The last federal election occurred just weeks after I arrived in Canada for university, more or less by accident. In my mind, the parliament created by the election told me who Canada was and what it valued, and it became an integral component of the country I learned so much about over the next four years and came to admire so deeply. I can still remember the figures from all the times I re-watched the election-night broadcast: 184 Liberals, 99 Conservatives, 34 NDP, 10 Bloc, 1 Green.
I’m guessing that’s what happened; because watching an entirely different set of numbers be tallied on CBC felt jarring, more than any single election should feel, as if I’d shifted to a parallel universe.
Anyway, I have musings.
1. A long-term decline of the Liberal Party
Glance at a chart of party vote shares throughout Canadian history, and you’ll notice an *extremely* long-term sag in the Liberal Party’s fortune: under Mackenzie King crossed 50% of the vote once and his successor approached it twice. Pierre Trudeau’s first majority (1968) was won with 45.4% of the vote, Jean Chrétien’s (1993) with 41.2%, and Justin Trudeau’s (2015) with 39.5%. The latter three all saw a second-term sag in support, but Justin’s is again the worst (indeed, the worst vote-share of any winning government in history): 33.1%.
Si la tendence se maintient, by the numbers alone, the Liberal Party would struggle to win elections over the (very) long-term, though this seems counter-intuitive to anyone following Canadian politics. It might just be that this trend reflects the West’s increasing demographic importance and that the Liberals have maintained their numbers within each province (particularly Ontario), allowing them to keep winning elections. This raises its own questions about how the Liberals could adapt to the long-term demographic future of the country.
2. This is why the Progressive Conservatives were a thing
Pundits paint a picture of a Conservative party uninterested or incapable of expanding beyond “their base” of 5.5–6 million voters, centred on the Prairie West and rural Ontario. Scheer’s campaign speeches echoed these regions’ downward spiral of hysterical grievance, which turned off voters in surburban Toronto and Atlantic Canada — areas that proved more loyal to the Liberal Party than one might have expected.
Which leads me to wonder if we shouldn’t miss the Progressive Conservatives. A party animated primarily by regional grievance would do well to confine itself to being a regionalist party, and let a standard centre-right party seek to convert voters in the rest of the country (including in Québec). Instead, one party now seeks to fulfill both of these roles, which works when regional grievance is at a low ebb but apparently not otherwise.
3. National unity is concerning, but there’s little we should do about it
Speaking of regional grievance: the governing party has collapsed to 14% of the vote in Alberta and 12% in Saskatchewan. This is a titanic repudiation of governing policy — and with the re-election of the Liberal government, alienation is more likely to worsen than improve. This isn’t unprecedented — in 1984, the first election after the National Energy Program and Trudeau père’s retirement, the party scored 18% in Saskatchewan and 13% in Alberta — but there is chatter that separation is being taken increasingly seriously among the Prairie folk.
My compassionate small-l liberal side is really concerned about the prospect of weakening national unity and think the new government should immediately undertake a very public listening tour with the public and officeholders throughout Alberta and Sask. (My more tribal, stridently progressive side doesn’t have a *ton* of empathy for a province confronting an entirely predictable problem, that refuses to consider any solutions that might involve the slightest taxation, and that nonetheless continues to be wealthier than the national average, hence its net-contributor status to equalization.)
This presumes that symbolic representation and recognition are of primary importance — because on the policy space, there’s little to be done. The centre-left’s skepticism on building pipelines is rooted in a genuine concern for the environment, and there’s not much that can (well, should) be done about Canada’s rules-based equalization system. A commitment to a massive federal investment in building the Albertan economy of the future is the only plan that occurs to me that could thread the needle.
In a subsection about national unity I feel like I should mention the Bloc, but I’m not worried about them. Statistically, outright separatism is on the wane, and Blanchet made sure to clarify that his party was not a vehicle for independence, though he personally desires it. In a province that largely treats the CPC’s American-style conservatism as a foreign ideology, Liberal-Conservative competition makes no sense; the Bloc’s resurgence simply reflects the divide that does drive Québec politics — an English Canada-style multiculturalism that emphasizes diversity vs. a laïc interculturalism that emphasizes integration.
4. Why exactly is the NDP?
Which brings me to the NDP, which for two election cycles had been able to fulfill this role of appealing to soft-nationalists, and then allying them with federalists and English-Canadian progressives. It was an astonishing achievement, one that only the NDP could have pulled off, and at times I look back at the 2011 election and imagine the two-party system that might have been: a Conservative party centred on the West and an NDP centred on Québec that would have fought over Ontario. Such a system would have taken all the country’s bewildering ideological and regional divides and collapsed them into a simple binary choice for government.
Of course, with the death of Jack Layton and rise of Justin Trudeau, this never materialized; now, this election put the nails in the coffin of the NDP’s presence in Québec. The party’s 14-strong Québec contingent, then still the party’s largest by province, has been collapsed to one; “decimation” would mathematically be an understatement.
The party did poorly in general, having won all of 13 seats east of British Columbia. And it leads one to wonder what the NDP is for, anyway — obviously it is “to the left” of the Liberals, but it largely seeks to appeal exactly to the same voters as them (educated urbanites, federalists) without the benefits of incumbency. Their old agrarian Western base has disappeared; their ties to organized labour no longer bear much significance. They have never formed government, yet their organization and personalities have been around for long enough that they are no longer credibly anti-system or “insurgent”, in the way that the Greens or Québec solidaire are. Their stance on laïcité means they appeal to the same Québecers as the Liberals, and their stance on pipelines and the energy sector dooms them in the Prairies, which leaves them with the same regions that the Liberals are already strong in.
The most I can say is that they’re in a good position to scoop up Toronto, Vancouver, and Atlantic Canada after these voters get sick of Trudeau — i.e. they’re not a government-in-waiting so much as an opposition-in-waiting. It had two opportunities (under Ed Broadbent and Jack Layton) to take over from an ailing Liberal Party and leave it in the dust, and neither time did this amount to anything. Other than these moments, including in 2019, it runs elections essentially to become the Liberals’ junior coalition partner (and indeed cites its successful historical record playing this role). Of course, it is hardly the hardly the only social-democratic party in the Western world to be a bit lost at the moment.
Being an established party to the Liberals’ left is useful and responds to a genuine need from voters (more about this in the next section), but 1) one can wonder whether this role isn’t more convincingly filled by a properly “insurgent” party, and 2) this election made obvious the fact that the main line of conflict in Canadian politics is region. The third party Canada needs is one that could channel the boiling rage of the Prairies and distinct desires of Québec toward a concrete governing program, incorporating these areas into a broader national coalition — in the way that Diefenbaker and Mulroney did, and Layton came close to doing. As mentioned above, it’d be nice if the Liberals attempted this, but they’re now likely to focus on the path of least resistance toward a majority (Vancouver suburbs and francophone Québec, most likely). The NDP, who at this point genuinely have so little to lose, would do well to try to solve this puzzle — to figure what recovering Western support would entail, or support among Francophone progressives.
“Dog bites man, Liberal berates the NDP”? Perhaps. I’m a marginally-attached Liberal at best, though, waiting for my newfound enthusiasm for Québec solidaire to spill over onto the federal stage, and I am absolutely saying that third parties have a crucial role to play, just that the present NDP isn’t fulfilling it today. (A cosmetic renewal of the party wouldn’t hurt either.)
5. This is all Canadian politics will ever be, isn’t it?
As mentioned above, I keep waiting for this country’s political parties to stabilize into something that “makes sense”; I keep imagining this current period of many fragmented parties to be a transition to something else. But looking through historical elections, trying to find parallels for this election’s level of regionalization, I’ve noted that Canadian party politics has actually been quite consistent, at least geographically, since at least the 1960s, with the only lasting changes being Québec’s shift from a Liberal fortress to Liberal-Bloc competition and Saskatchewan coming to resemble Alberta.
That Canada doesn’t follow Duverger’s Law is well-known in political science circles: i.e. the single-member-district system isn’t creating a two-party system, neither at the national level nor the local level. And there’s one obvious reason for this, which is the strength of the party closest to the centre, the Liberals. Governments tend to inspire opposition to their left as well as to their right, so it makes sense that a Liberal-dominant Canada would see not a two-party system, but a two-and-a-half or three-party system.
What might inspire a two-party Canada is a period of continued Conservative dominance, and it makes sense that the elections of 2011 and 2015 (where throwing out an incumbent Conservative government was a foremost priority) saw high strategic voting and exceptionally few votes for the Greens and the Bloc. Canada’s odd political situation is, then, due to structural deficiencies of the Conservatives, whose historical Toryism and appeals to Empire could not adapt to an explosively growing and diversifying nation. A second point: Duverger’s Law relies on the psychological effect where voters come to vote for the top-two parties out of a desire not to waste their vote. The fact that this doesn’t hold in Canada suggests that many voters are aware of the Conservatives’ structural weakness and don’t take the threat of a Conservative government seriously.
So during Liberal government, a stable equilibrium would be one where each province has a three-party system, with the Liberals occupying the central position. Yet, a strong performance from the Greens complicates this: in most provinces, both Greens and NDP stood above 5%, and in Nova Scotia and BC they were both above 10% — enough that they likely robbed each other of seats. This seems unstable.
And then there’s Québec, where the NDP and Bloc were above 10% and the Greens at 4.4%. It seems like there’s something unstable about the current setup where the Liberals and Bloc — parties with genuinely different outlooks on Québec society — can sweep most of the seats with ~30% of the vote each. It’s not clear what gives, though.
I wonder whether there can be a rapprochement between Bloc and Conservative identities. The Bloc, mirroring the CAQ at the provincial level, has brought a sort of social conservatism to the fore of its identity; its support is stronger in suburbs and exurbs like the Conservatives in other provinces, while most of its campaign-time rise in support seems to have come at the expense of the Tories. I’d hope the Tories could take note of this overlap and invest in winning Québec, though obviously the pipeline issue is a stumbling block. A best-case scenario for defusing regionalism is one where both the Tories and NDP see an opening to winning Québec-nationalist support and adjust their offers accordingly (mirroring the rise of the CAQ and Québec solidaire at the provincial level). Speaking of which:
6. Dual-leadership?
It’s odd that dual-leadership, in the model of green and left-wing parties in Northern Europe, hasn’t caught on within Canadian federal parties, given the presence of multiple regions and identities that demand symbolic representation. Two leaders per party would guarantee gender balance and improve regional balance. Québec solidaire has pioneered it at the provincial level; I think it’d make sense for some federal parties to follow suit. If not, a system with a strong, visible, elected Deputy Leader would also help and has a proven record in fellow Westminster democracies Australia and New Zealand.
Originally published at http://kojisposts.blogspot.com on October 30, 2019.
