What’s a progressive voter to do?
With the Conservatives and NDP gaining ground and the prospect of a Liberal victory increasingly uncertain, Canadians on the left may be facing a familiar dilemma.
MONTREAL—Until this week, most non-Conservative voters could assume that their vote next month would boil down to a choice between a majority or a minority Liberal government.
There did not seem to be much of a path to power for another party.
But as the pre-debate stretch of the campaign nears its end, Justin Trudeau’s re-election as prime minister can no longer be taken for granted.
Since the election call, the Liberal lead has melted. At week’s end, a handful of polls put Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives in first place.
A CPC lead does not automatically translate into an election victory.
In 2019, Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives won the popular vote, but came second in the seat count.
And if Canadians were voting this weekend, the Liberals would have a more than solid shot at again winning the most seats.
But while the current national numbers bear a striking resemblance to the CPC/Liberal 2019 finish, there are major qualitative differences.
The Liberals are losing ground to both the Conservatives and the New Democrats in Ontario. That trend could lead to a disaster for his party on voting day.
Between now and then, the success of Trudeau’s re-election bid will probably be in the hands of swing progressive voters.
He must hope that the prospect of a possible Conservative government will drive at least some of those who have been looking to support the NDP and the Bloc to reconsider.
Calls for progressive voters to coalesce behind the Liberals to keep the CPC at bay worked for Paul Martin in 2004 and for Trudeau in 2019. This year, both O’Toole and Singh have been trying out different strategies to counter the impact of such appeals.
The CPC leader has spent much of the first stretch of the campaign distancing his party from that of his predecessors. While it often seemed that Stephen Harper in 2015 and Scheer two years ago were mostly interested in fuelling the passions of the Conservative base, O’Toole has taken a different approach.
He has been highlighting policies that contrast with the Conservative platforms of the recent past.
The CPC plan is not just worker friendly; it casts the party as a union ally. It features employment insurance tweaks that one would usually expect to find in an NDP platform.
Where O’Toole’s predecessors approached all drugrelated issues as law-and-order matters, he equates drug addiction with a health issue.
For the campaign, the CPC and its leader have also dispensed with the vitriolic tone that used to be part and parcel of the party’s rhetoric.
It seems the ranks of those who have found O’Toole’s campaign reassuring include his NDP rival.
This week, O’Toole’s efforts to put a more positive spin on his party and its policies got an assist from the NDP.
On the campaign trail, Singh left the door open to supporting a minority Conservative government.
Only six months ago, it was a possibility he dismissed out of hand. In 2019, he spent his first campaign promising to not back a Scheer-led minority government.
There is both risk and an inherent contradiction to this change of tack.
Singh has spent the first stretch of the campaign taking credit for some significant parts of the recent Liberal record. Those include a more ambitious climate change agenda, a major child-care initiative to help the provinces create an affordable system along the lines of the one in Quebec and a more targeted federal approach to healthcare funding.
But all the above amount to policy work in progress that a CPC government would not pursue.
O’Toole is committed to cancelling the (NDP-inspired) Liberal child-care initiative.
His climate plan, while an improvement on its previous installments, is significantly less ambitious than that of the Liberals.
On health care, O’Toole’s policy is to transfer more money to the provinces and let them decide whether more should be spent on improving long-term care or putting the entire system in public sector hands.
Pharmacare has never been on the Conservative radar.
In light of those differences, it may be hard going for Singh to convince swing Liberal/NDP voters that it makes little difference whether the prime minister is called O’Toole or Trudeau after Sept. 20 as long as the New Democrats are in a strong position.
A word in closing: At this point, Quebec is essentially holding the Liberals in first place in seat projections.
By comparison to the fluidity observed in Ontario, the picture in Trudeau’s home province has remained relatively stable.
The electoral battle in Quebec is still a two-way fight between the Bloc and the Liberals, with the latter holding their own.
But then the ground rarely shifts in Quebec before the election debates. The first French-language debate is set for Thursday on TVA. Stay tuned.