With only 11 days remaining in the 45th Canadian federal election, polling still seems to indicate that the Liberal Party and Mark Carney will claim victory. If they do it makes you wonder: are the Conservatives ever going to be able to form government again?
Cursory consideration of this question is likely to lead to a reflexive response that the notion is simply preposterous, but is it?
Over the course of ten years Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party ran our country into the ground.
There’s no two ways about that. On every metric from crime, to housing, health care, immigration, defence and child poverty, everything is worse now than before the Liberals came to power in 2015.
But with the election only days away, the polls indicate that the majority of Canadians want to re-elect them. I’m not going to belabour how incredible I find that, I already covered it in a previous column; but holy hell, what does that say about the Conservatives?
Of course some will argue it’s not a problem with the Conservatives or Poilievre per se, but rather due to a slew of extenuating circumstances which have put the Conservatives behind the Eight Ball. They’re not wrong. But there are a few unique elements at play.
First and foremost there is Trump, his 51st State rhetoric, and the tariff element.
To paraphrase Justin Trudeau, the Liberals needed a good foil, and into their underving laps, fate dropped a scrappy tough guy president, who is widely and intensely disliked by a majority of Canadians.
Their ability to weaponize a puerile sense of Canadian nationalism against Poilievre by comparing him to Trump was not only incredibly cynical, it was highly effective.
Then there’s the fact that the Liberals are currently riding an enormous wave of optimistic denial that Mark Carney will be vastly different than Justin Trudeau. No amount of logic or reasoning is going to penetrate the minds of those voters who want to believe the new Liberal leader is different than the old one.
Even when faced with the fact that he denied Canada billions in tax revenue through the use of offshore tax havens, or that he moved Brookfield to the US, or has lied or obfuscated nearly every time he’s stepped in front of a microphone — nothing will sway them.
Lastly, there is the complete and utter collapse of the NDP under Jagmeet Singh.
Back in February 2007, the year after Stephen Harper formed his first minority government, Lorne Calvert, then NDP Premier of Saskatchewan, mused in Maclean’s Magazine about an eventual merger between Canada’s left-of-centre political parties. Eighteen years later and we may finally be seeing that, but not as a merger, but a hostile Liberal takeover of the NDP.
If Canada’s left permanently coalesces under the Liberals, then the conditions which enabled the Harper conservatives to rise to power from 2006 to 2015 have essentially evaporated forever.
But despite having no control over these significant issues, the greater reason to think that the Conservatives may never form government again is because of what they can control, and the fact that none of it works for them either.
Let’s look at a few things that will illustrate this point, starting with their leaders.
A lot of people have said that they won’t vote for Poilievre and the CPC because he’s a career politician, or that he’s too crass, or too conservative. Ok, but the Conservatives tried running with the very affable Erin O’Toole in 2021 who was none of those things. In fact O’Toole actually sacrificed some of his staunchest supporters in an effort to broadly appeal to centrist and progressive voters, yet Canadians still rejected him.
In 2019 there was Andrew Scheer who was also nothing like Poilievre. But back in 2019 having dual US/Canada citizenship was considered taboo for a potential prime minister, and that essentially cost him the election. Which of course is crazy when you fast forward 6 years when having three citizenships, like Mark Carney does, isn’t disqualifying but is considered endearing and demonstrative of being a knowledgeable and well-rounded global citizen.
Then there is policy.
The Liberals are literally running a campaign against nearly all their previous key legislation from the past 10 years. In the process they have copied or promised to implement almost all of the Conservatives major policy planks, and the electorate are willing to lavish gratuitous praise on them for it.
The cancellation of the carbon tax is the ultimate example of this hypocrisy.
Poilievre and the CPC campaigned for years against “axing the tax” for years, but when the Liberals saw that their political future was at risk over it they canceled it and bewilderingly got the credit for it from Canadians. The only way to describe this is that the majority of Canadians are suffering from some sort of political Stockholm syndrome.
And while it is true that all parties face some time in the political wilderness after an electoral defeat, the Conservatives have more than done their time. Just like the Liberals did after their defeat in 2006 and were eventually rescued from obscurity by the second coming of Trudeau.
Hopefully that isn’t indicative of what it takes to stage a comeback in Canada as a political party. Because that’s more dynastic than democratic, and while I’m sure that Ben Harper is a nice guy, I don’t necessarily want to see the Conservatives electoral chances tied to his chances.
All of this to say why I don’t think it’s unreasonable to go through the thought exercise of assessing the Conservatives prospects of forming government again.
They’ve spent a decade in opposition. They’ve tried different leaders. They’ve done almost everything right that lies within their power in terms of running a campaign. They’re proposing a full slate of innovative policies to make Canada better. They are up against a fundamentally flawed and foreign influence riddled incumbent government. Yet despite all that, it looks like they still can’t win.
So if they don’t, how much longer will the right remain united?
My guess is not long. If the pollsters' prophesied outcome comes true on 28 April, I think we may see mass disillusionment and disenfranchisement within the ranks of CPC supporters.
Some will go back to Maxime Bernier's People's Party of Canada, others in the West will likely flock to a western independence party. That is all but guaranteed to form, in order to meet the demand caused by 4th consecutive Liberal win.
Of course the argument against any disunion will be that it would all but guarantee successive Liberal governments for the foreseeable future.
But when you stop and think about it objectively, that might be the case anyway.
