Daniel Dufort: Don’t learn the wrong lessons from the last election, Conservatives

What’s past is prologue, Shakespeare wrote. Often, the case to be made that history rhymes, or at the very least informs the future, is certainly very strong. It is not ironclad, however. Drawing lessons from the events of the past differs starkly from simply assuming that what just occurred is bound to repeat itself again and again–a mistake many political observers and media influencers are making now following this last federal election.

In behavioural economics, this is called recency bias, meaning that individuals have a tendency to ascribe to recent information probabilities of recurring that aren’t quite moored in reality.^{1The financial sector is rife with examples of individuals opting to sell their holdings amid a financial crash as they believe that a worse one is on the way, or they will double down on investments that have thus far been successful, as we saw with the dot-com bubble.}

It could be said that Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre won the 2024 election in a landslide, dominating the issue set that was on the minds of voters. However, the writ didn’t drop until 2025, and by that time, voters were presented with two wildly different ballot questions: one was about change and the cost of living, and the other was about personal leadership and standing up to President Donald Trump.

The à la carte nature of what was on the election menu put in sharp relief the preferences and even the temperaments of Canadians along traditional regional fault lines, as well as a generational divide in which the usual script has been turned on its head.

The bottom line is this: a significant share of the population, including Baby Boomers, opted for the second ballot question, which essentially hinged on the perception of the leadership qualities provided by the two prime ministers who had a realistic shot at forming government. This predictably led to an outcome that left smaller parties out in the cold, with both the Bloc and the NDP failing to retain traditional strongholds.

In this election cycle, Prime Minister Mark Carney was able to appeal to a very large tent that included both very progressive voters as well as middle-of-the-road suburban grandparents driven by fear of Donald Trump and annexation.^{2When we look back at that time, it will be interesting to compare news television-watching habits during this specific period of hysteria to those observed during COVID among older Canadians.}

This specific set of circumstances is hard to bottle up and reproduce. Yet many are arguing that we have entered a bipolar moment in Canadian politics, where the NDP will lose relevance as the Liberal Party becomes the home of all progressives. Needless to say, this had appeared to be the aspiration of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and it was set to result in a crushing defeat in the indefinitely postponed 2024 federal election.

Constantly catering to the costly demands of a hypertrophied progressive wing takes away from the Liberal Party what has been one of its greatest political strengths: ideological morphability. This ability to act unconstrained by the wills and wants of an ideologically motivated base allows the Liberals to straddle the mushy middle of Canadian politics, which is somewhat progressive enough for the cultural cognoscenti and relatively inoffensive to Bay Street titans. Picking a side is a risky gamble for a party that has enjoyed tremendous success straddling the fence.

The NDP, for its part, has had a bumpier ride of late. In fact, the NDP didn’t merely collapse; it cratered. After increasing the party’s vote share in the 2021 general election, Jagmeet Singh led his troops to a complete rout in 2025, winning just 6.3 percent of the popular vote. Audrey McLaughlin had managed nearly as badly in 1993, when she garnered 6.9 percent of the popular vote. And yet the NDP rose again and reached almost-impossible heights with the charismatic Jack Layton at its helm. Don’t count this party out for good.^{3Fairly recent political history also tells us of the many impending disappearances of the Bloc Québécois and the Parti Québecois, and yet the latter of which is currently on track to form the province’s next government in 2026.}

Leadership matters. The NDP’s grassroots will have an occasion to renew themselves ahead of the next federal election and provide a more popular option to the Canadian public than Singh has proven to be. In fact, this shouldn’t be particularly hard. Meanwhile, progressives swayed to the Liberal Party by 2025’s version of an Orange Wave may very well grow disenchanted with the leadership provided by a former Goldman Sachs investment banker.

What I am saying here is this: it would be ludicrous to simply assume that the extremely sui generis nature of the 2025 federal election is set to repeat itself in perpetuity, and that the Conservative Party of Canada must become a pale version of itself in order to make a broader appeal.

This would not only disconnect the party and its leader from its base of support; it would also deprive Canadians of the principle-based leadership and policymaking that are set to become ever more important in the years to come, as our economy stagnates.

The notion that the Conservative Party of Canada should do this has long been an obsession of media types as well as of some so-called centrists who seem to share just one defining characteristic: a singularly consistent unwillingness to vote for the Conservative Party of Canada.

At a moment when the winds of Prairie populism are blowing strong in Western Canada, electing to become more like the Liberal Party of Canada may not only prove to be against the Conservative Party’s interests. It might very well be against the country’s interests.