Canada Recap: There Was No Tory Path

Liberals Returned, Tories Still Locked Out

The Tories needed to win seats in the GTA if they wanted to win office Monday night, and they’ve lost seats there.

And y’all told me I was crazy to say the Tories had no chance.

…

I’m going to skip the assessment of how my projections did, given the tight margins and the mail ballots, and do all of that when the election results are finalized. Trust me, I will own my errors - the PPC seat was a yikes, and I was bearish on the Tories in Atlantic Canada - but the broad analysis of this election was very clear. The Tories needed to win seats in Brampton, Mississauga, and Halton, and they didn’t make a single gain. They didn’t win Kanata-Carleton, they didn’t win St. Catherines, they might maybe flip Conestoga back, but that’s not even a guarantee. It was a pathetic night for the Tories, and it was eminently predictable - and predicted, by me, for the last 18 months.

Oh, but PJ Fournier said that this race was close, and that the Tories were favourites at one point, so it must have been true, right? No, it was poppycock, idiocy on stilts from someone who should know better, and either doesn’t, or went for the headline that would drive traffic. The Tories never had a path to victory, and anyone who thought that I went too far and too fast is wrong. I saw this election with clear eyes.

What does it mean for Justin Trudeau? It hurts not to win a majority for him, I’m sure, but given the deep panic that so many Liberals had before today, the victory is fine. It’s suboptimal, but it’s fine, and they’re going to stay in government. There’s no real way to judge the answer of what the right baseline should have been, but this result is fine, honestly. The point of the election call was that they had majority government upside and little downside, and they hit their downside and they’ll probably net seats after the mail ballots come in.

My real ire is for Jagmeet Singh, who has run a deeply unserious campaign and blew a genuinely good chance at making advances. I mean, the party’s seat haul is deeply disappointing, and even if it improves slightly, to be as low as they are, after being told the NDP were a serious party, is pathetic. Jagmeet should resign for the good of the party, because it is clear he cannot run a campaign good enough to convert good vibes into seats. Stop running a campaign to win TikTok and run a campaign to win seats in the fucking House, or fucking resign, and let Matt Green run and actually win shit.

This campaign might have been the campaign which accomplished nothing in some senses, but it did actually underline the Tories very real problem - they cannot win seats in the GTA while running candidates with the ability to win their batshit crazy membership. The Tories need to moderate to win the next general election, and they cannot do that because their membership would lose their fucking minds. The Tories are a party that cannot win the GTA as currently constructed, and until they manage to square that circle, they’ll be locked out of the GTA, and government in this country, indefinitely. That was the story in January 2020, when I said the Tories can’t win this election, that was the story in August when I said that there was no path for them, and that’s the story now. There was no path to a Tory Government, and I was right.

What a fun sentence to be able to write again.