Election Thoughts

 I normally have a good sense of where an election will end up a few days before it actually takes place. This one was more difficult: two days before the election I would have called the most likely result a reduced minority for the Liberals. In the end, the needle barely moved on numbers.

Last election I was already noting that the Liberals would do well to get rid of Trudeau, though that was before Covid, which pushed up his stock somewhat. I would reiterate the comment; he is clearly a drag on his party, but his retention of office without a significant loss of seats probably leaves him with enough power to avoid being pushed out.

What the Conservatives need to do, to deflect their usual problems next time round, is take the relatively moderate platform O'Toole ran on and maintain it up to the next election. As I gather that there are members who already want to depose O'Toole, I doubt they will manage it.

(The best grounds for attack on O'Toole the Liberals had, they wasted: pointing out the drift between his run for the leadership and his run for PM and suggesting that he is a weathervane seems to me like the obvious weak point. By next election he will be gone or his platform will have some stability. I doubt he can reinvent himself yet again.)

But the map shows the kind of current electoral trap Canada is in. There are two broad areas of solid blue: the west (for all practical purposes: the NDP has a few new seats there), and rural Ontario. (That these are the areas with the biggest Covid problems is not coincidental: in addition to Alberta and Saskatchewan, about which little needs to be said, it is the rural caucus in Ontario which by all accounts has been most opposed to reasonable anti-Covid measures.) In Ontario the whole GTA with a couple of exceptions went Liberal, and of those exceptions only one - Thornhill - went Conservative.Other urban areas voted Liberal, except where they were weighed down by large rural components of a single riding (such as Peterborough).

There are two big blockers to any majority government. First, the Bloc essentially prevents the Liberals from gaining a majority; their only other normal way there is a thoroughgoing collapse in the Conservative vote. (Both Bloc and Conservatives have been weak before; the Reform/PC split gave the Liberals under Chretien a long time in majority office, taking all, or nearly all the ridings in Ontario to make up for the Bloc in Quebec, and the Bloc was weak in 2015.)

The Conservatives, on the other hand, have tended to win only when dislike or distrust of the Liberals - Chretien's cronyism, Trudeau's / Turner's patronage appointments, distrust of Dion and Ignatieff - drives the electorate in the swing ridings of Ontario to abandon the Liberals for the Conservatives. Although the Tory base certainly feels that way about Trudeau, his weaknesses among the general population - seen as naive, self-centred, not terribly bright - have not, to date produced that result. So the Conservative road to a majority runs through the suburbs of Ontario. The past several elections have been marked by a significant number of voters voting, not for the Liberals as such, but against the Conservatives when there is a risk of them winning, and younger voters in central Canada are even less likely to vote Conservative. To make things worse, the Covid crisis has made government with an activist and intrusive bent more generally attractive, which means that the Harperite/libertarian block making up the core of the parliamentary party is even more out of step than they might otherwise be.

The geographical split encourages the parties to vanish into the event horizons of their own bases, which decreases the likelihood of a breakthrough.

The NDP lacks a base which could realistically allow it to come within shouting distance of power, except of the sort they have right now as the key to the continued governance of the Liberals. The Greens essentially disintegrated.

All that being said, it would be unwise to claim, as I've seen some commentators do, that Canada is locked into a permanent minority situation, or - a closely related claim - that the Canadian people chose a minority. Over half of active voters almost certainly belong to the bases of the two major parties. Presumably they wanted a majority. (The NDP base might welcome a minority, but I doubt they voted for one.) An average of people's choices, filtered through FPTP, cannot be given a notional will or mind, any more than the players of Prisoners Dilemma want the probable outcome.

More critically, a lot turns on immediate personal reactions. The voters of Ontario elected Doug Ford because they were fed up with the Liberals, despite the chaos of the Conservatives and the very real doubts about Ford's suitability to govern. If the Liberals do something stupid, not necessarily more stupid than the various kerfuffles which marked, but did not end, Trudeau, O'Toole or an equivalent could walk into government. If the PPC or an equivalent splits the CPC vote more heavily and along structural fault lines, we could be in for another King-St.Laurent reign.

Or at another level, if post-Covid remote work sends more urbanites out into semi-rural Ontario, that block of rural Ontario CPC ridings could become far less certain. If the Alberta NDP becomes the government again and the post-Kenney PCs became a hissing in the dark, that solid blue block could splinter. Or if the dislocations of climate change throw most people's lives into uncertainty, the resulting resentment may drive some voters towards the right while driving others towards "a safe pair of hands". The current social and economic context is the opposite of stable.