As the Wikipedia entry for the current election illustrates, the Conservatives won the 2008 election with 143 seats, or 37.65% of the vote. Then came the Liberals with 77 seats (26.26%); the Bloc with 49 seats (9.98%); the NDP with 37 seats (18.18%); and the Greens with 0 seats (6.78%). Add those percentages together, and you get 98.85% of the vote.

But as these figures on the Elections Canada website reveal, “the vote” included just 58.8% of all eligible Canadians – the lowest voter turnout for a general election in our country’s history.

In other words, the 37.65% of the vote that went to the Conservatives actually represented just 22.14% of eligible voters. The Liberal figure represented 15.44%, the Bloc total represented 10.69%, the NDP figure represented 5.87%, and the Green Party figure translated to 3.99%.

Compare those totals to the 41.2% of all eligible voters – almost double the number of Canadians who voted the Conservatives back into office – who didn’t vote for anyone at all.

If “none of the above” had been an option on the 2008 ballot, and if everyone who didn’t vote had checked it, then “none of the above” would have won the popular vote by a landslide.

Or to put it another way, if everyone who didn’t vote in the last election had voted for the Greens instead, then the Greens would have won about 46% of the total vote. The Greens, for Christ’s sake!

That’s how many people aren’t voting in Canada. If they were a voting bloc, they’d be unstoppable. They’d be running this country.

And if current trends continue, then it won’t be long before they’re in the majority.

British Columbia is currently a Liberal province presided over by Premier Christy Clark. Although they’re often renowned for their progressive environmental attitude – or written off as a bunch of dirty hippies, depending on your point of view – British Columbians tend to score no better than the national average on a number of key environmental indicators.

One of the main factors that do distinguish British Columbians from their fellow Canadians is their attitude toward arts funding. Nine out of ten British Columbians, believe that their local arts scene is good for tourism. According to Bricker and Wright, “it’s the only region of Canada where there’s complete agreement with the idea that a vibrant cultural scene is great for the local economy… Spend public money on the arts, get money back from tourists, and enjoy a better economy overall: In the world of opinion polls, nine out of ten counts as resounding support for this concept.”

Perhaps it’s not surprising, in that case, that British Columbians read more books than anyone else in Canada. However, Bricker and Wright are careful to note that “the reading list probably did not include the Bible.” Indeed, Quebec is the only province whose residents read the Bible less.

And by the way, if you’re a British Columbian, then compared to your fellow Canadians, you are “most likely to have got your pet cat spayed our neutered, and most likely to have got it tattooed.”

“Imagine that you have 100 people in a room, and you want to figure out what to order them for lunch. You don’t have a clue what to order, but you know that you don’t have the luxury of asking them each individually what they would like to eat. And, most importantly, you want to make as many people happy as possible. So you decide to ask a few people in the room to give you input.

“You ask everybody to stand up and count off by ones to 10, until each person has a number. Then you write out 10 cards, numbered one to 10, and put them in a hat. You have someone pull a card out of the hat and read you the number. It’s three. You then ask all of the 10 people who said ‘three’ what they would like to eat for lunch. You find out that four people want Chinese food and six want Italian.

“So you order 40 Chinese lunches and 60 Italian lunches. To everyone’s amazement, the vast majority of the people in the room are thrilled with what you ordered…

“Now, what about that ‘plus or minus 10%, 19 times out of 20′ stuff? What does that mean? Let’s go back to the lunchroom. It we succeeded in selecting a fair sample by picking all of the number threes, and didn’t actually select all the vegetarians or low-carb dieters, the rules say we should still expect to be off by a little bit. Not everybody will be satisfied with the lunch order. That’s the margin of error. It might turn out that 10 people in the room were stuck with good they didn’t really want, which would mean our margin of error was 10%. If we picked another random sample, we shouldn’t be surprised if this time five people wanted Chinese food and five wanted Italian. Maybe we should have ordered 50 Chinese lunches and 50 Italian lunches. Great, but even if we had, we shouldn’t have expected fewer people to be upset in the end, based on asking a sample of just 10 people and making a prediction about the rest.

“The really sad news is that even if we followed all of the rules perfectly and did our lunch poll 20 times, one time we would be wrong by even more than 10%. Maybe that was the unlucky time we happened to ask the ten people who were allergic to pasta. We get used to a margin of error in even the best-performing polls, and over time, we learn to predict what that margin probably is.”

The first section of the book – entitled “Where Do You Belong?” – deals with the sensibilities of Canadians by region. As I read my way through it, I might even post an overview of each chapter in this space between now and the election. Torontonians in particular, especially during an election, have a way of thinking of the country as “us versus everyone else” – and if it’s only because we assume that’s the way they think about us, then so be it. Nonetheless, it might be nice to get a better sense of where our fellow Canadians are coming from.