This year’s election campaign like no other
Lengthy three-way race could change whole political landscape
There has never been an election campaign like the one on which we are now embarked. There’s a weird finde-siècle glow in the air, a sense of things coming unstuck, old certainties uprooted. Policies, parties, institutions, everything is in flux, to a degree I cannot recall any precedent for.
The 1988 election was an important one, but it was in most respects a conventional campaign, fought by conventional means, with the Liberals and the Conservatives duking it out as they always had. The 1984 and 1993 elections, dramatic as they were in result, were likewise conventional in every other respect; neither proved to be quite the realignments expected. Within a few years of their supposed extinctions, both the Liberals and the Conservatives were back in contention. I suppose one of the things we will find out this fall is whether 2011 was the realignment it was declared to be.
Why do I say this campaign is unique? Consider three factors. One is the sheer length of the campaign, the first to be held under the fixed election date law, or rather the first to adhere to it. Leave aside the formal writ period, itself potentially of unusual length ( there are rumours of a mid-August call, meaning a campaign of more than 60 days — the first of such length since the 1970s). The real campaign, it is widely acknowledged, is already underway, and has been since at least the start of the year.
As I’ve written before, the fruits of this are already evident, in the form of a sustained run of serious policy proposals from all three major parties, with more presumably to follow, all to be subjected to much lengthier scrutiny and debate than would be possible in any previous campaign, with the notable exception of 1988, which was more or less a referendum on free trade. This will be the policy campaign to beat all policy campaigns.
If that were not already true, a second factor assures it: the debates. In the four decades after their first appearance, these followed roughly the same script, with minor variations. A consortium of television networks organized and broadcast them.
There were typically one in each official language, with all the leaders present and a variety of topics covered. Millions of people watched, sometimes with decisive results.
This time, all those precepts have been overturned. With the Conservative decision to pull out of the consortium process, and the wild scramble that followed, the debates have multiplied and mutated. At this point no one quite knows how many there will be, or which leaders will turn up: it will depend, one presumes, on where they are at in the polls. But based on commitments made to date, it appears there will be at least five, with whole debates given over to the economy and foreign policy. This, too, is unprecedented — though whether the debates will prove the same draw, without guaranteed all-network coverage, is another unknown.
Last, there is the matter of the nature of the race. No one can tell, of course, where the parties will be in the polls four months from now. But as things stand, with all three of the main national parties level at roughly 30 per cent in popular support, give or take a couple of percentage points, it is shaping up to be, at least at the start, a genuinely three-way race.
It is literally impossible to rule out any one of the three parties — or a combination — forming a government. We’ve never seen that before, either. (No, not even in 1988 — the New Democratic Party’s brief run atop the polls had ended months before.)
Campaigns matter, especially campaigns of this length, and we can expect at least a couple more waves, like the one that carried the NDP to its recent lead in the polls, between now and election day. Such volatility is not new — it’s been building for some decades — but there’s reason to think there may be a particularly high degree of movement this time, at least between the NDP and the Liberals, as anti-Conservative voters try to decide which party is best placed to defeat them.
The danger of a bandwagon effect forming means that each party will have to be prepared to make dramatic pitches for support, should they find themselves falling behind: witness, for example, the democratic reform package the Liberals released this week.
So the kind of cautious incrementalism we might have expected from previous campaigns seems unlikely this time. Moreover, with all three parties fighting, to some extent, on two fronts, whole new playbooks will have to be written.
Of course, to call it a threeway race conceals yet another unusual aspect of this campaign. Outside of recessions, majority governments do not often lose elections. The last time a government in possession of a majority was driven from office when unemployment was below seven per cent was in 1957.
Yet here the Conservatives are, bumping along at 30 per cent or less in the polls, as they have been for most of the last two years. Worse, just five per cent of voters rate the Conservatives as their second choice, meaning the Tories’ universe of available voters is just 35 per cent, versus 45 to 50 per cent for their two rivals.
And if they lose? If they win anything less than a majority? Then one or both of the other two form a government, both pledged for the first time to fundamental changes in the electoral system that could conceivably make the Tories unelectable — or at the least, lead to wholesale changes in the political landscape.
There’s never been another election like it. There may never be another like it afterward.