Merger's Farcical Realities

On The Idea Of A LPC-NDP Merger

One of the most annoying parts of my sports fandom is also my favourite part of my sports fandom – Jordan Spieth. Spieth, the wild chaos agent of a golfer, is known for making shots that nobody else could even contemplate making, but his willingness to try wild ass shit has won him Majors and lost his them. For every time he does … well, whatever the fuck it was he did to save bogey (editor’s note: I’m ashamed of myself) at Birkdale, he dunks two in the water at Augusta to win Danny Willett a Masters.

He is a roller coaster on the best of days, a human equivalent of a strobe light at worst, a heart attack waiting to happen every time he contends. His chaos is why I love him, and it’s an inexorable part of the Spieth experience. A Spieth who plays golf by hitting fairways, hitting every iron to 20 feet, and then two putting wouldn’t be Spieth – the chaos and the creativity is Spieth, for good or for ill.

At the Masters that just ended, Spieth came fourth – a perfectly respectable result that ignores the real truth, which is that he played like a championship winning golfer for 3 rounds and played like dogshit in his third round, and that’s why he’s fourth and not first. But the thing is, asking for Spieth to avoid the 76 in his third round means he would have to radically change his game, and that game is why he can turn around and shoot a 66 hours after finishing his third round.

There’s a tendency too assume that you can get the best of someone – or something – without the downside, and too often it’s bullshit. And the Jordan of it all is all I can think about when I see the conversation starting about a Liberal-NDP merger.

…

The basic tenants of an argument for a Liberal-NDP merger are, essentially, the following. Something like 50-55% of the country votes for progressive parties, the split vote hurts the left, and if you merged the two parties (or the three, back when the Greens were still a nominal threat circa 2019), the left would never lose again. It’s a nifty little math problem, because in lots of seats, the Liberal + NDP vote would be greater than – if not much greater than – the winning vote share for the CPC (or the BQ, in a few seats). The problem is, the math’s a fraud.

There are three major problems with the idea that because the Liberals and NDP got 50% of the vote in 2021 they’d get that as a combined party. First is the suburban middle, the second is the regions, and the third is the left proper. They’re all not exclusively big problems individually, but together, it’s a disaster for proponents of it.

The first is that the Liberals have won government, especially the last two times, through the GTA and the suburbs. These are not places where the NDP brand is particularly strong, as the NDP’s terrible performances in Mississauga and Halton in both 2018 and 2022 provincially show, and where a leftward turn of the Liberal Party won’t be helpful. There is some tolerance for an economically left wing agenda amongst the wealthy, socially liberal fiscal conservatives who voted for Harper in 2015 and now vote Liberal, but that appetite is not endless, and the policy concessions the new party would have to make to the NDP would give the Tories an opening.

The second problem is the regions, where the Liberal brand is not strong and where the NDP has been strong by not being a party of Toronto elites (also known as Northern Ontario) or Central Canadian elites (Skeena, Comox, Kootenay). The Liberals are too elite, they’re too socially liberal, they’re too soft for the NDP-CPC voters in these areas, and the idea that Charlie Angus would hold on just because the math looks good is for the birds. This would accelerate the left’s decline in these areas and just make it easier for Poilievre to win seats he needs. (The Liberal brand is also worth something in Atlantic Canada, and poisoning that with the NDP brand when the Liberals are facing huge problems in Cape Breton and in Newfoundland for the same reasons is not likely a winning strategy.)

Oh, and the idea that such a merger would work in reducing the left’s vote split is for the birds. The idea that even if the Liberals can control the leakage on their right flank, that the NDP voter base would accept a merger is for the birds. The NDP vote is not voting for them because they’re too stupid to realize the NDP can’t win, and for a lot of people, that’s the appeal. The NDP is a safe home for not-Liberal left wing votes, and that vote won’t just migrate to the united party.

In the aftermath of the 2015 UK election, it was estimated that 29% of UKIP’s vote came from people who supported Britain’s membership in the European Union, and in 86 seats, UKIP replaced the Lib Dems as the party of second place. The idea that there wouldn’t either be an exodus from the NDP to the Greens (if they came out as anti-merger and the new staunchly left force) or the PPC (as a general Fuck The System vote) is for the birds.

When the Reform Party and the PCs merged in 2003 (no, I don’t accept the existence of the alleged ”Canadian Alliance”, Reform fought the 2000 election), they walked into a combined party with 38% of the vote at the 2000 election. They walked out with 30% afterwards. The merged CPC got 78.5% of the combined solo total, which would put the new Liberal/NDP merged party on for a sub-40% of the vote. Yes, if the CPC is still at 33% then the left being at 39% would be good, but the CPC would gain some of that floating 11%, and then it’s all mostly a wash.

The left benefits from being able to pitch two visions in two different parts of the country to two different sets of voters. The NDP gets to use their anti-establishment message to win regional cities and towns, and the Liberals get to use the NDP as a rhetorical triangulation point to seem moderate in the suburbs. It’s a relationship that maximizes the left’s vote share, which given the two parties have 50% of the vote and 54% of the seats, is a win.

A merger is an unserious proposition that even on political terms would fail, ignoring all the policy ramifications and the political fallout of a party that would be at war over internal control at the start. Remember when Peter MacKay had to threaten to reform the PCs at the 2005 CPC convention over leadership rules? Imagine that, again and again and again.

The answer, if the left were serious about fixing vote splitting issues, is either ranked ballots (which the NDP objects to on reasonable-but-overstated grounds that it would elect Liberal majorities) or a mutual non-aggression pact of not running candidates in negotiated seats (which is doable, but would require eliminating the link between national campaign spending limits from the number of nominated candidates). That way you don’t have the risk of the Conservatives winning Mississauga-Lakeshore or Timmins-St. Will Charlie Angus Please God Stop Asking For A Malapportionment with 35% of the vote without the downsides of a merger.

If you want to say that the days of political cooperation are here and that the NDP and Liberals should formalize their relationship, great. There’s ways to do it short of a merger that would be much better. A merger would be a fucking disaster for the left and for progressive ideas, and anyone trying to help stop the Tories should focus on what’s possible over a fantasy, because thinking that you can just stack the NDP votes on top of the Liberals’ totals is a farce. It’s the same as asking for Jordan Spieth to not go for the hero shot – if you think that’s possible, you no longer understand what it is you’re trying to do in the first place.