National Post (National Edition)
Splitting right will hand Grits victory? History not so sure
Bernier’s party opens way for fresh perspective
The most reliable cliché in all the coverage of Max Bernier’s latest adventure was the one about the champagne corks popping in Justin Trudeau’s office. What could be the result of launching a second conservative party, as a thousand reports and columns noted, but to hand the next election to the Liberals?
After all, isn’t that precisely what happened the last time, when the Reform Party arose out of the West to challenge the governing Progressive Conservatives: a split in the right-of-centre vote that allowed the Chrétien Liberals to sneak through to three consecutive majorities? Everybody knows that, right?
Well, no. Everybody thinks they know that, especially partisan Conservatives, whether of the Reform or Progressive Conservative inheritance. For the latter, it provides a conveniently self-exculpatory explanation of their decline into insignificance; for the former, it justifies their decision to pack in the Reform experiment and throw in their lot with the PCS, rather than continue to build upon Reform’s remarkable record of growth.
And if post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning is your thing, the evidence looks pretty solid. The conservative vote was indeed divided in the 1993, 1997 and 2000 elections, and the Liberals did indeed win majority governments in all three. Mind you, the conservative vote was also divided in 1988, the first election Reform contested, when it won only two per cent of the vote on the way to the Conservatives’ second straight majority. And the conservative vote was united in 2004, when the newly formed Conservatives under Stephen Harper lost, and again in 2015, when they lost again.
But never mind. Did the Liberals win those three straight majorities, when the conservative vote was divided, because the conservative vote was divided? Put another way: Would the Liberals have lost those elections had the right not been divided? Was the division on the right the decisive factor in the election results — as opposed, say, to the relative strengths and weaknesses of the parties’ leaders, the candidates, the platforms, plus the state of the economy and all the other variables that go into any election outcome?
This seems rather harder to maintain. Certainly in 1993, it seems clear the Tories would have lost under any scenario: after the trauma of Meech Lake, at the tail end of a long recession, with Brian Mulroney polling at levels never before seen for any prime minister, and given the historic incompetence of the campaign under his successor, Kim Campbell. Reform, meanwhile, under the unilingual Preston Manning, did not even field candidates in a third of the ridings, notably in Quebec. The Liberals won, not because the right was divided, but because neither of the conservative parties was in a fit state to govern.
Much the same could be said of the two elections that followed. Did the Liberals win in 1997 because the right was divided, or because the conquest of the deficit, starting with the 1995 budget, took away the right’s biggest issue, and with it a chunk of its voting base? Did Jean Chrétien win again in 2000 because there were two conservative parties, or because one of them was led by Stockwell Day and the other by Joe Clark?
Also confounding the vote-splitting explanation: over much of the country the vote was not, in fact, split. East of Ontario, Reform was not a factor, even where it did run candidates, while West of Ontario, the Progressive Conservatives had all but ceased to exist: in 75 of 88 ridings in 1997, the Tories finished fourth or worse. Only in Ontario was votesplitting even nominally an issue, and then only in about a third of the ridings.
That might still have been decisive. The Liberals won substantially all of the seats in Ontario in all three elections; if vote-splitting accounted for even a couple of dozen of those it might have been enough to make the difference, especially in 1997, when their majority was only four seats.
For this to hold, however, you have to assume the Conservative and Reform (or Canadian Alliance, in 2000) votes could simply be added together: that had there been only one party on the right, it would have sewn up all or nearly all of those votes. But this is far from clear. If it were only the Reform Party on the ballot, many traditional Ontario Conservatives would probably have defected to the Liberals; if it were only Clark’s Progressive Conservatives, many Reform-minded voters might have stayed home.
In the event, merging the two parties seemed to result in a bit of both: that first election in 2004 the newly formed Conservatives won just 29.6 per cent of the vote. Not only was that about eight points less than the combined Canadian Alliance-progressive Conservative vote in the previous election, but it was only four points more than the Alliance won all by itself. Indeed, in the five elections since the merger the united Conservative party has won a smaller share of the vote, on average, than were cast for its two founding parties in the three elections before. There has been no ballotbox bonus for merging.
It’s impossible to know, of course, how things might have turned out had the two never merged. Still it’s interesting to speculate. What if Reform had been more patient with Manning, who took them from zero to official opposition in just three elections, instead of dumping him for Day?
What if, instead of devoting all that time and energy to the elephantine, multi-year merger process, the two parties had simply struck a deal: Reform taking the West, the PCS Quebec and Atlantic Canada, with joint nominations in Ontario?
Who can say? But as we await the dawn of le Parti Max, it’s perhaps worth considering these questions afresh.