Quebec’s Conservative Gains About To Elect …Liberals?!?

On Dynamics Oft-Misunderstood

If 6% of Quebecers flipped from voting for the Bloc to the Conservative Party of Canada, and nothing else changed, who would be the big beneficiary?

Yes, the Conservatives would gain 3 seats from the Bloc, which isn’t nothing, but it would actually be the Liberals who gain the most. A 6% swing Bloc to Conservative would actually win the Liberals 5 seats, even without the Liberal vote changing in the end. (This is off the redistribution, where two Liberals notionally flipped to the Bloc - on the 2021 results it’d be 3 gains apiece.)

The reason this is worth mentioning is twofold - yes, Poilievre is doing better in Quebec, and so it’s worth pointing out the seat math is much more complicated than it appears, but also because I think a lot of people aren’t quite grasping the situation Quebec is creating for the Conservatives - and how much more imbalanced the popular vote could get for them.

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In 2021, the Conservatives got 18.6% of the vote in Quebec, worth ~4.4% to the national popular vote. Right now, the Conservatives are getting 22.5% in Quebec in my polling average, which is worth ~5.3%. That 0.9% isn’t much, but it’s 0.9% of the national vote that is right now getting them 2 seats. (Trois Rivières, one of the three they’ve jumped the Bloc in, is going red.) But take something like this morning’s Mainstreet, where the Cons are on 29%. That’s a shade under 7% of the national vote, or a 2.5% increase in the Conservative vote alone from Quebec. And, with that, they’re still nowhere in Quebec, winning 4 more seats. That’s it.

The Conservatives just have a deeply inefficient vote in Quebec, and in this election it’s cascading the already existent Liberal efficiency advantage in two ways. For every vote the CPC gain from the Bloc, the Liberal vote in Quebec gets more efficient, as the chances of the Liberals winning a Montarville or Terrebonne or Shefford rises, yes. But it’s also the case that for every Bloc vote the CPC get with minimal seat gain, the national popular vote gets even less representative of seats.

The Cons already have a problem of stacking useless votes in the Prairies, but with the big Liberal gains in votes from the NDP there the inefficiency may lessen - if the polls actually end up being right there, which I’m moderately doubtful of. But in Quebec the Conservatives are speedrunning their way to Bonnie Crombie’s existence - a big increase in votes and a tiny one in seats.

The reason for this is that the Tory vote, outside their seats and their core target trio, is about as flat as the Liberal vote in Alberta. There are just few places where the vote spikes, which means like the Ontario Liberals, there’s no real ability to convert a rise in vote share into spikes into seats. Going from 21% to 29% in a seat might be useful, but it doesn’t win shit under First Past The Post.

Well, except it does - just not for them. The Liberals are salivating at this, because this Conservative gain from the Bloc is making it easier to elect Liberals. It’s helping across the North and South Shores, the key region I identified earlier this month. If the Conservatives can steal BQ voters in Blainville or Rivière-des-Milles-Îles, that’s less Bloc voters the Liberals have to flip.

Some have been excited about the positive Legault comments about Poilievre, but it’s funny to tell who thinks this means the Conservatives will suddenly flip a dozen seats versus who understands this helps Mark Carney. It’s counterintuitive, but it’s very true that the one place where Liberals are praying for the Conservative vote to hold up is Quebec. And if your commentators don’t get this basic fact then you should get new ones.

I know I’m a broken record on this at this point but I don’t care - the quality of commentary in English Canada about Quebec is fucking pathetic. Quebec is not actually that hard to understand, if you have a brain and are willing to either read in French or occasionally check a translation. Quebecers are not some exotic species that is finally being exposed to Canadians, they’re our brothers and sisters who have, for good or ill, been a key part of the political fermerment our entire country. It’s both offensive and plain fucking stupid how bad so many people who have control over guest selection, op-ed rosters, and more are at getting anybody with a more nuanced understanding of Quebec than “Montreal = English” on their shows and in the pages of their papers. (In all sincerity, thank fuck for the CBC - both for At Issue and P&P, they do a great job at making sure Quebec is covered well.)

The problems for the Conservatives don’t stop here, but it’s worth noting very clearly that the Conservatives are helping the Liberals in Quebec. The thing that held the Liberals to minority in 2021 was their inability to break through in Quebec, and into areas they’re currently winning in. What happened was two fold - Trudeau ran a mediocre campaign that couldn’t take advantage of the Bloc’s lack of energy until the Debate, and the Conservative vote came in lower than many of the polls and people’s hopes. Now, the Conservatives are - at least for now - helping the Liberals.

Plainly, any Conservative who saw that Francois Legault clip as good for the Conservatives misunderstands Quebec. A Conservative upswing in Quebec would come from 2021 Bloc voters, and every vote they take takes more Liberal MPs likelier. They’ll never do it for understandable reasons but if the Tories wanted to hurt the chances of the Liberals winning a majority, they’d bail out of Quebec and try and help the Bloc. Thank fuck they’re too proud to do it.