PPC's Portage Possibility

On Portage Lisgar

Guess how many more people voted for Annamie Paul in 2021 in Toronto Centre as leader of the Green Party of Canada than did in 2019 when she was a nobody candidate.

Whatever you think the answer is, you’re too high, because the answer is a firm 69. She could only get 69 more people to vote for her in 2021 than voted for her in 2019. Some of that was turnout dropping as Elections Canada cut polling places due to COVID, but the effect her leadership had at general election time was 69 votes and 1.49% of the vote from the baseline of being a no name candidate.

She also got 33% of the vote at the entirely forgotten to history Toronto Centre byelection of 2020, which has been forgotten to history because it was 8 days before Biden Trump and the same day as the Saskatchewan election, which was also 2 days after John Horgan won a majority in BC. Why am I bringing up old history? Because Max Bernier is running in Portage Lisgar for the PPC in the soon to be announced byelection to replace Candice Bergen, and the PPC might get into Parliament.

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Portage Lisgar has been interesting already – there was some internal nomination intrigue, with a PC Minister in the Manitoba government wanting to be the next nominee, but being rejected on the basis of being too moderate. Why does it matter? The PPC got 22% there last time, and now they’re running Bernier.

If this were a general election, I think the CPC’s 30% lead from last time would hold, because the chances that candidate factors alone can make this up is a stretch in normal times – especially since Pierre Poilievre is more friendly to CPC-PPC swing voters than Erin O’Toole was. But I think the lesson of Toronto Centre matters here.

In 2020 it was reasonable to say that the Greens were down, Liberals were up, and therefore the result of the byelection would be a roughly no change situation off of the previous election result. That analysis ended up being right for the 2021 General, even! But on byelection night, it was idiocy on stilts. Go back to the 2018 Chicoutimi byelection, where the CPC went from 4^th to 1^st and got a majority of the vote in a seat they failed to break 17% in the previous election.

Treat Bernier as a well known independent and you get numerous international examples – Rob Oakeshott winning the 2008 Lyne byelection (albeit with the tacit support of the Labor Party, who didn’t run a candidate), the Liberals losing Wentworth in 2018, and even the close running of Trent Zimmerman in North Sydney in 2013 all show the sorts of volatility inherent in byelections. And when you’re an underdog, volatility is good.

Remember when the Liberals went from 5% and literal fourth place behind the Greens in Brandon Souris to 43% and a 1 point loss in 2013? Go across the pond - remember gestures wildly at every Lib Dem byelection gain ever? Remember George Galloway winning Bradford West, when he won by 30%? Byelections can lead to wild shit, and generally speaking the results that do wild things aren’t on this fertile of territory. When Reform won their first ever MP in the 1989 Beaver River byelection, they did so coming from 13% of the vote (albeit making up a 30% margin, as here).

Would the CPC win this seat if Bernier was running and this was a general election? Of course they would, because we saw what happens to leaders in these sorts of situations. When voting for Annamie Paul became an actual statement of intent, as opposed to a statement about one seat at one time, her vote collapsed, and the Greens went from 2^nd back to 4^th. In the same way, the 2025 election will necessarily default to Trudeau versus Poilievre, and that contrast fucks the PPC. But on some random ass Monday in likely July? Who the fuck knows.

There were a pair of byelections in 2019 in the UK where the Tories lost – being knocked to third in Peterborough and losing Brecon to the Lib Dems – that they ended up winning in December of that year at the general election. Byelections have their own rhythm, their own gravitational pulls, and they need to be understood as such. This isn’t an argument that Bernier will win, but it’s an argument that predicting byelections with general election confidence intervals is a dumb and bad exercise, as someone who has done it before.

Bernier might go backwards on the 22% the PPC got last time because the people of Portage Lisgar don’t want a Quebecois carperbagger representing them, or he could get 50%. The error bands on byelection predictions are huge, province wide swing is a mostly useless metric when you’re dealing with minor parties, and unless Mainstreet polls it, we’ll be shit outta luck on actual, useable information.

My prediction, if forced to make it, is that the CPC wins by 15%, but that’s not the point. Anybody trying to say that Bernier can’t win fundamentally misunderstands how wildly variant byelections can be. Could it be a snoozer? Of course it could – there’s a survivor’s bias in the myriad of examples I listed about, because for every byelection where Gilles Duceppe gets 66% in the infancy of the Bloc, there’s the 2005 Labrador byelection where the incumbent party cops a swing against it and nobody bats an eye.

Once we know which it is the narrative will seem obvious and everyone who thought otherwise will be an idiot, but right now, Bernier’s got a very real shot of entering Parliament, and it’s worth remembering how wild byelections can be. This is a real, credible chance at Canada electing their first PPC MP that should not be written off or shrugged aside. Would it take a massive job to win the seat? Sure, but if Annamie Paul can get close because of the vagaries of byelection randomness, it’ll take a bolder man than me to write Bernier off.