What did we learn from another Liberal minority win?

Jordan So, I’ve got Deja Vu.

CBC News Clip Canada, your next government will be a Liberal government. Justin Trudeau will continue on as Prime Minister, gaining back enough seats to form government tonight.

Jordan The past two years have destroyed everyone’s sense of passing time, I know, but doesn’t it seem like we were just here? A battered Justin Trudeau declaring victory, a Conservative leader claiming that gains had been made even in defeat, a Canadian public that wished all of these people would just get to work and get things done, a bunch of tired journalists and a bunch of rich ad agencies. It is the same result at the top of the line, a minority Liberal government. But this election is different from 2019 in a few ways, if you look deeper. First of all, this was Canada’s first pandemic election. And as I record this late at night, the ramifications of that are still being felt.

News Clip 1 This riding, Spadina-Fort York is one of eleven ridings in the Greater Toronto Area where Elections Canada had to cut the number of polling stations by more than half.

News Clip 2 One of our journalists at UBC in Vancouver, he’s been talking to students in the line there, and the people at the end of the line have been told by Elections Canada a wait of 3 to 4 hours.

News Clip 3 The question is, what is going to happen when someone comes in here and sees a long line up. Are they just going to turn around and decide not to vote?

Jordan Even the down ballot results showed how Canada’s mood has changed. In the era of the climate crisis, the party that has traditionally owned that issue shrank in the polls. As hate crimes and populist anger rose, so did the party most effective at channeling that rage and hate, even though it didn’t result in a single seat. And Conservative leader Erin O’Toole, it’s true is not his predecessor, Andrew Scheer, who was seen as too conservative to win Liberal votes. Does O’Toole with his rabid base have the opposite problem? In the coming weeks, we will learn what this new Parliament looks like and more importantly, how it functions. But right now, I think I speak for all Canadians when I say, let’s figure out what this means, lets thank God that it’s all over. And please, let’s not do this again for at least a few years, okay?

I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings, this is The Big Story. David Moscrop is a political writer and commentator. His book is called Too Dumb for Democracy , which feels appropriate tonight. Hello, David.

David Good morning.

Jordan Did we all just waste about $600 million and five weeks of our lives or what?

David Well, Jordan, you know, it’s never a waste when you go to the people and give them a chance to exercise their Democratic right to chart the course for the future of the country.

Jordan I didn’t know I had Justin Trudeau on this podcast.

David Yes, it was a waste of six weeks, and I know that there’s going to be people who are saying what I was just jokingly saying, it’s never a waste when you go to the people. But the fact is, people have been saying this for two months now, including myself. Parliament was working fine enough. The government had the confidence of the House of Commons and therefore the right to govern. The Liberals thought they could get a majority, so they went for it, and they didn’t. And we’re back where we started. And quite frankly, I do think it’s it’s a waste of opportunity cost it’s a waste of time. And I don’t really love viewing this through the frame of money because, look, elections cost what they cost. But we just spent $600 million on this to get back to where we started. So I think people will feel like the last six weeks were a bit of a waste, and I think they’re right.

Jordan I opened the intro by saying, I kind of had a feeling of deja vu this entire night, and I know we’re speaking late at night when it hasn’t officially officially been called a Liberal minority, but it looks almost impossible for them to get there. There’s still some ballots out there. But assuming a miracle doesn’t happen, how much does the final seat count for the Liberals and the Conservatives matter if the Liberals are going to stay in power, but they don’t have a majority, the Conservatives will once again be the official opposition. Does it matter when all the votes are tallied, if those seats have moved up or down much?

David Probably not. I mean, it matters if there’s a shift in how many parties the Liberal Party has to court, assuming that party’s vote as a block, in order to pass legislation and maintain confidence. If there’s a shift in that, then it matters a bit because it changes the dynamic of the House a little bit. You know what I mean? If you can pick anybody to dance with, it’s different than having to dance with a couple of people at once. But that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. It looks like the Liberals are going to end up with enough seats to choose any of the other three parties or combination of them, or four parties rather, if we’re doing combinations because the Greens look to pick up a couple of seats, in order to pass legislation and maintain confidence.

So it looks again an awful lot like it did in 2019. In fact, it could come down to a few shifts between the NDP and the Bloc Quebecois, and not a lot from the Liberals.

Jordan Before we get into all the down ballot stuff because there is some really interesting stuff in the results from this election. And to your point, that does matter. But I want to ask you about a report that circulated in a couple of places on Election Day. Which is that keeping the Liberals from a majority would be considered a win in Erin O’Tooles camp. There were a couple of Conservative strategists or people close to the party who are kind of coming out and saying that. Is that just posturing? Is there a way that this is a win for O’Toole?

David I don’t see how that is a win. I think it’s the sort of thing you say as a party when you’re trying to manage expectations last minute, even though the person who said it claimed that they were misquoted and so on. If you’re reaching for that message at all, you’re probably preparing to manage expectations. Now, I think it would be appropriate to say, ‘look, Erin O’Toole was actually up against tougher expectations than you thought. If you go back to where the Conservatives were polling ahead of the election, given the pandemic, given the fact that he was elected in the middle of it. Right? I mean, he was around last summer was when he showed up, and so it was actually much tougher for him than you thought. And if he’s able to maintain something close to a status quo, then you ought to give him at least another election, right? If the party is going to keep turfing its leaders after one election, they’re never going to form government, it’s going to be much harder than it would be otherwise. Stephen Harper didn’t win his first election in 2004, despite the fact that Paul Martin was not particularly popular, and the Liberals have been governing for over a decade by then. So why should Erin O’Toole be held to a different standard? So whether or not it’s a win for them is going to depend entirely I think on whether or not they’re viewing this as a one election strategy or a two election strategy. If it’s a two election strategy, they can make a case. If it’s a one election strategy, then it’s clearly a loss because they didn’t form government. But I think it would be unwise to view this through the lens of a one election strategy.

Jordan Is there going to be internecine warfare in the party over whether this is a one in election strategy or whether we need to give this guy some time? Because it looked like he was really caught between a rock and a hard place this entire campaign.

David I mean, without a doubt there will be and you can see the rumblings of it already. It has started already. People think that it’s the left in Canada that’s fractious and difficult to govern and tends to break apart. That’s not historically true. Unless you think the Liberals and the NDP are the same sort of left. The fact is, the right is the fraction punch. They’re the bunch that break apart. They’re the bunch that’s hard to govern. And so they’ve basically been doing some iteration of this shtick since the 1980s when the Reform Party emerged. So I do think there will be internecine warfare. I do think that’s consistent with what we see from the Conservatives, and I do think it’s a major impediment to them forming government. And again to go back to Stephen Harper. It is of note that one of the things Stephen Harper was able to do quite well was keep the caucus and the party base in order, at least until he couldn’t. He did pretty well from 2004 to 2014 and then not so well from 2014 to 2015. And the party hasn’t been particularly good at it since.

Jordan Since the Liberals are staying in power, the Conservatives are staying the official opposition, give or take a few seats on either side. Who really did gain the most from this election then?

David Sometimes everybody loses.

Jordan That’s a cheerful note.

David Sometimes nobody wins. Perhaps the NDP will be the party that comes out saying, Well, we won because they added, I don’t know, several seats. We’ll see how many they actually added the numbers are still being processed. We’ve got mail in votes to process to be determined, but it looks like ultimately it could very well be the NDP as the only the part that comes out ahead in terms of picking up seats. But even then, it doesn’t look like it’s going to be a ton and it’s not going to change the balance of power in Parliament. So does anybody win that?Not really. We just all lose six weeks of our lives.

Jordan The one party that rose the most in the polls or at least rose a significant amount in the polls doesn’t look to have won a single seat, but the People’s Party of Canada certainly increased their vote share. What does that mean for the party going forward? And did that hurt the Conservative Party’s chances at eking this thing out? Do we even know that yet?

David Well, I don’t think we know that yet. I mean, you have to look at it at the riding level. It depends on the margins of victory and loss at the riding level. And so it’ll take a little bit of time when we have final results post mail-in ballots to sit down and say, okay, were there ridings where it’s reasonable to conclude that the PPC cost the CPC the seat that they otherwise would have won or had a high probability of winning. And that’s something you can only do in the fullness of time by going through the results individually. On aggregate, presumably without a doubt, they must have taken votes from the Conservatives. It’s prima facie the case, that must have happened. Probably some from the Greens too and probably mobilized new voters on top of it. That looks to be the mix of the PPC that drives them primarily. There probably are some people who actually are happy that that group has been excised from the party because they think that the future of the Conservative Party is to move towards the center and to try to be a little bit like the party of the 1980s and early 1990s rather than the mid 2000s. And who’s to say? I mean, that remains to be sorted out in years to come. I guess one of the questions you have to ask is, ‘if the party, the Conservative Party, runs this election again, in let’s say 2023.

Jordan Oh, man, can we just push it a few more years?

David I would love to push it the full four years. Well, technically, you’re allowed five, but functionally, it’s four. But we know from history, in fact Justin Trudeau sort of threatened it himself in one of the debates, 18 months or 2 years is sort of what you get from one of these things. And if the party runs that again, do they have a better shot? I think they do. And I think they’re probably better off without the PPC folks to in some sense, but it’s all going to depend on the particular breakdowns in the individual riding.

Jordan You mentioned that the PPC likely took some votes from the Greens. I think a lot of people would find that surprising. But I also think a lot of people would just be surprised at the lack of votes for the Greens, certainly in much of the country compared to where they were. I know they’re still going to hold a couple of seats at least. But when we saw the early numbers roll in, their vote share was way down. The other votes won’t be counted for maybe a day or so. But what happened? This is supposed to be a climate election. Every election is supposed to be a climate election, and the party that usually owns the climate saw the biggest drop.

David Yes. Well, I think what happened was the party went into a federal election in a state of civil war. And they had rebelled against the leader publicly, and they never gave her a chance to lead, despite the fact that I think she had a chance to be a pretty compelling leader. And so it’s very hard to do that both symbolically and in terms of resources, because that hurts the bottom line, right? That hurts the kind of candidates you can recruit. It hurts the morale of your volunteers and the volunteers you can recruit, it hurts the money you can raise. And that just makes it difficult to run an election. And then, of course, a leader who’s worried about keeping her job spends the entire election, almost the entire election, the vast majority of it in Toronto and in particular, in her own riding, trying to win it. Well, you can’t run a campaign like that. You can’t run a national campaign like that.

She didn’t want to go to specific ridings because she didn’t want to be a distraction. Well, forget it. You can’t run a party like that. And it’s too bad because the Green Party did have things to say. She had things to say. She brought a very different perspective to the election, and it was a real shame she wasn’t given that chance. And it looks like, it sounds like she may be pushed out now, and I think if she ends up with two or three seats and pushed out of her own party after several months, we’re going to have to have a very serious talk about what the standards are in this country because it’s sort of ridiculous. If she wins two seats, given everything she faced, that’s a very good day for the Green Party.

Jordan That’s good to hear.

David My God, they only had three the last time.

Jordan What about the mood inside the Liberal Party? I don’t mean tonight where they’re obviously going to have a good one. But going forward, there were a lot of questions about, obviously, whether failure to win this election would cost Justin Trudeau his place as leader, but even about whether or not the party would be satisfied with having gone through this whole thing just to end up where they were and whether or not he would take some blame for that.

David Well, I think he will take the blame for it. There was a sense that they could win a majority, but I do think that will be tempered by the fact that it very quickly looked like in fact they couldn’t. So the expectations seem to change a little bit and level out. So I think he’ll probably be the beneficiary of that. And look, if you formed or hold government, that’s a pretty good night for you, no matter who you are. The fact is this will be the fifth of seven elections that has yielded a minority Parliament. So there is a trend that extends beyond Justin Trudeau.

I think this also opens an opportunity for what you would expect to see, this isn’t a guarantee, but expect to see a kind of a year of Justin Trudeau, give or take, a new leader and then we do this all again under someone different, which perhaps lines the Liberal Party up for a decent shot, unless the country’s sick of them, in which case of Conservatives have a real chance at capitalizing.

Jordan You look at the big picture a lot. You write about the big picture. You’ve been a political scientist, you’ve written a book about democracy. You just mentioned the trend of minority government. So Zoom way out, and when you look at the election and this result, what does it tell you about the political mood of Canada and Canadians?

David I don’t really know. It’s tough to know because the fact is sometimes you get a minority government because people en masse when you add them all up, just don’t seem to want to give anybody a majority. But you also sometimes get a minority government when people en masse want a majority, but disagree on who should have it. So the fact is that the individuals don’t sort of sit down and do the mass calculations as a rule and say, ‘Here’s the message I want to send to Ottawa. Here’s the kind of Parliament I want to see here’s the majority versus majority calculations.’ It’s just nobody has been particularly compelled by one party or another, such that they produce a majority. But it is of particular note that we have a single member plurality system, first past the post we call it, in which very small fluctuations in the vote have huge effects at the national level. So the percentage swing might be 2 or 3%, but that makes a difference between who governs and whether or not that government is a majority or minority.

So it’s hard to make big conclusions about 2 or 3 or 4 or even 5%. Because it’s nothing, really, when we’re talking about 100%. But what it says about the party system, though, is that we’re jamming a multi party system into a two party electoral system, and that produces what we’re seeing now.

Jordan I was going to ask you about that because we’ve seen both the Liberal and the Conservative vote shares rise, and it seems to me like that indicates a rise in the same kind of partisanship we’ve seen around the world recently. And how does that mesh with the future of our current system? I know Justin Trudeau said recently that he was open to looking again at electoral reform. I don’t know how much of a possibility that is, but how long can we kind of run this two party system in a multi party system?

David Well, he’s open to ranked ballots. That actually means alternative vote.

Jordan Would that help in this situation?

David It would probably help him.

Jordan I see.

David Here’s the thing, I don’t want to get into a lecture on this because it will bore not just you and your listeners, but me, but ranked ballot isn’t a system. Ranked ballot is a way of having a ballot. You can have ranked ballots in a PR system, depending on how you design it. What he’s talking about is an alternative vote, which means that you have an instant runoff. You rank your ballot, if nobody gets 50%, you drop the bottom person, you redistribute their votes, and you keep doing that until somebody gets to 50%. And the idea behind that is it creates a sort of pressure on parties to come to the middle and to appeal to that second voter. It’s pretty good if you’re a Liberal, because you’re kind of everybody’s second choice if you’re not their first choice or at least enough that it looks pretty good for you. But this is classic Liberals who believe that these sort of things have a sort of tempering moderating influence, but it can produce even bigger distortions than the first past the post system. So I’m not convinced that’s better.

Jordan When we spoke to you earlier in this campaign, and you are not the only person that has said it to me during the course of this election, there was the idea that the Liberals would probably hold on because they are kind of the natural governing party of Canada. And given that this election was in the middle of a pandemic, that people were angry that they didn’t want it, the Conservatives had a new leader who, by and large, everybody seemed to like more than the last leader. There seem to be a lot of things pushing for change, and we saw that reflected in the early polling, and then things just sort of settled back to the way they were. Is it fair to say that like these elections are basically now the Liberals to lose going forward?

David I don’t think so. I think it’s fair to say that we’re seeing a pretty similar pattern replay itself as it always has. I mean, the fact is, if you look at the 20th century the Liberals governed 70 odd years. Of those years, two men, Mackenzie King, who governed for I think it was 22 and a half years. And Pierre Trudeau who governed for I think 16 and a half years made up between the two of them, nearly 40 years. The Liberals tend to govern for long periods of time. They peeve people off, they lose. The Conservatives govern for slightly shorter periods of time. They cheese people off even faster than the Liberals. And then we just repeat. And that’s been a pretty consistent standard, actually, since John A. Macdonald, so pretty much from day one.

Jordan So what will you be watching for in the next days and weeks to come in terms of how the Liberals form government, who they work with, what issues they tackle, or even just internal political stuff that could give us a sense of if this will be different at all than the last two years?

David Well, I’ll be watching to see the tone of Parliament. Justin Trudeau claimed that the reason we needed the election is that Parliament was toxic. That was moderately true, but not nearly as true as he led people to believe because he needed a reason to have an election. Is this going to be better? I don’t know. It very well may not be. So the question is, how will Parliament function? Because this is a moment where we need governance, right? The pandemic still happening. We’re going to need to recover from it both during and then after when it stabilizes. Climate change still problem. In fact, more of a problem today than it was yesterday. And it’ll be more of a problem tomorrow than it was today. We have of an overdose crisis in this country. We have an Indigenous reconciliation and justice crisis, quite frankly it’s a crisis because the state isn’t doing enough to deal with it. We have overlapping and intersecting crises, and Parliament is where that’s going to get worked out by and large. I’m going to watch very closely to see from day one whether or not the members of Parliament want to deal in solutions and whether or not the government is amenable to being checked by Parliament because they aren’t always especially with this Prime Minister. And if you see those two things collide, it could be a very rough 18 months and we don’t have time to burn. So that’s what I’ll be watching.

Jordan Right now, as we’re speaking, all the major networks have now projected a minority Liberal government. Things will remain exactly the same. So. And you’ve already answered this. How long is the longest I could possibly hope to not have to do this again? Not that I don’t like talking to you, my friend.

David Well, constitutionally five years.

Jordan Yeah, but I want your analysis.

David 18 months to two years. And the reason why is that it’d be extraordinarily unlikely that a Parliament would last any more than two years, either of the opposition parties of the government by two years will want to pull the plug as a rule. So there’s that. Point two, is if Justin Trudeau decides that he is going to leave, he’s going to do it either a year or a year and a half in, and then the next person is going to come along and they’re going to govern for a little bit, and then they’re going to go and have an election. And that means that they’re probably not going to dilly Dally too much, because as a rule, these folks feel like they need to go back to the people and check in once they’ve been appointed. So on a good day, say all the winds align, two and a half years, but I think probably closer to two.

Jordan I would just be happy to not have to do it again during a nice summer, David.

David Yeah, of course nobody wants a winter election either, though. Like there’s really no good time to do it.

Jordan At least then I can just sit inside and stay on Twitter and follow the issues. Quote, unquote issues.

David Isn’t that what we’ve been doing all summer? We had to do that, right?

Jordan We did.

David The difference between daytime podcasts and late night podcasts, by the way, is that during the day, when you do this, you think these things through in your head before you speak and at night you talk them out.

Jordan I enjoy talking these things out with you.

David Yeah. So my apologies that anybody has to spend any time in my head because I’m not a giant fan of it myself, so I can’t imagine how other people feel. But the fact is I think people were kind of tuned out of this election a little bit, and I think people were kind of frustrated and angry. I’m very curious to see what turnout looks like. My sense is that it was going to be low. I don’t know yet. We may know by tomorrow, but I think we’re all just deeply tired, deeply frustrated, deeply anxious, increasingly cynical and scared. And it’s not a recipe for particularly good politics or elections.

Jordan That’s a cheerful note to end on. And by the way, I enjoy spending time in your head, but not more than 30 minutes. So we’re done now, David. Thank you.

David It’s my pleasure,

Jordan David Moscrop our favorite person for political nihilism. That was The Big Story. For more from us, head to thebigstorypodcast.ca. Find us on Twitter, talk to us whenever @TheBigStoryFPN. To email us [click here!] And of course, find us in your favorite podcast player. Like us, rate us, review us, tell your friends. All that good stuff.

It’s been a long election, you guys. If you listened to us all the way through it, I’m so happy you did. I’m so grateful you’re still here. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings we’ll talk about something other than this election tomorrow. Back to top of page