JUSTIN TRUDEAU ENCROACHING ON NDP BASE

But outflanking Dippers on left a risky move

Here’s a key to understanding Justin Trudeau’s government and the strategy it has employed since assuming power last November: The New Democratic Party is gone.

Of course the NDP isn’t actually gone. It holds 44 seats in the House of Commons, the party’s second-biggest contingent ever. Leader Tom Mulcair badgers the Prime Minister daily there, just as he did his predecessor, albeit with less time at centre stage.

And yet in a strategic sense the Dippers are gone, after a fashion. Their base of support has been absorbed by the Liberal party, in a big shift that began in late August, when Trudeau turned the election campaign upside down by promising “a modest short-term deficit” of no more than $10 billion in each of a Liberal government’s first three years, after which it would return to balance in fiscal 2019-20. That was the pivot point, in retrospect, that derailed the NDP campaign. In one deft move, Trudeau had outflanked them on the left.

Mulcair’s rejoinder — an attempt to appropriate the old blue Liberal party’s fiscal-conservative mantle by promising a balanced budget in year one of an NDP government — was bold, honest, and consistent with his long-standing effort to push his party to the centre, where it could vie for power, rather than merely heckle from the fringe. It was a logical strategy. It didn’t account for, as it turned out, either Trudeau’s personal appeal as a youthful change agent, or the fact Ontarians in particular are no longer terrified of freespending governments. Premier Kathleen Wynne’s reelection with a majority in 2014 had shown that.

The result, to boil it down, was that left-leaning Canadians who might traditionally have voted for the NDP voted Liberal instead on Oct. 19.

The proof is in the data: A comparable number of Canadians voted for the Tories in 2015 as they had done in 2011 — down about 230,000 — meaning the Conservative base remained more or less intact.

The NDP’s vote share dropped by more than one million and the Liberals added more than four million, as voter turnout rebounded.

Recent surveys continue to reflect this shift. In January, according to poll aggregator Three-HundredEight.com, Liberal support was 45.2 per cent nationwide, higher than Stephen Harper’s Conservatives achieved at any point of their time in office. The Tories, now led by interim leader Rona Ambrose, had 28.4 per cent, meaning their reliable third of voters continues to stick by them. And the NDP languishes at 16.3 per cent, back to its pre-Jack Layton breakthrough base in the midteens.

This explains Mulcair’s new appetite for more overtly leftist positions on trade, defence and the like: He has little choice now, with the Liberals encroaching so aggressively on his base, but to move back to a more purely social-democratic mould to save the furniture.

Here’s where all that gets us: The great merger of the Grits and NDP, the subject of so much feverish speculation after the Liberal wipeout in 2011 under Michael Ignatieff, has come to pass, but at the voter level. With Trudeau as leader, straddling the centreleft, the Liberal party has a solid majority coalition, based in Canada’s largest cities, that does not require the numerical support of rightleaning rural and small-town Ontario, let alone conservative Quebecers or Albertans, for its sustenance. It is quite different from the centreright coalition that won Jean Chrétien three consecutive majorities in the 1990s.

This may be why so much Liberal messaging since the Oct. 19 vote has seemed oddly discordant with the party’s historical positioning, going back to 1993, and with Trudeau’s own branding in the first period of his upward trajectory from 2012 onward. He cast himself then as a “classical liberal” and “Laurier Liberal,” code for small-c-conservative on economic issues, presumably because his strategic objective then was to pry Chrétienvintage swing voters away from Harper.

But, as Brian Mulroney once said, “you dance with the one that brung ya.” In tacking centre-left — whether it’s insisting on pulling combat aircraft out of the air war in Iraq, or shifting into neutral on pipelines, or borrowing billions more than he said he would to “invest in social infrastructure” — Trudeau is doing just that.

And here’s the risk — setting aside that racking up billions in new debt for “investment in social infrastructure” is a recipe for boondoggles and an eventual debt crisis not unlike like the one that preceded the national wave of spending cuts in the 1990s: The Liberals are proposing, not incremental change as we saw under Harper and Chrétien, but wholesale, ambitious change that requires, dare we use the term, “social licence” far in excess of 40 per cent support, or even 45 per cent, to succeed.

The last prime minister who swung for the fences to this extent, without the benefit of truly broad-based popular support, was Mulroney, with his Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords. Two seats in the 1993 election was his party’s reward.