The COVID incumbent advantage
Canada no longer has a special relationship with the U. S. — burney
Opposition parties throughout the land should be trembling in their boots.
Sure, Monday’s two federal Toronto- area by- elections were only narrowly won by the Liberals — in Liberal strongholds, no less. And that is certainly the narrative most media reports are focusing on.
But if any of those contests had gone to one of the opposition parties, we would be told that it doesn’t mean very much, because by- elections give voters an excuse to voice their displeasure with the sitting government, without running the risk of toppling said government. This is true even given the current minority Parliament.
That the Grits pulled off these wins despite the fact that these were low- stakes by- elections and the party has endured months of negative press over the WE scandal shows that the Liberals are actually on pretty solid ground. And this is not the only news that should allow Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal cronies to sleep a little easier at night.
At first blush, it may seem counterintuitive that Trudeau would have anything to gain from the decisive victory handed to Premier Scott Moe’s right-leaning Saskatchewan Party in Monday’s provincial election, given that the two leaders have clashed on issues such as the carbon tax.
But the Liberals wrote off the Prairie Provinces years ago and given the damage the federal government has done to the Western Canadian energy sector, it’s clear that their electoral strategy hasn’t changed.
What the Saskatchewan, and British Columbia, elections do show is that incumbents have a clear advantage during this pandemic.
To be sure, the Saskatchewan Party has been a force in provincial politics since it was first elected in 2007 and increased its seat count in each of the subsequent two elections. Even back in February, before the pandemic was seen as a threat by most Canadians, an Angus Reid poll found that Moe was the second most popular premier in the country, with 58 per cent support. By August, little had changed: a similar poll pegged Moe at 59 per cent support.
In other words, it’s not much of a surprise that his party won the election. But, although over 60,000 mail-in ballots still need to be counted, the scale of the victory is quite profound.
As it stands, the opposition NDP is leading in only 12 ridings, down from 13 seats when the legislature was dissolved. It looks to have received the lowest popular vote share since its predecessor, the Co- operative Commonwealth Federation, first contested an election in 1938. The Saskatchewan Party, meanwhile, is ahead in 49 ridings, well above the 31 seats needed to form a majority.
A couple days earlier, on Oct. 24, B.C. Premier John Horgan managed to secure a majority for his New Democrats, who had been in a minority position since 2017.
Again, the final results could take weeks to tabulate given that there are around 500,000 mail- in votes waiting to be counted ( get used to not knowing the results on election night in 2020 — and don’t say I didn’t warn you come Nov. 4).
But as it stands, the NDP has 55 seats, a gain of 14, thanks, in part, to the COVID bump, which saw Horgan’s approval rating increase from 46 per cent in February, to 69 per cent in August.
This was the second time this fall that a provincial election turned a minority government into a majority: in mid-september, New Brunswick’s Progressive Conservatives also managed to secure a majority for the first time since coming to power in 2018.
Taken in this light, perhaps Trudeau’s moves to prorogue Parliament at the end of the summer and turn a Conservative motion to set up an anticorruption committee into a confidence vote were not merely bids to protect himself from further details in the WE Charity fiasco coming to light.
Perhaps Trudeau was hoping that the throne speech would be too leftwing for the Conservatives and too right- wing for the New Democrats, and that the opposition parties would be more concerned about ethics and accountability than having to contest another election.
If so, the NDP’S slavish support must prove an enduring disappointment.
If this was indeed the Liberals’ true strategy, the three recent provincial elections and two federal by-elections show that it would have been a good one, had it succeeded.
It would appear as though many Canadians think their leaders have done a good job of handling the pandemic and don’t think this is any time for the partisanship and instability that comes with minority governments.
The latest national polls have the Liberals leading the Conservatives by six points, and CBC’S poll tracker gives the Grits a 47 per cent chance of winning a majority if an election were held today.
So don’t be surprised if Trudeau tries to engineer another untimely demise for his minority government in the near future.
It’s just too bad, because this government has made some serious mistakes throughout this pandemic and has put the country in a completely untenable fiscal situation. We can’t afford another four years of unchecked Liberal power.
THE LIBERALS WROTE OFF THE PRAIRIE PROVINCES YEARS AGO.