THE BIGGEST LOSERS
FOR THE FIRST TIME IN LIVING MEMORY, AT LEAST FIVE OF SIX PARTIES LOST
If you picture a basketball game where both sides, unbeknownst to the other, bet against themselves, you might have a good sense of how Canada’s federal election — which ended not in a whimper but in a 40-day sigh — played out.
It’s not just that no one seemed capable of winning. It’s that they all looked at times like they were actively trying to lose. So, kudos all around. Because if that was the goal, they all managed it, or at least most of them did anyway. For the first time in living memory, at least five of six competitive parties lost Monday. The only real winners were the Bloc Québécois.
So here then, is a catalogue of the losses, a compendium of all the attempted failures and accidental wins.
THE CONSERVATIVE
PARTY
Andrew Scheer was always supposed to be a placeholder leader. And, boy, did he live up to that billing. Facing a vulnerable Liberal party, its leader beset by scandal, its vote splintering four ways, Scheer still managed somehow, not to win. In fact, he didn’t even come close. The Conservatives won a plurality of the popular vote, yes, and the party picked up 23 seats. But it failed in every way to expand beyond its base.
The party made marginal gains in the Maritimes, lost ground in Quebec and juiced its popular vote numbers by winning a series of massive blowouts in the Prairies. The Conservatives did pick up three seats in Ontario, but they were effectively shut out of the Toronto suburbs.
Scheer only won the leadership in 2017 after every serious candidate, convinced the Liberals were unbeatable this year, decided not to run. Even then, he only managed his victory on the 13th ballot, by half a percentage point, after the original front-runner, a screeching TV buffoon, dropped out, afraid he might actually win. On the campaign trail, he managed to appear somehow less qualified than Justin Trudeau and less charismatic than Stephen Harper.
Beholden to the dairy industry, he gave off the air on TV of a walking bag of milk.
Scheer has enough seats and enough support to make pushing him out at least something of a challenge. But you have to imagine there will be no shortage of Conservatives — Brad Wall? Rona Ambrose? Peter MacKay? — willing to try. Over the past 18 months, the Liberals pulled their goalie, then pulled their defence, then pulled the forwards too, and still Scheer couldn’t score.
THE NDP
Goodbye Orange Crush. Goodbye fortress Toronto. Goodbye Jagmeet Singh?
First, the good. The NDP did better than many expected. The party holds one path to the balance of power and it should be able to use that leverage to extract something of value from the Liberals. Singh was also not the disaster on the campaign trail that many, including many New Democrats, predicted he would be.
The more people saw of him, the more people seemed to like him. For all the focus on his otherness — his turban, the colour of his skin — he was by some measure the closest thing to an average guy running.
All that said, yikes. Monday was a bad night for the NDP. The party, that once had dreams of riding a Quebec wave into power, was cut down to a single seat in that province. Even more troubling was the party’s performance in the Greater Toronto Area. Under Singh, the NDP failed to win back any of the Toronto seats it lost in 2015 and failed to make any inroads into the 905. At this point, the party is clinging to a basket of rural seats in B.C. and Ontario and a few urban ridings held by lifers.
They could ditch Singh, sure. But what are they selling if they replace him? What message do they have that could resonate beyond the party’s shrinking base?
THE PEOPLE’S PARTY
Maxime Bernier couldn’t get a Ford elected in Etobicoke. He lost his own seat. He finished with well under two per cent of the vote. Populism and nativism in Canada aren’t dead. But Bernier looks spent as a political force. He had his tantrum.
He took his ball. He went home. Home told him they’d rather have someone else.
THE GREEN PARTY
Where to begin? There was the mass defection that wasn’t in New Brunswick, one that left the party mired in accusations of racism and serial exaggeration. There was Elizabeth May’s comedic attempt to convince reporters that star candidate Pierre Nantel, who wants Quebec to leave Canada as soon as possible, is not, in fact, a separatist. There was the Islamophobic candidate in Ontario the party fired, and the four in Quebec that it kept. And then there was the straw. It was, in fact, a Photoshopped straw, in a doctored photo, meant to hide the fact that May was drinking from a disposable cup.
In the end, the party finished with a nub of extra support pushing through in New Brunswick, a single seat added to the two it had, and even that was likely more a testament to the popularity of a local leader than to the strength of the national brand.
THE LIBERAL PARTY
In one sense, the sense that matters most, the Liberal party won Monday. Trudeau is still prime minister. The party holds a strong minority.
But, boy, what a way to win. The Liberals took less than a third of the popular vote. It has less popular support than any government in Canadian history. The party lost every seat it held in Alberta and Saskatchewan. It lost the popular vote to the Conservatives. It lost, somewhere between 2015 and now, any sense of what it was selling to the public. It lost, through blackface, SNC and the Aga Khan’s private island, any claim to moral superiority. It lost, through bullying and bungling and general ham-fistedness, Jane Philpott and Jody Wilson-Raybould.
The Liberals return to Ottawa chastened and reduced. It’s a heck of a way to claim a mandate. It’s going to be an awful couple of years for the party.
THE BLOC QUéBéCOIS
The Bloc added 22 seats. They are now the third-largest party in Parliament. They achieved those gains in large part by standing up for Quebec’s right to legally discriminate against religious minorities.
National Post