Canada Preview: Trudeau's Unlosable Election

Your 2021 Canadian Election Preview

“When it starts to fall apart/Man, it really falls apart”

There’s a funny paradox at the start of the Canadian election campaign that is about to begin, which is that for a country where the Conservatives are so far off the field of play in terms of winning, the story of how we got here is in so many ways the story of Conservative failure - but not a story that starts in this Parliament. In 2019, the Tories underperformed the consensus expectations - although, not mine - by only gaining a net 22 seats against the Liberals, coming from their Government-losing number of 99 seats in 2015 to a slightly more respectable 121 after the last election - although, they did so despite the privilege of running against a Liberal government that was comically corrupt, and a Prime Minister who could easily be beaten. Unfortunately, the Conservatives couldn’t make a serious run at office, and the reason is simple.

Canada, even more so than the US, is a country of social liberalism, and the Conservative path to office runs through the socially liberal suburbs - namely, the Greater bits of Greater Toronto and Vancouver. In places like Brampton and Oakville, Mississauga and Milton, Surrey and Stevenage, the Tories could routinely win seats, and in those places came the 2011 Harper majority government. Fear of what a Layton NDP government would do on tax and spend policy led to the Conservatives finally breaking through in these areas. Even in losing office in 2015, the Tories lost many of these seats, but still held close margins in many, which led to many believing that the suburbs could run to the right, especially after the twin scandals of SNC Lavalin and Trudeau’s use of Blackface. In reality, they sprinted right, even as the nation moved right.

What happened in 2019 was the Tories running up the score in what the US would call the American Heartlands - they won every seat in Saskatchewan, all but one in Alberta, and increased their votes in the rural areas where they already held seats. They did gain some seats in this process - Wascana, the old Ralph Goodale stomping ground, comes to mind - but they did this at the cost of Ontario, where almost 40% of the seats are. The Tories went backwards across southern Ontario, losing Kitchener-Conestoga and (more notably) Milton, where their deputy leader sat. In Milton, Lisa Raitt had won in 2015 by 5%. She lost by 15% four years later, despite the increased attention and profile boost of the deputy leadership. The Tories chances of winning anything in Brampton collapsed, as there currently isn’t a single seat there that the Liberals didn’t win by 20% over them in 2019. In Mississauga, there’s only one seat within 17%. If the Tories want to win the next election, they probably need five seats between those two cities. They’ll be very lucky to get one at this point - hell, they’d be lucky to get close to getting one.

The current Conservative Party has refused to accept the Canada that exists - the socially liberal, comfortable with gay marriage and abortion country we are. A majority of the Conservative caucus voted against a proposed ban on conversion therapy, and even if there is a legitimate criticism of the legislation as not actually banning the practice, such nuanced arguments were not the reason these members didn’t vote for it - it was because they think it can be a legitimate process. While Erin O’Toole himself has no great record of anti-choice comments or votes, he does have a record of having to placate his anti-choice right flank, whose votes got him the leadership and whose members sustain it through his horrible polling. The Tories are stuck, being unwilling to go through with a radical agenda of differentiation from the Liberals while also refusing to actually advocate for the policies that the Liberals have taken in this pandemic. I have no idea what a theoretical O’Toole government would have done in COVID, given the refusal of him or his party to actually outline a coherent alternative. “The Government has spent like drunken sailors” may be true, but if it is true, you need an answer to the obvious followup - “okay, what programs should they not have funded?” None has ever been forthcoming.

Because of the Conservatives’ complete uselessness, the question in this election isn’t who will win, but whether the Liberals can get the majority they want or not. The entire discussion about the election is framed around the Liberals, but it is fundamentally about the Conservatives. They’re off the pitch and out of the game, because for them, things have fallen apart. They have been decimated in the polls, unable to put together anything resembling a coherent vision, and leaving two battles to decide whether the Liberals can get the majority they had in 2015, and lost in 2019, back again.

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In 2019, the Liberals came up 13 seats short of a majority government, winning 157 seats and needing 170 for that magic number. They’ve managed with NDP votes since then, but they’re anxious to try and get that majority back, understandably, and it is the central question of the campaign. Or, actually, the two central questions. The first is whether the Liberals can get a majority government this year - not whether or not they will, but whether it is in the meaty part of the bellcurve, in the likely part of the distribution of outcomes. The answer to this is clearly yes. The second question is whether they can do so without gains in Quebec, and that question is much harder. The path to 13 extra seats without Quebec does exist - the independent retirement in Vancouver Granville functionally locks in a Liberal gain, Jack Harris’ Newfoundland seat, West Nova, and Fredericton out east could all flip (especially Fredericton, where the incumbent MP was elected as a Green but is now a Liberal candidate), just for a start - but is very narrow. If we accept that those four all flip - by no means a certainty, to be clear, you’d still need nine seats out of the rest of English Canada. Maybe the Liberals flip a few seats in the outer stretches of the Greater Toronto Area, maybe they win a couple of seats in Edmonton and Calgary, maybe they end up on the right side of a lot of 3-way coin flips in Greater Vancouver … if all that breaks their way, the path to 170 exists. But that’s a damn fragile path, and it ignores the risks.

The NDP finally have some momentum behind them, and are likely to make real runs at the Liberals in some urban centers where they used to be competitive up until 2015. Ottawa Centre, the Danforth/Davenport/Parkdale trio in Toronto, the Windsor seat the Liberals won from the NDP in 2019, and a wide swathe of Vancouver-area Liberal seats could flip Orange, meaning that the Liberals can’t count on their 157 holding strong. Hell, throw in the Liberal seats in Northern Ontario, and the Liberals would realistically need 20 gains off the Conservatives to be confident they would get to 170, after the seats the NDP could win get added into the picture. And so, as every Canadian election is wont to do, it all comes down to Quebec, in its glory or pain.

In 2019, the Bloc surge cost the Liberals the majority. Before the Bloc surge, the Liberals were looking at around 50 seats - if not even more -  in the province, with 14 of the 16 seats the NDP held after the 2015 election strong targets for the party. They ended up winning 35 seats, and that difference was the majority. This time, they’re likely to have more than the 122 seats they won in English Canada last time, but they aren't likely going to get to 170 without a sizable gain of seats in Quebec. The seats exist for them, especially if the Liberals can get close to a double digit lead in the province consistently, but that is, fundamentally, the question of this election. The South Shore and the Eastern Townships are full of Bloc seats that could, if the Liberals entrench their position in the province, flip, and cause the majority to easily come into view. But that sea of Bloc seats could also make this election a banal absurdity, with the Tories losing some seats and the Liberals gaining a few, but the fundamental nature of a Hung Parliament where the Liberals are the only possible potential government remaining unchanged.

Canada is in a funny spot, with a government that should be eminently beatable and yet that same government is walking into the unlosable election. Trudeau will remain Prime Minister after the election, and yet it is decidedly unclear whether he will be able to break the Bloc sufficiently to get the majority he craves. Maybe he will, and the decision to call this election will look genius. But while Trudeau walks into this election as near-certain a winner of any Canadian politician since the 2000 election, he also walks into this election with the pressure to deliver the third term majority government that his father delivered the Liberal Party. If he is to do it, holding the NDP surge at bay and beating the Bloc will be the key, as the Conservatives watch from the sideline, in opposition and yet utterly irrelevant. Canada, Trudeau’s Unlosable Election is here - but who knows whether Trudeau will win his gamble for a majority.