By-elections offer a glimpse of electoral future
Why, in the middle of the second wave of COVID-19, would anyone care about two Toronto by-elections?
It’s a good question, but there are in fact a number of reasons to see next week’s votes in Toronto Centre and York Centre as significant political events in a very tumultuous year. They may not rattle the balance of power in Justin Trudeau’s minority government, but the Oct. 26 by-elections are laden with historic and political firsts across the political spectrum.
In fact, the results of these two votes are worth more than the attention — or turnout — that they’re likely to receive in the midst of a pandemic that’s wearing down the entire country.
Here are just some of the ways in which they do matter, and why they will be analyzed by party strategists in the coming months for signs of what’s to come.
Most obviously, this is the first electoral test for the brand new Green party Leader Annamie Paul, who is vying to win the seat held until very recently by former finance minister Bill Morneau.
Paul is the first Black woman and the first Jewish woman to lead a political party; in those ways alone, Toronto Centre gets to be part of history. But it is also one of Canada’s safest ridings for Trudeau’s Liberals, so Paul’s battle will be an uphill one for a new leader trying to make some kind of Green gains.
It might be a stretch to call these two by-elections a referendum on Trudeau, but they are the first by-elections he’s faced since he won the 2019 election a year ago this week. A lot has happened since then, to put it mildly.
Trudeau will get to see, for example, whether the loss of Morneau amid the WE Charity controversy of the summer has cost him any support among the faithful. Many Liberals were grumbling about how Trudeau and his team managed to create another ethical storm for themselves during the pandemic. Will that unrest surface in Morneau’s old riding?
Conservatives, currently involved in trying to resurrect the discontent of the WE Charity saga, certainly hope so. These by-elections are a first for new Leader Erin O’Toole, too, and a chance to show whether he can grow the Conservatives’ support in Liberal territory.
O’Toole, who represents Ontario’s Durham riding in the Commons, calls himself a GTA politician, and someone who can get non-Conservatives to see themselves under his big blue tent. That wasn’t how he won the Conservative leadership, it should be said. A postvote analysis by the Star showed that his chief rival, former Progressive Conservative party leader Peter MacKay, was preferred by more partisans in downtown and suburban Toronto.
The headline on that analysis read that O’Toole “has work to do” to make himself an attractive prospect in the GTA. Next week’s by-elections aren’t the final verdict on whether he’s doing that work, but they’re not a bad early report card.
The NDP is the only major party without any big firsts in these by-elections, but Leader Jagmeet Singh will be looking to see whether he’s getting any bump or loss of support for working with the Liberals during the pandemic.
So here, in terms of numbers, is where the main parties will be looking for signs in next week’s Toronto results.
Trudeau’s Liberals need to keep or improve the 50 per cent plus strength they had in these two ridings last October. Morneau won with 57 per cent in Toronto Centre, while former MP Michael Levitt, also now resigned, won York Centre with 50.2 per cent.
The Green party leader needs to vault herself and her party out of the single digits. Paul, who also ran in Toronto Centre last year, netted only seven per cent of the vote in that race, while Greens took a tiny three per cent of the vote in York Centre.
O’Toole will be eyeing York Centre especially for growth, where Conservatives ran a strong second last year at 36 per cent. In Toronto Centre, he’ll want to do better than the 12 per cent Conservatives got in 2019.
The NDP will want better than the 22 per cent it got in Toronto Centre last year and the 9.8 per cent in York Centre.
Two Toronto by-elections may pale in the shadow of COVID-19’s second wave, not to mention the looming presidential vote in the United States on Nov. 3. But the results will create major to-do lists for all of Canada’s main political parties, for whenever a full-blown federal election rolls around again in this country.