appears to be the bottom of Canada on normal maps, is quite high up here since in reality, the majority of Canadians live south of it.

• Northern Ontario appears relatively small (it’s actually enormous), but is solid orange, while the rest is mostly red and blue. This is reflective I think of the great political distance between Northern and Southern Ontario.

• If you look closely, and are familiar with city and suburb names, you’ll notice that almost all of the Conservative strongholds are outside the major cities (with the exception of Alberta) while the cities are pretty solidly Liberal with sprinklings of NDP. The giant red section in the middle is Greater Toronto, and the red section in Quebec is Montreal—a red island in a sea of BQ blue. Overall, Canada is quite regionally divided, making it difficult for any party to win. The reason the Conservatives have been able to win even a minority is a strong base in the prairies combined with national support in rural areas and smaller cities. Outside the maritimes, the Liberals have become a purely large-city party.

Comments/suggestions welcome!

Update: I’ve created a new web version with updated results from the May 2 election. You can read about it here and you can view it at electoralcartogram.ca.

I’ve just accepted (and started!) a new job at Twitter, working with their analytics team. This is an extension of the work I’ve done on Trendly, and joining me at Twitter will be the three developers with whom I’ve had the fortune to work for the past few years on both Trendly and Dabble DB: Andrew Catton, Avi Bryant and Ben Matasar. I’m pretty thrilled that I get to keep working with them and yet join the thriving Twitterverse at the same time. I went down to San Francisco for the first time a couple months back to meet the Twitter folks and got a chance to see what a dynamic, friendly bunch they are. It felt like a place I could be really happy working — and not just because they have good espresso machines in the kitchen. Though they do.

As part of this new job, all four of us — and our partners — will be moving to San Francisco later this year. Toronto’s only been my home for about two years, and I guess I’ve gotten used to moving around the world, but I had moved there with the intention to stay awhile, so this is a change about which I have mixed feelings. There are a lot of people in Toronto I’m going to miss. On the other hand, whenever I’ve mentioned San Francisco to them, they tell me how excited they are to come visit me once I’m living there. Apparently Bean (aka Catriona, aka my lovely wife) and I are going to need a spare bedroom.

To be fair, it’s been looking like we would need a spare bedroom anyway — we found out recently that Bean is pregnant, due at the end of November.

Did I mention things were changing?

I’m a big believer in public transit, and for that reason alone, I can appreciate what Miller has tried to do as mayor of the country’s largest city: turn Toronto’s aching, geriatric transit system, the TTC, into a modern, attractive, financially sustainable service. Recent coverage in the media has focused on Miller’s failures, but Munro eloquently highlights his successes:

• the creation of the TTC’s Ridership Growth Strategy
• moving future expansion away from new subways towards modern light rail
• pushing funding from being more fare-based to more subsidy-based

Of course these are controversial measures for some people. Even though there is no public transit system on earth that is fully self-funded, there are many in Toronto who think that if the TTC needs more money, it should simply raise fares; that those who use it should pay for it. Munro explains: “Operating subsidies fell over the years, and farebox cost recovery grew from about 70% in 1988 to almost 85% by 2000. Partly this was achieved through fare increases, and partly through service cuts.” Miller has pushed the level back down to 70%, and ridership is at an all-time high in absolute numbers — projected to be 473 million rides this year. To put things in perspective though, the previous all-time high was 463 million in 1988. According to Wikipedia, the City of Toronto’s population has grown about 300,000 since then, and the Greater Toronto Area’s has grown by at least 1.3 million. In proportional terms then, 2009 is hardly a peak. Also, 70% of funding through fares is exceptionally high, even within Canada, but especially when compared to the other countries. Recent headlines about how monthly pass popularity has “hurt” the TTC’s budget are an absurd way of suggesting that the TTC needs to increase fares. Our own transit agency is complaining that more people are using public transit? It’s pretty simple: if Torontonians want good public transit, then their government(s) must pay for it.

It’s been one year since my wife and I moved to Toronto, and in that time I’ve come to know the TTC for better and worse. I had expectations based on previous visits to the city that transit here was good. I remembered a subway and streetcar system that ran reliably and frequently, and that many of the streetcars operated twenty-four hours a day. Single fares are pretty reasonable: $2.25 if you buy tokens and no “zones” — one fare can take you 40 km from Kipling Station in Etobicoke to McCowan Station in Scarborough. Saying all that, I can see now how the TTC creaks and groans as one the most heavily-used transit systems in North America. Its most frequent customers are often its biggest critics, and like all public transit systems in Canada, it struggles for funding to expand or even just to maintain existing service.

What’s wrong with the TTC? The subway is good if your origin and destination are close to it, but Toronto suffers from arriving late to the underground party. The two original lines, built in the 1950s and ’60s, provide insufficient coverage for today’s population. Sadly, the only recent expansions — the Scarborough RT in the ’80s and the Sheppard line in 2002 — are suburban routes that attract but a fraction of the ridership of the two older lines.

Meanwhile, the iconic streetcars prove better in theory (clean, reliable and frequent!) than in reality (garbage-laden, crowded and stuck in traffic!). Waiting half an hour on a “frequent service” route is common — eventually three or four packed cars will show up, making one feel that walking would have been a faster choice. (Cycling is always faster.) Queen Street, the retail heart of the city from east to west, ought to be one of the city’s best-served transit corridors, but the Queen streetcar is among the system’s least reliable. Buses are good in some places, but service can be patchy (half-hour schedules on Sundays on downtown routes is nearly criminal), especially once one gets north of Bloor Street.

If you’re a regular customer, the TTC is not cheap. The cost of a monthly pass ($109) is markedly higher than in Vancouver ($73) or Montreal ($68.50), making driving more attractive to many people. There’s also the fare system itself that could charitably be described as antique. If you don’t want or need a pass, there are only small, easy-to-lose tokens and old-fashioned paper transfers. If you switch from a surface-level route to a subway at an older station, you have to line up to show your transfer to the booth attendant because the turnstiles don’t permit them. And forget about any integration with the city’s GO commuter trains. The provincially-knighted but totally toothless regional transit authority, Metrolinx, would like to implement a modern smart card system, but has no ability to pay for it.

Nonetheless, David Miller and his followers have fought to make improvements, and growth in ridership and more frequent service are positive signs. Ironically though, the biggest achievement of all may be one that doesn’t come to fruition until well after Miller’s retirement. “Transit City” is the city’s comprehensive light rail plan that would see the construction of seven new light rail lines (all with dedicated rights-of-way to ensure reliable service). If it all gets built — and that is a mighty “if” — the plan has the potential to drastically alter life in a city whose pervasive car culture threatens to choke it to death by smog.

The “if”, as always, is where the money will come from. Although Miller has been successful in increasing the TTC’s budget during his reign, it has come largely through ritual cap-in-hand begging at Queen’s Park and in Ottawa. This is a testament to what, in my mind, is the biggest problem facing confederation. It is certainly the thing that has brought a premature end to Miller’s mayoral career. Put simply, the inability for Canadian cities to pay for the services their citizens need is ruining the very places where most Canadians live. Canadian cities are not allowed to levy income or sales taxes, but property taxes are insufficient to pay for the services that so many Canadians, especially lower-income Canadians, rely on. Successive provincial and federal governments have found reason to cut permanent funding in transit, housing and social services while simultaneously giving responsibility for them to the cities. Toronto runs its own welfare program, has its own public housing agency, and operates its own transit system, but is extremely reliant on provincial transfers to pay for all of it. Any change in the political winds or the economy threatens that arrangement.

How does this make any sense? Shouldn’t the government most directly involved in providing a service be the one that raises the taxes to pay for it? This is something on which I believe most taxpayers would agree, because it urges transparency about how tax dollars are spent. The current dysfunctional arrangement, where cities go begging to the province, and the province goes begging to Ottawa, does quite the opposite, all but eliminating accountability. (Perhaps federal politicians like it this way.) Sadly, the design of the political system in Canada makes change difficult, to say the least. Our country’s historical legacy has given us provincial legislatures and a national Parliament where the rural population is overrepresented, and it has blessed us with a winner-takes-all voting system that locks many ridings to one party. In the City of Toronto, the Liberal party has a virtual lock on most seats, both provincially and federally. Thus the Liberals in power at Queen’s Park all but take Toronto voter support for granted, while the Conservatives in Ottawa all but write it off. Worst of all, the system breeds apathy, leading to declining voter turnouts with each passing year.

David Miller spent some of his time fighting the system, but he largely approached his role as a pragmatist, with a level bravado that bordered on brinkmanship. He successfully convinced the province and Ottawa to fund the Spadina subway extension by bullying. Similarly, the subsequent announcement and promotion of Transit City before any funding was in place was essentially a dare to the province and Ottawa to say no, to risk public backlash. It worked with Ontario’s sympathetic premier, Dalton McGuinty, but it backfired spectacularly when Miller pressed Ottawa to use recession “stimulus” money to buy the city new streetcars. The federal cabinet said privately it wouldn’t do it, and Miller pressed them publicly. Eventually Miller was made to look like a fool after the Conservatives did the political arithmetic. (No Tory seats in Toronto means no angry voters.) Miller’s credibility took a big hit, and then it was damaged further by the civic workers strike. I think Miller’s P.R. team failed him during the strike, but the strike itself was an inevitable outcome in a city whose costs simply outweigh its capacity to pay. Until this changes, it will be nearly impossible for any Toronto mayor to do better than David Miller. The city is ungovernable.

In Ontario, almost all wine is sold at the LCBO. Since it’s not spelled out in full too often, I’ll mention that LCBO stands for the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, which is a government agency (run at arms length) that controls the import, distribution and sale of alcohol in the province. To be fair to the LCBO, they keep their customers relatively happy. There have plenty of locations in Toronto where I live, and most stock a decent selection of wine, although the vast majority of it is what I’d call mass-produced stuff without much character, most often from Australia, California and Italy, with sprinklings of New Zealand, Argentina and Chile. There’s a little from France too, but not a lot, because the French don’t really like making mass-produced wines. There is also lots of wine from Ontario itself, and nearly all of it — even the more expensive stuff — is utter plonk.

After about six months living here, I’d concluded that 90% of Ontario wine was downright awful, and the other 10% was merely okay but overpriced. To be fair to Ontario, I don’t care for Riesling, one of the most common varietals here, but even still, everything else, particularly the red wine from the LCBO, is just bad. Many restaurants serve bad Ontario wine too, for which one pays an outrageous markup. The dark secret though is that the majority of the wines sold in the Ontario section of your LCBO are actually made mostly from imported grapes, with a small amount of local produce mixed in. These bottles are labelled “Cellared in Canada”, and while some of them might be inoffensive enough for a night in front of the TV, I resent the false pretense under which they’re sold. By contrast, I assumed that wines with a VQA label, which guarantees the origin and quality of the product, would be at least decent, but even most of these range from bad to mediocre, and most are overpriced at $15-25 a pop. It wasn’t until I took my first trip to the Niagara region, and visited a few wineries between St. Catharines and Niagara-on-the-Lake, that I discovered there is actually some lovely winemaking happening in Ontario. You just can’t buy the fruits of that labour at the LCBO.

Talk to any small Ontario winemaker (or even a larger one who focuses on quality), mention the LCBO, and watch their faces wrinkle in disgust. Why? Many LCBO stores have a “Vintages” section, selling fine wines from all over the world, many made in smaller quantities. It isn’t all mass-produced Aussie shiraz — if you want to explore French wine, the Vintages sections will keep you happy. In theory, you could buy some of the nice, affordable Ontario wines there too, if you could find them, except that mostly you can’t, because most good, affordable Ontario wines are made in such small quantities that the LCBO isn’t interested. The process for getting your products listed with the LCBO is also apparently quite onerous, and even when everything falls into place, stocks will be limited given the public’s level of awareness and interest in Ontario wine — an interest hindered by the horrific rot that is sold in the mass-produced aisles. Most of the good Ontario wine that makes it to Vintages goes straight to collectors’ wine cellars and to nicer restaurants. And what’s left is often astonishingly expensive. Why spend $40 to get a good Ontario wine when a $20 Spanish wine will likely taste better?

Still, the wineries themselves are allowed to sell their own products, and thank heavens for that. There’s even one private retail chain, the Wine Rack, operated by Vincor, the elephant among the gnats of the Canadian wine industry; they own dozens of wineries and thus have enough product to stock their shelves. Most wineries can’t afford to operate retail stores though, so they only sell products directly at the winery or online. Unless one lives in Niagara, buying wine online isn’t a bad way to go, especially if you can convince other people to go in on a case and save on delivery costs. Nearly all the wineries sell products on their websites, or there’s also Winery to Home, which lets you mix-and-match to a very limited degree. This is as close as it gets to my hand-picked selection at the deli in Nottingham.

Of course, if you have a free weekend and some cash burning a hole in your pocket, even better is to simply go to Niagara and visit some wineries. I and my travel companions did that this past weekend and we returned with a truly shameless amount of wine, but we were so impressed by what we tried that it seemed silly not to bring back as much as we could afford (and fit in the car). It means we don’t need to go to the LCBO for awhile (a long while if we behave ourselves), and better still we’re supporting the little guys making quality, local products. These people do it because they enjoy it, not because they’re making a lot of money.

One of the wedding gifts we received last year was The Wine Atlas of Canada, a lovely book which helped us narrow down the geography of Niagara and find a selection of wineries to visit. But the book was published in 2006 and many new wineries have opened even since then. This is an industry still in its nascent stages, and I was astonished by how many wineries there are. The majority of them are really small operations, producing something like 5000-10000 cases of wine per year, and perhaps only 500 cases of any one particular wine. On the whole, Canada is a tiny, insignificant player on the world wine scene.

This past weekend we rode bicycles around the villages of Jordan and Vineland, and the town of Beamsville, stopping to taste wines in the area. (We had to bring the car back the next day to pick up the goods.) Producers in Ontario have recently tried to bring the concept of “terroir” to Niagara, to emphasize how much influence local soil conditions can have on the product, so many of the wines now mention exactly where they’re from — sub-appelations like Twenty Mile Bench and Lincoln Lakeshore. You can cycle between these places in no time — they’re tiny little geographic divisions. The Niagara Escarpment scenery is terrific and we were impressed with a great deal of what we tried. Everyone seemed to be excited about the 2007 vintage, particularly the reds, but since different wineries release their wines at different times we tried wine from a number of different years. On a functional note, many of the smaller wineries offer free tastings, but the ones that don’t will usually waive the fee if you buy any wine.

Some of the highlights included:

• everyone was selling recently-released rosé for not much money ($10-15), and most of it was decidedly drinkable — light, dry and refreshing.

• Calamus: a small winery near Ball’s Falls. They won points for selling very affordable wine ($12-$20 for the most part), which ranged from merely good to downright great. I enjoyed their Calamus Red and the Meritage, and the Pinot Gris.

• Featherstone: the highlight was the 2007 “Onyx”, another red blend, but we liked just about everything here, including the fact that they use sheep to eat the leaves off the vines during the late season when the grapes need all the sunlight they can get. They’re also insecticide-free.

• Kacaba: some big, impressive red wines at this small winery, but they don’t come cheap. The host said his favourite was their 2007 Cabernet Franc Reserve, and I found it hard to disagree. Lots of award winning wines.

• Fielding Estate: another small winery making great, affordable wine in the $10-20 range. One of many wineries in Niagara where the architecture helps sell the wine. More great reds, both for single grape and for blends, and their 2007 Sauvignon Blanc was very smooth.

• The Organized Crime Winery: the name and the artsy wine labels made me suspicious — were they selling cheap tat, or going for the trendy crowd? In reality though, it seemed to be neither; this is a tiny “boutique” winery focusing on good-quality wines, and they’re just marketing them with a bit of character. The Pinot Gris was flying out the door thanks to a recent review on CBC, while the 2007 Syrah was maybe the smoothest wine I tried all weekend.

• Daniel Lenko: if the name makes it sound like one guy pouring wine in his kitchen, that’s because it is. (Well, actually his dad is there too.) There’s no pretension here, but there are some amazing wines. My only regret was that the affordable ones I liked here — the White Cabernet and the 2006 Old Vines Merlot for instance — are only available by the case. And at $60, the 2005 Meritage was out of my price range, although it was superb. His Riesling made me forget that I don’t like Riesling.

• Hidden Bench: they don’t make enough wine here apparently, because they were running out of red when we arrived. The single type left, a Merlot-Cabernet Franc blend, was very good, but more impressive to me was the 2006 Estate Chardonnay. I’m generally apathetic about chardonnay, but this one really wowed me. Hidden Bench is one of the newest wineries to have opened in Niagara, but apparently already in great demand. They tossed their entire 2004 vintage because it didn’t meet their standards so you know their wines aren’t cheap, but most hover around $30, good for a special occasion.

I understand why the LCBO may not carry any of these wines — when you sell to all 12 million Ontarians, it’s hard to justify carrying a wine that would sell out if 0.05% of the population bought one bottle. But this just highlights the absurdity of the system. It should be possible for a small winery in Niagara to sell its products to people 100 km away in Toronto without making them pay a visit or buy a whole case at a time online. The simple explanation is that liquor laws in Canada stem from the Prohibition era, and while they’ve changed since then, they’ve never been overhauled completely. I find it bizarre that our governments perpetuate a system that is stacked against our own domestic producers — and by extension, consumers — not only within each province, but between provinces. As difficult as it is a for a small Ontario winery to have products on Ontario store shelves, they can all but forget about the idea of appearing on shelves anywhere else in Canada, and good luck finding any of the nice Okanagan wine if you live in Ontario. Tasting BC wine in Ontario is largely a matter of having your relatives bring it with them when they visit, but even that is technically illegal. It’s also illegal for wineries to ship their products to other provinces. And don’t even get me started about beer. I look forward to the day that the “free trade” mantra applies to Canada itself rather than just between Canada and other countries. And I look forward to the day when our government realizes it should promote our wine industry rather than hinder it.