Rolling the dice on an election
It’s well understood in Canadian politics that Ontario and Quebec are the parts of the country that matter. This is immensely frustrating, and understandably so, for the Atlantic provinces, the West and the territories. But it’s just math. If the Liberals can win big in Ontario and Quebec, they win. If the Tories hold their Western base and win big in the Ontario suburban areas, they win. Some Tory seats in Quebec are a bonus, and helpful for a lot of reasons, but both parties need either Ontario or Quebec or both. It’s where the action is.
It’s also where, as speculation of a spring election continues, the pandemic is.
Quebec is locked down, under a 28-day “circuit breaker” to lower COVID-19 transmission and save the health-care system. Ontario has joined it with a strengthened lockdown of its own, announcing this week that Ontarians are to stay at home unless it is absolutely necessary (though just what the hell that means seems to be up to whatever police officer pulls you aside to ask why you’re not at home). In Ontario, as in Quebec, the concern is preserving the health-care system, which is being hit hard by COVID-19.
This is a damned interesting backdrop against which to even ponder holding an election. The parties must ponder it, of course. We are, after all, blessed with a minority government, and things can happen! The Liberals and Conservatives are both apparently getting set for a spring vote, even while insisting they don’t want one.
The incentives for the parties are weirdly skewed by the public-health crisis in the country’s two most populous provinces. The 30-or-so days between an election being called and the vote itself are long enough in political terms. On Jan. 14, Ontario reported 3,326 new COVID-19 cases, 62 deaths, and 388 Ontarians in hospital intensive care units. A month before, it was 1,940 new cases, 23 deaths and 244 in ICU. That was considered bad, at the time. Quite the difference a month can make!
So here’s the big problem. There is enormous danger in calling an election, and there will be for months. The circumstances won’t matter much. Maybe it’s the Liberals finding a way to force the issue, or one of the opposition parties deciding the time is right, or maybe just some dumb, Guns of August-style series of miscalculations forcing an election no one really wants. It won’t matter. There’s an unavoidable risk that the situation on election day will be worse than when it’s called, and that during the entirety of the campaign, the party responsible for triggering the election will constantly be asked to explain why they thought an election was a good idea just as the pandemic got worse in (insert jurisdiction here). This danger is particularly acute because the two highest-value provinces seem to be the ones that are doomed to have brutal COVID waves, while other parts of the country remain relatively fortunate.
There’s also huge incentives to do it, of course. The Liberals have received generally good reviews for their pandemic performance — better than they deserve, in many ways. When this is over, there will be a reckoning, and some of their mistakes will be closely examined. It makes perfect sense for them to want to get the vote out of the way while we’re still all wrapped in the flag, meeting a crisis headon. That feeling already seems to be waning, and when the emergency is passed and all we’re left with are hard questions to answer and huge bills to pay, it will be hard for incumbent governments to survive. Locking in four more years now makes perfect sense.
Both the Liberals and the Conservatives, of course, have a lot riding on the vaccines. If the Liberals rapidly secure lots of doses, faster than expected, and effectively distribute them to the provinces, that’s huge for them. Even if the provinces botch the distribution (which we cannot rule out, based on what we’ve seen so far, alas), the Liberals can say, fairly, hey, we did our part. We delivered. But if the vaccination procurements derail, or even if it stays more or less on track, leaving Canada far behind many of its closest allies, the Liberals will have to pay for that. It’s a glass-half-full-or-empty situation — if it’s going to be a disaster, the Liberals will want to go to the polls soon. If it’s going to be a huge success, the Tories will want to go soon, and strike before the Liberals can claim, credibly, that they got Canada back on track after a disaster.
It’s fun to speculate about all the calculus going on at the various party HQS. But the problem of the pandemic remains. There’s lots of reasons for the Liberals and Conservatives to consider rolling the dice. But if they do, and there’s another wave, they’ll be sending Canadians to the polls in the middle of a disaster. That would look bad anywhere. In the most populated provinces, where the pandemic has it hardest? It’s hard to imagine anyone would risk it. But stranger things have happened, many of them recently.
SENDING CANADIANS TO THE POLLS IN THE MIDDLE OF A DISASTER.