‘This is a red alert’
Byelection result has Liberals looking nervously toward the next campaign
The terrible showing by the federal Liberals in the Durham byelection won by the Conservatives demonstrates how much work lies ahead for the Trudeau-led party to motivate its flagging base, if it even can.
Byelections are often sloughed off as no reflection of anything other than voter disinterest in byelections. Unless a political party manages a surprise win.
Still, the loss in Durham stung not because the Liberals expected to win. They didn’t.
It stung because the Liberals fell short of their own internal goal to hold at least the nearly 30 per cent of the vote the party got in the last federal election. The Conservative victory was much stronger than just a few years ago in 2021. And so many rank-and-file Liberals, including some MPs, think the dismal 22.6 per cent Liberal vote share Monday is alarming.
“This is a red alert,” said one long-standing Liberal, who spoke on condition he not be identified. “The leader and the party has serious soul-searching to do.”
That Liberal declined to lay the blame squarely at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s feet, or call for him to step aside.
But he said the party ignores the messages of the Durham result “at our peril.”
Conservative candidate Jamil Jivani, a lawyer, writer and conservative commentator, won the riding contest decisively with 57.6 per cent of the popular vote, trouncing Liberal Robert Rock, who had once weighed running for the Conservatives. The NDP candidate Chris Borgia garnered 10.1 per cent, with the other roughly five per cent of the vote split among several other candidates.
The 35-point spread between the Conservatives and Liberals is more than double the 16point margin of victory the Tories snagged in the 2021 election when Erin O’Toole, who’d represented the riding since 2012, held it.
“Yes, it’s a solidly Conservative riding,” said the Liberal who voiced concerns. But the massive swing in the margin of the win for the Conservatives shows the Pierre Poilievre team has a strong ground game, and while the Liberals had a strong volunteer ground game, “our voting base was not motivated to come out,” he said.
All main party leaders, including Trudeau, the Conservative’s Poilievre and the NDP’s Jagmeet Singh, had stumped for their candidates in Durham — a suburban Toronto riding in the 905 belt that loops in a bit of working-class Oshawa and a bit of Scugog cottage country.
Publicly since the defeat, senior Liberal party officials and caucus members who knocked on doors in the Durham campaign have adopted a “keep calm and carry on” message.
They cite “very low” turnout: less than 28 per cent of eligible voters cast a ballot versus, say, the 39 per cent turnout in another Ontario byelection last June in Oxford. Never mind that the turnout in a December 2022 byelection in Mississauga-Lakeshore was lower, around 27 per cent — when a Liberal replaced a Liberal.
One senior Liberal insider, who took a more sanguine view of the results, said wryly that at least the Liberal vote share was better than the NDP’s 10 per cent.
Another second senior Liberal who also downplayed the outcome said the party’s voter identification system didn’t fail; it did identify Liberal voters at the door. And the Liberals were able to draw enough volunteers to give legs to the campaign and establish a new riding organization for next time.
But a third admitted it just “didn’t translate into people going out and voting because they knew that this was inconsequential.” In other words, Liberal voters didn’t believe it was going to make any difference to a Conservative victory that was seen as a foregone conclusion.
Still, the Liberals needed to jazz their troops in the 905 and show the party has staying power, and the 30 per cent target should have been achievable. That it wasn’t has other Liberals alarmed, and dismissing the explanations of the party as “spin.”
Senior Liberal campaign operatives, who spoke on a background-only basis, conceded nevertheless the result shows the challenge ahead.
“There’s no question that we have work to do,” said an insider, adding “the economy is hurting us.”
For now, in the Liberal government’s top ranks, Trudeau and his advisers are counting on time, two more federal budgets, and hopes for an improving economy to recover their political fortunes. They also expect the contrast between Trudeau and Poilievre to sharpen “and the gloves to come off” in the coming months.
Pollster David Coletto, head of Abacus Data, says his firm’s tracking data shows those aspirations amount to a “hope and a prayer.”
Poll after poll shows the Liberals would lose government if current trends hold.
In its latest survey, Abacus found the Conservatives would get 42 per cent of the vote if an election were held today. The Liberals would get 24 per cent, the NDP 18 per cent and the Bloc Québécois seven per cent. The Greens were at four per cent and the People’s Party at three per cent. The Conservative vote may be less efficient in turning popular support into seats, but an 18-point spread — which the Liberals dismiss as inflated polling — is big.
The results come from an online survey of 1,500 Canadian adults conducted from Feb. 29 to March 6. While online polls are not assigned a margin of error, a random sample panel of the same size would be considered accurate to within 2.53 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
“I take the same thing away from the Durham results as I do from these poll results,” said Coletto in an interview, “which is, even when the Liberals throw everything they can at trying to change people’s minds about them and their opponents, it hasn’t worked.”
If the Liberals are banking on the next two budgets to draw voters back, Abacus’ data shows they have a big confidence deficit to beat.
Only 35 per cent of Canadians thought Trudeau was doing a good job of managing the economy, Coletto said. And they’re not confident in the future. Only 27 per cent of Canadians think the federal government’s policies will improve the state of the economy, and only 23 per cent think it has a clear economic plan to grow the economy.
Coletto says an election ballot question can always change depending on what issue is front and centre in voters’ minds. A season of wildfires might focus voters on climate change, he said. And campaigns matter.
But by the time the next election comes, the Liberals will be in office 10 years, so their challenge is clear.
“How do you convince people who want change, that actually they don’t want change anymore or … that the change that’s available (Poilievre’s Conservatives) is absolutely not acceptable. That seems to be the last strategy they have left to play, and they haven’t yet been able to do it,” Coletto said.
For now, the Conservatives are basking in the Durham result.
Calgary MP Michelle Rempel-Garner called it a “major, historic routing in a riding in vote-rich southern Ontario. In the boxing world, this would be the electoral equivalent of a decisive K.O.”
Even prior to the Durham outcome, a senior Conservative organizer had suggested the Liberals are clearly nervous.
The Liberal party has not set a nomination date to pick a candidate for the safe downtown riding of Toronto-St. Paul’s, vacated by longtime Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett in December, and the byelection date has not been announced.
Nor has a byelection date been set in Montreal’s LaSalleÉmard-Verdun, empty since Liberal David Lametti quit, or in Manitoba’s Elmwood— Transcona, which just opened with the departure of NDP MP Daniel Blaikie .