Election 2015: The Liberals were a spent force. What happened?
EDITOR’S NOTE: Concordia takes no position on the 2015 Canadian federal election. This article expresses the opinions of Brooke Jeffrey, who will be participating in Election 2015: What does it all mean?, an October 26 panel discussion co-hosted by Concordia's Workshops on Social Science Research (WSSR).
The remarkable comeback of the Liberal Party of Canada in this 2015 election is significant for many reasons, not simply for the obvious fact that the party staged an unprecedented come-from-behind surge worthy of the Toronto Blue Jays.
The Liberals moved from third place in the polls on August 2, when the writ was dropped, to capture a convincing majority of 185 seats and 40 per cent of the popular vote in only 11 weeks. It's an exceptional accomplishment by any standard. But this is far from the whole story, impressive though that achievement may be.
To fully appreciate the magnitude of the Liberal’s victory, it is important to recall the context of the past four years. Crushed in the 2011 federal election, reduced to only 34 seats, with 19 per cent of the popular vote and an unheard-of third-place finish, the party was on its knees.
Conventional wisdom declared the Liberals a spent force, doomed to extinction or an unequal merger with the dominant NDP. Yet the selection of Justin Trudeau as leader in early 2013, and the rebuilding exercise which followed, proved the naysayers wrong.
With rejuvenated riding organizations, state-of-the-art technology and a massive fundraising effort under their belt, the Liberals went into the 2015 campaign as underdogs, underestimated by everyone including their political opponents. But, as Justin Trudeau demonstrated from the first leaders’ debate, the emperor did have his clothes and he, like the party, was ready.
Similarly, the Liberals’ dramatic victory makes a mockery of the argument that they could never again be a truly national party. The election results produced a wave of red from sea to sea, with new Liberal seats emerging in Alberta and BC as well as a majority of seats in Quebec — including francophone ridings, the best result there since Pierre Trudeau’s 1980 election victory.
This raises the next significant point about the Liberals’ return to power, namely that this should have been expected, sooner or later, rather than being a source of consternation or surprise. The party continues to represent the moderate centre-left position on the political spectrum, which is home to the majority of Canadians.
Despite years of conservative pundits describing Canadians’ alleged move to the right, public opinion polls over the past two decades have consistently demonstrated that no such shift has taken place.
As Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson once stated in frustration, the idea Canadians were moving to the right is “an assertion based sometimes on hope, often on conjecture, occasionally on fragmentary evidence, but never on serious facts and deep analysis.”
His point was reinforced two years later by pollster Michael Adams in Fire and Ice: The Myth of Converging Value, who concluded that, if anything, Canadians have become more liberal since the Harper Conservatives came to power, thereby explaining the growing divergence between Canadian and American values as epitomized by the Tea Party and Donald Trump.
Certainly the Liberals under Justin Trudeau took advantage of that situation. They not only ran a polished, professional campaign, but an optimistic and positive one that stressed fundamental liberal values.
Leader Justin Trudeau’s “sunny ways” were in sharp contrast to the petty partisanship of the Conservatives. But he also consistently reintroduced the notion of liberal values and beliefs in his speeches and leaders’ debates, epitomized by the slogan “better is always possible.”
Moreover, with the NDP inexplicably determined to balance budgets rather than demonstrate change, the Liberals took advantage by outflanking that party on the left, staking out their own economic position of modest deficits and infrastructure expenditures as one way of offering “real change” which Canadians found credible and convincing.
Meanwhile the Conservatives — who spent more than a year creating low expectations of Trudeau — must surely regret their decision to launch endless attack ads, as he effortlessly exceeded those expectations time and time again, just as they must have come to regret their decision to conduct such a long election campaign, allowing the Liberals and their leader to define themselves and change perceptions.
Finally, it must be noted that this campaign was significant for the Conservatives’ unprecedented willingness to use any issue to further their cause, even if it meant dividing Canadians or undermining national unity.
No doubt they must be reconsidering the wisdom of their efforts to make the niqab a central issue of the campaign, since it had the inadvertent effect of sinking NDP fortunes in Quebec and consequently ensuring that the Liberals were seen across the country as the best choice to prevent another Harper government.
Worse still, at least for many federalists, it rejuvenated a moribund Bloc Québécois.
It is true that a week is a long time in politics. Eleven weeks is closer to a lifetime, and the Harper Conservatives may find that it is their party that is now on life support.
Perhaps the most significant aspect of the Liberals’ return to power will be the end of the Reform/Alliance brand of conservatism and the return of a Progressive Conservative Party worthy of Canadians.
Register now for Election 2015: What does it all mean?, a panel discussion taking place at 6:30 p.m. on Monday, October 26. Co-hosted by Concordia's Workshops on Social Science Research (WSSR) and the Department of Political Science, it will feature experts ranging from CBC's Power & Politics pundits Ian Capstick, John Duffy and Tim Powers to academics Richard Johnston (University of British Columbia) and Lawrence LeDuc (University of Toronto). The moderator is Paul Wells of Maclean's Magazine.