Article content continued

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or

In those results, Mr. Rae took 37.6% of the popular vote, beating Mr. Peterson by a slight 5%. Still, the NDP more than doubled the Liberal seat count, 74 to 36.

This time, the Liberal popular vote was hovering around 37%, to the Progressive Conservatives’ 31% and the NDP’s 26%, for a total spread across the three main parties of barely 10 percentage points.

And yet, it took only about an hour for the first news outlets to call a predicted majority, with the second place PCs winning less than half the number of seats as the Liberals.

Even within the Liberal party’s own fortunes, a shift of a couple of percentage points has meant the difference between victory and defeat.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or

Most bafflingly, in 1999, the Liberals came away with a greater share of the popular vote than this year, and yet they wound up in second place.

“The Liberals got a majority government with less than 40% of the vote and produced a three-way race that failed to reflect how voters really voted,” Kelly Carmichael, executive director of Fair Vote Canada, said.”

“Unfortunately, parties will continue to focus their attentions on a few swing ridings and voters will continue to vote strategically until all votes count with proportional representation. Hopefully, one day voters will realize that there is a better way to do politics in Ontario and choose a system where you can choose the candidate you really like instead of voting strategically to block the candidate you don’t like.”