1984, 1993, And History’s Limits

On Why Those Comparisons Fail

84/93 Redux?

There’s a lot of reasons to be sceptical of the idea Mark Carney will win the next election, if that’s a position you want to take. But one of the most persistent ones is that 1984 and 1993 both show this big honeymoon that then fades away. In some ways, it’s a worthwhile thing to be wary of, but there’s one thing that’s really important to note; we have a bunch more robust sense of where the country is today than we did then.

In 1984, we got 9 polls from 4 pollsters between the moment Pierre decided to resign as PM and the moment John Turner dropped the writ. A majority - 5 of those 9 - were conducted by one pollster (CROP, for the Globe). Over the course of those 4 months from February 29th to July 8th, we got 9 polls. In 1993, in a significantly longer period from February 24th to September 8th, we got 11 polls from 4 pollsters. Over the course of 6 full months and two partials, we got 11 polls. Today? We have 39 in the two months and a day since Trudeau announced his resignation.

Whatever you think of individual polls, there’s no denying that this trend is incredibly real, and while debatable to what level it’s at, it’s a far more robust data set to draw conclusions from than the 1984 or 1993 ones are. Let’s say all we had this year was Leger, Abacus, and IRG and that was the story of the polls we were seeing - you’d see big swings left but still a comfortable Tory majority the whole way through. Compare that with Ipsos, EKOS, and Mainstreet, and you’d think the only question is whether the Liberals are in majority or minority. The answer is somewhere in between, which is probably a correct state of affairs.

When you look bad at older elections, or even sparsely polled provincial elections now, your chances for error are pretty big. But we tend to assume that the chances the polls are correct right now - that if there was an election right now these would be correct - are the same in 2025 as in 1984 or 1993. That seems laughable.

The problem is we treat those polls as if they were true reflections of reality, while knowing that individual polls in the here and now should never be taken as gospel. But for some reason, those 9 polls over 4 months in 1984 or 11 in 1993 were definitely totally correct and accurate and didn’t at all artificially inflate things by any measure. But again, God Fucking Forbid we take any poll too seriously here and now.

The blithe 84/93 whataboutism also ignores that both Campbell and Turner ran really bad campaigns. Put aside the high profile gaffes in those campaigns, what was the message from either Turner or Campbell for their own continuation? They were running not to get slaughtered, defensive campaigns that didn’t have any agency or reason to exist. That context matters, because there’s every reason to think this is Ontario 2014 or BC 2013 than it is 84 or 93.

The difference between those sets of comparisons is clear - in the former, the governments were able to effectively reboot on personality, yes, but also on substance. Wynne was able to get past the teachers issues and pivot the focus to a stronger public sector against the recklessness of Tim Hudak; Clark was able to paint Dix as an anti-business anti-growth radical who was pandering to the Greens. In both cases, Hudak and Dix were good leaders, but not generational talents. On the other side, you had listless and purposeless governments running against Chretien and Mulroney, generational talents if there ever were any.

The other part of the dividing line between those two elections is third parties. In the two successful reelections it was in part because the third party was a problem for the Opposition - or at least not a big problem for the government. Horwath’s NDP was really mostly in places the Liberals weren’t going to win anyways, and in some places the NDP being able to take working class culturally conservative votes helped the Liberals. In BC, Dix absolutely got fucked by the Greens, as socially liberal, environmentally conscious voters who thought Clark couldn’t win voted Green letting Clark’s people come up the middle, and by generally forcing Dix to move left on pipelines.

In 1984 the Liberals had to deal with Broadbent’s NDP and in 1993 the PCs had to deal with Lucien Bouchard and Preston Manning. Those were incredibly robust challengers from third parties, and was part of why Campbell and Turner fell was the incredibly obvious options for voters to go to. Are we going to pretend Jagmeet poses the same threat? Of course not.

What people are looking for is some form of trend to confirm a hope. People who do not want Mark Carney to win the election invoke these two data points because it’s comforting. But it’s two data points. It’s no different than everybody who was invoking the 18 of the last 20 Best Actors at SAG ended up winning Best Picture to pick Chalamet last week. It’s a fun fact to drop at a cocktail party and utterly useless at telling you anything in specific about any specific circumstance.

Now, should history matter? Maybe, but in the sense that you should have appropriate fear for what has happened before. If Carney’s people or any Liberals think they’re going to moonwalk into 24 Sussex (or, Rideau Hall, whatever) then, sure, there’s a value to continuously invoking those two years. But given that nobody with an IQ above 7 thinks they’re going to win easily it’s irrelevant.

I’m aware of the fact that political history is generally written by winners, and therefore our understanding of who is and isn’t generational talents in politics is biased. I know that it’s hard to be objective, but come on - Poilievre isn't that guy. He’s just not. There’s a certain je ne sais quo to this that matters, and Skippy doesn’t have it. He could win if he was running against a government that had already basically given up, but that wasn’t about him, that was about Trudeau. Now, in the face of tougher scrutiny and a better Liberal leader, he’s exposed.

Poilievre might win, and he might win comfortably. But if he does it’ll be because he pulls his head out of his ass and stops embarrassing himself and his country on a daily basis, not because of 1984 and 1993. And those invoking those years should remember history’s limits.

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