Poilievre's Atlantic Opportunities

The Liberals' Weak Spot

One of the most frustrating moments for me watching an election night broadcast was the 2017 UK Election, or more specifically since I was no fan of Theresa May one specific part of the coverage. The story of that election was the complete erasure of the UKIP vote by the Tories, and then a swing of socially liberal, Remain voters from Tory to Labour. In aggregate, it looked like the UKIP vote was splitting between the two, but any analysis of the specific seats made the trend clear – a night where the Tories lost Kensington and won Stoke South was not a night where the UKIP was splitting even.

The reason I’m thinking of this is the lack of capacity for nuanced understandings, and a concern coming into the next election here in Canada, and specifically the east coast. What is likely to happen when we get those two hours of election results before the rest of the country votes is likely going to be much worse for the left than the rest of the country, for a simple reason – it’s never really made that much sense why Atlantic Canada is so resolutely Liberal.

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Now, that’s not quite true, there are two historical reasons why Atlantic Canada has been so much more Liberal friendly at the federal level – distrust of Western Conservatives and a weak NDP. Even in the Layton Landslide of 2011, the Liberals still won 12/32 seats in Atlantic Canada – which is more than they won in Quebec (7) or Ontario (11) despite having either less than half or around a third of the seats.

Now, that fact – or more the general sense memory of Atlantic Canada as part of “Liberal Canada” – has created a weird Heads I Win, Tails You Lose mentality to discussing the region between campaigns. If the polls are good for the Liberals there, many on the left treat them as correct. When the Tories are doing well, the results are small samples that can be safely ignored. Now, that is true – most Atlantic samples struggle to hit 100 people, and are notoriously bouncy – but the acceptance of that only seems to come when the Liberals are on the wrong side of that variance.

I’m a big fan of Abacus and David Coletto, but I’m sure he won’t begrudge me saying I doubt the NDP’s really at 29% in the Atlantic, as his sample this week shows (with a LPC-CPC tie at 32%). But the thing is, I suspect a lot of the people doubting that wouldn’t blink at a 51-30 result, which knowing how these samples generally go is what’s coming soon, either from Abacus or someone else. But what’s more important than the polls is the basic truth, which is this moment in time is going to be a serious departure from the historical norms in the East.

In what I think of as the modern era of Canadian politics – everything after the 1995 Quebec referendum – the Tories have broken 10 seats in Atlantic Canada 3 times. In 2008 they won 10 seats, in 2011 they won 14 (really 13, if we void the Labrador result for the very obvious campaign finance violations), and then 1997, when the PCs won 13 seats on the back of discontent against the Liberals’ social spending cuts and Jean Charest’s non-threatening persona. The thing is, Conservative victories in Atlantic Canada have always come from not being too conservative – which is why the Tories gained seats in the east in 2006, 2008, and then 2011 as the secret agenda attacks lost credibility.

Now? The Tories are running against their traditional Atlantic strategy, but it’s going to work well for them, because 20 years ago things were different. Back then, economic liberals who didn’t always agree with the Central Canadian Cultural Consensus but wanted government supports voted Liberal for the economic reasons. This is the same thing that we’ve seen everywhere else – the old Labour strength in the Red Wall in the UK, Democratic strength falling apart in rural and regional America, amongst other examples – but these voters are increasingly voting for the party of their cultural understanding.

We saw the first real example of this in 2021, when Scott Simms went down, because while nobody could accuse Simms of not getting his voters, the national Liberal Party is increasingly a turn off to the rural voters that still vote Liberal. There’s too many guns and too many hunters and too many people who aren’t all the way on board with every part of the gay and trans rights agenda that I’d support. It’s not a shock that 69% of Atlantic respondents to that Leger poll on schools outing trans kids to their families supported the policy and only 49% of BCers did (57% nationally did), let’s just say.

What it means for the next election is that if you’re sketching out the kind of places that the Tories more muscular conservatism will do well, it’ll look something like Atlantic Canada. Rural and regional areas with Liberal MPs, higher than average concentrations of guns and hunters, socially conservative tendencies, and not a lot of ethnic diversity? Well, you’re sketching somewhat Northern Ontario (though the number of universities and reserves up there gives it some diversity) but you’re really describing Atlantic Canada.

Now, how much better will Poilievre do? That’s harder to say, but the idea that there won’t be considerable Atlantic gains for the CPC is for the birds. It’s a nonsense understanding of the region, because the region has always been an odd fit with the Ontario and (some of) Quebec coalition the Liberal Party has always been. The 90s Liberal governments were a coalition of social liberals in Ontario’s cities, some social conservatives (and plenty of social liberals) elected through vote splits in the Ontario regions, and then just enough in Quebec and the rest of the country to win again. Now, it’s a much more uniformly socially liberal coalition, which is why it wins Milton and loses Miramichi.

That trade will work for the Liberals, especially if they can turn red socially liberal areas still repped by Tory MPs – seats in Calgary and Edmonton, places like Niagara Falls and Durham. The Tories have gains to make, but they’re not done bleeding on the other side. That said, they have a real, substantive opportunity to make a breakthrough on the east coast at the next election – and Liberals who dismiss the possibility will be in for a rude awakening.