National Post (National Edition)
Justin Trudeau and Donald Trump now share the distinction of having won an election while losing the vote. That should sting.
The amazing thing, when you look at a map of Monday’s election results, is how little Liberal red there is.
The Liberals won the election, but you wouldn’t know it from the map. Mainly they did well in a few cities: Toronto and the suburbs around it, Montreal, parts of Vancouver and most of the Maritimes. So, three cities and a region heavily reliant on federal largesse.
They didn’t even draw the most votes. The Conservatives under Andrew Scheer won 34 per cent of the ballots, to 33 per cent for the Liberals. Justin Trudeau and Donald Trump now share the distinction of having won an election while losing the vote. That should sting for a party that said it wanted to change the electoral system to better reflect the relative popularity of the parties. If Trudeau had kept his promise he’d have ended up in second place. Two-thirds of the electorate voted against him.
He didn’t do well in Quebec, where four years of a Trudeau government produced a strong surge for the separatist Bloc Québécois. The Bloc is once again the third largest party in Parliament, regaining a prominence it enjoyed for 20 years until a decline in separatist fervour pushed it towards irrelevance in 2011. The Bloc won just four seats in that election and 10 in the next, but four years of Justin Trudeau has them making a big comeback with 32 of the 78 seats.
The Liberals did well in Ontario by relentlessly attacking its Conservative premier, which can’t bode well for federal-provincial relations over the three years remaining in Doug Ford’s mandate. They didn’t win a single seat in Alberta (no surprise there), lost their last seat in Saskatchewan when veteran Ralph Goodale was upset after a lifetime of loyal Liberalism, and accumulated just 15 seats in the vast part of the country that starts at the Manitoba border and runs West.
In the media this was identified as a “strong minority” government. This is strength? In Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia, Liberals won the support of, at best, a quarter of the population. Trudeau will need to expend a lot of carbon emissions flying over the part of the country where he’s not welcome if he wants to visit his small enclave of enthusiasts hunkered around Vancouver on the West Coast. Jody Wilson-Raybould, who won her seat as an independent, won’t be there to greet him. This is a national government only to the degree it can convince enough members of the Bloc and New Democrats to continue keeping it alive. And at what price, you have to wonder.
For many years Liberals liked to think of themselves as the default party of government in Canada. They only needed to outpoint the Tories, and count on the NDP to stick to third place. But it’s been almost two decades since they managed to attract as many as four voters in 10. Jean Chrétien won in 2000 with just over 40 per cent of the vote. None of his successors has managed to reach that level since.
The party has had four leaders since Chrétien retired. Only one — Trudeau in 2015 — came close to reaching the 40 per cent mark, but a lot of Canadians evidently regretted that choice. Dropping six percentage points in popularity is not a mark of success. Trudeau will stay in office, but he trails NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh as the most favoured party leader, even as Singh’s party dropped to fourth place.
If Trudeau can be honest with himself, he’ll have to look at these numbers and realize “victory” is the last word to describe what the Liberals pulled off by running one of the lowest and dirtiest campaigns in Canadian history. Regional disgruntlement is rife. Much of Quebec wants nothing to do with federalist parties, and is happy to retreat into self-absorption. Anger in Alberta and Saskatchewan threatens to reach dangerous levels. Outside urban centres the Liberals struggle just to survive. This is a party that badly needs to figure out who they are and what they represent.
Liberals seemed to lose track of themselves somewhere around the Sponsorship scandal. Paul Martin never seemed quite sure what to do with the party he inherited from Chrétien, despite the fat surplus that came with it. Stéphane Dion struggled with the same problem: Does everyone remember “Do you think it’s easy to set priorities?” When he finally sought to upend the economy in favour of his Green Shift it was too late and too few people trusted his judgment. Michael Ignatieff did even worse, seemingly never managing to figure out why he was leader, much less why Liberals should run the country.
The party thought Trudeau had solved the problem: Liberals were about power, and to get it they were in favour of promising just about everything to everyone. They fought the 2015 campaign on hundreds of promises, from balanced budgets to new voting systems, to reconciliation with Indigenous Canadians and big budgets for lots of expenditures that would buoy the economy even as they poured money into better benefits all-round. Plus, they would do it all with a big cheery smile, demonstrating forever more that good intentions and a big heart were all that was required to run a nice country like Canada.
Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out that way. Two-thirds of the country didn’t buy what they were selling. Turns out Canada isn’t back, as Trudeau once boasted. It’s just dissatisfied and hoping something better comes along.