Liberal Comeback Unprecedented In Canadian History
October 20, 2015
Andrew Coyne
Contrary to the old saw, governments do not, as a rule, "defeat themselves." Economies defeat them. Majority governments, in particular: cautious hedgers that they are, Canadians tend to stick with the devil they know unless given an overwhelming reason not to. That reason is almost always the economy.
In only four elections in the past 80 years were governments in possession of a majority driven from office: 1993, 1984, 1957, and 1935. In three of those, the country was recovering from deep recessions or indeed depression. The exception is 1957: the government in that case, led by Louis St. Laurent, had been in power for more than 20 years (as had the Liberal government in 1984, but for the Clark interregnum), the longest continuous term in office in Canadian history.
For the Harper Conservatives to go down to defeat, then - of any kind, let alone defeat of the scale that seemed evident election night - is remarkable. The economy is not in recession, certainly nothing to compare to the previous examples. Unemployment is barely scraping 7 per cent. Inflation is low. Real incomes are at an all-time high. And the government has been in power less than 10 years, only four of them with a majority. This is a government that has had to do its level best to defeat itself, and let it be said it has been up to that challenge.
But then, as bad as the Tory campaign was - dull, purposeless, a series of morosely staged photo ops featuring Stephen Harper with nothing really to announce - it's hard not to see their fate as having been baked in from the start. Such was the degree of polarization engendered by the Tories' relentless resort to wedge politics that the party could count on somewhere around 30 per cent of the electorate to vote for them no matter what - versus the 65 per cent that would not vote for them no matter what.
The Tory vote only ever had about 5 per cent to grow from that base - the 5 per cent that put them as their second choice - meaning a minority government was always the best they could hope for, assuming they could pick up all of the votes that were available to them. And that was only if the opposition vote remained almost perfectly evenly divided. Elections are often described as referendums on the governing party. In this one the contest was much more to see which of the opposition parties, if any, could unite non-Tory voters behind them
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