Election Aftermath

[jsburbidge]

 If there were a purely pragmatic set of lessons the Liberals should take away from the last election, up at the top of the list would be dropping their pipeline and upping aggressive climate change related measures.

 

The reasoning is simple: they spent over 4 billion dollars and ended up shedding votes in the oil patch, and losing all their seats there. There were no indications that any realistic measures would have altered that outcome. On the other hand, votes they lost to their left were largely responsible for losing some ridings in the rest of Canada, and a more aggressive climate change platform might have mitigated those losses.

 

(In fact, the general landscape of the electorate seems to be that the Conservative base won't vote for anyone else, and nobody else wants to vote for the Conservatives, so trying to get votes there is pointless. More on that later.)

 

The other obvious lesson would be to ditch Trudeau in a year or two. The last six months or so have left him with a badly damaged image, and most of what he ever had to offer was image. I see some commentators drawing parallels to 1972; there are few to draw. Trudeau the elder retained an undiminished personal stature based on intelligence and flexibility, and he had a strong cabinet on which he could rely. Trudeau the younger looks shallow and given to easy enthusiasms without much thought, and his record to date shows no signs of reversing the drift towards the autocracy of the PMO which occurred under Chrétien and Harper.

 

The Liberals' worst nightmare is a strong and well-differentiated party or parties on their left who pull away enough votes for the Conservatives base to outweigh the fractions of the more progressive vote. This election, they were lucky the NDP was led by a slick but also not very deep "professional politician" and focussed mainly on the middle classes rather than the working classes and the poor; and that the Greens are still seen as a long shot. They were  lucky that  the Tory leader was, essentially, creepy enough to motivate a fair block of voters within shouting reach of centre to try to ensure they didn't get in. They may not be so lucky again.

 

On the other hand, the Conservatives would kill to have problems of the Liberals' type. Theirs are structural and crippling.

 

Take the reaction to Scheer's leadership. Although there were predictable (and correct) calls for him to be replaced, and predictable (but bravado) statements that he would stay in, the telling note is that Scheer is under attack not just for failing to appeal to centrist voters but also for failing to represent the social conservative base vocally and strongly. Likewise, there were reactions to the strategy taken by which amounted to an expression of the belief that if they would just come out swinging and really show their colours they would appeal to enough people to win. (Needless to say, the most polite thing one can say about such calls is that they are the product of severe cognitive dissonance.)

 

Outside of the oilpatch, Conservative support is too low to do anything unless the vote to their left is badly split. Their hopes this election were based on the chances that (1) discouraged Liberal voters would stay home and (2) energized progressive voters would forsake the Liberals for the NDP or the Greens, allowing them to take FPTP ridings with just their base.

 

(This doesn't always fail.  It's basically why the provincial Conservatives won the last election in Ontario. It's still a poor general strategy, especially when what energises progressives is frequently fear that the Conservatives might win.)

 

I'm not sure what hurt the CPC most, worry about ideology or concern that they're joined at the hip to big oil. Either way, they are reduced to a base which is basically social and rural conservatives and the oilpatch.

 

Just ditching Scheer for a more effective leader doesn't solve their problems. It helps, especially if the Liberals drop the ball badly.  But consider: their single weakest area is climate crisis policy, and it's going to become an even bigger weakness with every passing year. But if they take on even a very moderate carbon policy - which means at least as strong as the Liberals' current one - the most likely result would be a loss of Alberta and Saskatchewan votes which they can't afford.

 

Actually, it's worse than that. There are real long-standing cultural differences which come into play. Manning's Reform Party came into existence over divergences between Central Canadian and Western[1] conservative views which had nothing to do with oil. When Mulroney and his government governed in ways which paid attention to the concerns of the bulk of the country (I.e. the numbers in Ontario and Quebec) the pushback from the West lost the right any chance at government for much of a generation.

 

The CPC faces two unappealing alternative strategies. They can double down on who they are and hope that they can come up the middle of a split left (except that this ought to have been that election, and it didn't work, despite the sugar-coating they tried to apply), or they can remake themselves as something which will work in the rest of Canada (broadly: socially liberal, fiscally conservative, serious about climate change) and risk another generational split and another right-wing party coming out of the prairies, with more clout than Barnier's failed experiment.

 

They may not have a choice. Their model of leadership selection is inherently tied to a direct democracy of their base, and, whatever the views of the leaders, the base doesn't look as though it wants to compromise.

 

The NDP has no money, and a policy only mildly more progressive than that of the Liberals; they keep trying to recapture their surge under Layton and failing. With the return  of the Bloc Québécois their potential for seats is largely in BC, where they're under pressure by the Greens, and Ontario, where the hard ceiling they ran into last provincial election is probably applicable to the federal level as well. They might do well to return to the position of being a gadfly, mounting a critique of centrist policies with an aim of moving the needle on policy, rather than keep hoping that somehow, this time, they might form a government.

 

Underneath it all, there's still that tide of resentment at change and dislocation which has fuelled populism at home and abroad. (Trudeau is a populist; what draws attention away from that is that he leads a centrist party which has no grand slogans. Doug Ford is a populist who is busy sinking his brand.Both are  now on the downward trajectory of the stick, having gone up like a rocket.) Canada is ripe for another Aberhart or Manning or Diefenbaker, allowing for times changing; or for another Tommy Douglas or E.C. Drury or Woodworth, if the left can produce one. And there's still the likelihood of a recession before the next election, and the possibility of a rerun of the meltdown of 2008 based simply on the amount of risk out there, and the eventually inevitable (but not necessarily yet) financial typhoon which will hit with the collapse of the petroleum bubble. I have rarely seen an election of which the result left me with the feeling that the entire political landscape stands a good chance of changing completely by the next one, but this has been one of them.

 

[1] Even that phrase is in its way loaded. Manitobans think that by rights they are Central, not Ontarians, who are Eastern.

 

Comments

[graydon]

I have a lot of trouble believing that by 2024 it won't be really brutally obvious we're in trouble for food security.

(I mean, it's obvious now; any idiot with a concept of trend and a graph of the last forty years of constant-dollar Prairie hay prices would be feeling deeply uneasy. But I was expecting 2008 in 1998, so maybe I'm a long ways off.)

The only two responses to that one are a technocratic government of national unity or genocidal white supremacy; the former might work in terms of delivering increased food security, and the second has funding and believers. So far as I can tell, nothing else does.

[chickenfeet]

I don't think there's a sensible solution for anybody under FPTP. My objection is not that it's unfair, although of course it is, it's that it has become severely dysfunctional. Moderate fiscal conservatives are forced to make common cause with the Bloc Rednecois leading to ridiculous outcomes like the Fraud government. The non-Liberal voting parts of Quebec are stuck on a sort of political triple point which means small changes in preferences swing huge numbers of seats. It's a mess.

[graydon]

However, if we get rid of FPTP, there will never be another majority government. Instant "no, don't want" from the great majority of the Commons who believes their party may someday form a majority government.

Then it's not easy to do; pure proportional rep is how you get Israeli politics. (Or Italian.) It's a terrible plan. Plus various constitutional guarantees (PEI gets four Commons seats per the Articles of Confederation; Quebec gets a quarter, and there's a Charter right to political participation.)

It would take a single-issue movement with a specific plan, broad national appeal, and tough enough to fight off all the dark money. (Corporates are against effective government pretty purely.)

[chickenfeet]

If I was a liberal careerist (and is there any other sort?) I would fancy a switch to PR. It would be trading being a majority some of the time for being in government pretty much all the time. Plus it would likely weaken the power of the PMO.

I also don't think PR necessarily leads to chaos. Germany is clearly more stable than the UK for example. If you want to cherry pick dysfunctional democracies the UK and the USA might not be bad places to start.

But I don't expect it to happen anymore than I expect meaningful reform of the Senate.

[graydon]

Germany doesn't do pure PR; there's an element of PR in what Germany does, but the individual states are different and the system is engineered to be incapable of meaningful change. (Which is another way of saying it is designed to produce political stability around a broad consensus.)

The "can't produce meaningful change" part is... difficult, today, in the beginning of the Anthropocene. We've got a Lord Protector scale problem.

I'm not against elements of PR; I'm against treating pure PR as a solution, when it's a problem. And pretty much all of the public advocacy is for pure PR, which means (to me) it's either inept or hostile. (the advocacy is inept; the funding is hostile.)

Something drastic is sure to happen; I'm trying to avoid expectation. (And rathering cursing my inability to do any kind of useful political thing.)

[jsburbidge]

Of course, Liberals' preferred form of electoral reform was STV (familiar to SF fen as the Hugo voting system (not the nomination system, which is much harder to describe)).

With the parties as they are today, STV would mean a permanent Liberal government. Of course, the parties would adjust (probably regionally) and the results might not be nearly so friendly to the Liberals. However, that was the basis of the deadlock that led to them giving up electoral reform.

Westminster style parliaments have traditionally been fairly good at dealing with emergencies - establish a unity government with support from both sides of the house. But that's in the context of time-limited wars, where people expect things to return to normal in a few years. A long-term crisis is a beast of a different colour.

[graydon]

None of the established parties have figured out that the future is going to be a question of successor states. (I can't imagine it won't be more than once; 2050 and 2200 are going to sharply different.)

The other part is that it's time for the quantitative analysis, and the existing system selects very strongly against that, and has no incentives to stop selecting against that. The model of the Martin insurgency within the federal liberal party provides an example of how you could get around that if you had buckets of cash, which is a bit like saying we if we had some ham, we could have some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs.

I'm kinda hoping the kids figure out it'll have to be an outright revolution very soon.