With files from Kiernan Green.
Old political narratives die hard. It often requires ample time in the face of conflicting facts for them to gradually become undone.
One of Canada’s oldest political narratives is that the Liberal Party is the “government party” or the “natural governing party.” According to this long-standing axiom, it’s the only political party capable of commanding broad-based support across different groups and regions.
The narrative was correct for most of the twentieth century. Over 28 elections, the Liberals won 19 of them. They won an average of 43.5 percent of the popular vote over this period. The Conservatives averaged nearly ten percentage points fewer. The result is that Liberal prime ministers governed for 69 percent of the century.
The twenty-first century was supposed to be more of the same. People were talking about Paul Martin as a “juggernaut.” The Canadian Right was fragmented. The old Liberal trick of shifting Left and Right meant that the party had virtually no competition. They matched the Conservatives on taxes and spending, the New Democrats on compassion and identity, and defeated the separatists on national unity.
Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau looks out over the Montreal skyline from the Mount Royal Park Observatory with local candidates Marc Miller, Rachel Bendayan and Marwah Rizgy, October 2, 2015. Paul Chiasson/The Canadian Press.
A lot has changed since the halcyon days of the start of the century. Stephen Harper’s efforts to unite the Right have clearly changed the political landscape. But a united Right is a necessary yet insufficient explanation for today’s political context in which pundits are now asking about the future of the Liberal Party itself.
The best explanation was first identified by leading pollster Darrell Bricker and Globe and Mail columnist John Ibbitson in their 2013 book, The Big Shift, in which they foresaw a shift of economic and demographic power from the centre of the country to the west. These trends, which must be understood in part as an exercise of self-selection, anticipated Liberal decline in the most dynamic and fastest-growing part of the country.
Their hypothesis has been more validated than not since the book’s release. In the 2015 election, the Liberals managed to pick up some seats west of Thunder Bay, but even at the time these wins seemed more like aberrations than a new political equilibrium. Since then, the party has bled support in the West.
This week’s byelection result in Winnipeg in which the Liberals ended up with less than 5 percent of the vote—among the worst by-election outcomes for an incumbent government in Canadian history—cannot be merely dismissed as a reflection of a deeply unpopular prime minister. It must be seen as a secular challenge for Liberal politics.
Today, the Liberal Party is for all intents and purposes a regional rump. A party with a smattering of support in the Maritimes and across the Via Rail corridor between Montreal and Toronto. The population density of this swath of geography means that the Liberals won’t necessarily disappear off the electoral map. But it does mean that they can no longer claim to have a national coalition or the capacity to form a representative government.
As part of their analysis, Bricker and Ibbitson famously coined the phrase “Laurentian elites.” Although definitions can always be a bit imprecise, it’s fair to say that at least in geographic terms, the Liberal Party is now the Laurentian Party: its centre of gravity is this narrow part of the country between Plateau Mount Royal and the Annex.
There are of course various factors behind these developments. It partly reflects the growing sophistication and salience of Conservative politics—particularly under Pierre Poilievre’s leadership. It’s partly a function of the growing polarization of our politics such that the old centrism of the Liberal Party feels a bit unmoored. And it’s partly a sign that big “L” Liberalism’s modern mix of corporatism, redistribution, and identity politics is finding a smaller and smaller audience these days.
In the coming days, the focus will no doubt be on the short-term consequences of the by-election results and what they mean for Prime Minister Trudeau’s own future. Losing a previously-held Quebec riding is therefore probably where most of the attention is placed. But the Liberal Party’s increasing isolation from Western Canada is a more significant long-term challenge for Liberal partisans.
It’s a sign that the historic notion of a natural governing party is over. And, if they don’t find a way to broaden their support outside of the Laurentian corridor, Liberals may find themselves in the “opposition party” of the future.
Sean Speer is The Hub's Editor-at-Large. He is also a university lecturer at the University of Toronto and Carleton University, as well as a think-tank scholar and columnist. He previously served as a senior economic adviser to Prime Minister Stephen Harper....
