Posts
I previously posted a revised version of an article published in Inroads last spring on the forthcoming federal election, part of a series of regional analyses. It concluded provincial politics were likely to play a role in the fall federal election. A few days after the October 21, 2019 event I submitted the article below, which appears in the new issue of Inroads. After the article there is an update and additional analysis.
------------
In the Summer/Fall issue of Inroads, I noted at the end of my election preview article that while Ontario’s provincial politics played no role in the federal elections of the seventies, by all appearances that was not going to be true in the upcoming election. Last December and January, prior to most of the major political developments of 2019, the federal Conservatives were averaging about 40 per cent in the Ontario section of the national polls. On October 21, Andrew Scheer’s Tories picked up just 33 per cent of the vote in Ontario, down slightly from the last election, while the Liberals, despite slipping a few points, won 79 seats, just one fewer than in 2015.
The difference can be chalked up to Ontario Premier Doug Ford. Sworn into office June 29, 2018, Ford had become such an unpopular political figure that Justin Trudeau made the Ontario Premier a staple of his political messaging. Trudeau warned that, should Andrew Scheer become prime minister, he would copy Ford’s spending cuts, such as those to education and other services. In the two weeks leading up to the election, Trudeau campaigned hard in the hopes that NDP and Green supporters would vote Liberal, arguing that they should vote for “a progressive government, not a progressive opposition.” The appeal to such voters to accept the necessity of casting a ballot for their second choice to avoid a Conservative government was particularly effective in Ontario.
To help out his federal counterpart, Ford suspended the provincial legislature until after the federal election and kept a generally low profile as Premier over the course of the campaign. However, he could not avoid governing, or the daily reporting that comes with it. As students returned to schools, universities and community colleges, tales of consequences of education cuts reinforced the impression of the unpopular austerity that dominated the first year of the Ford government. The promise of tax cuts had little impact on the negative feelings evoked by Ford’s regime.
There is a constituency for this kind of governance, but it achieves political success in Canada in our first-past-the-post political system only in particular circumstances. A deeply unpopular Kathleen Wynne regime coming at the end of 15 years of Liberal rule in Ontario produced the Ford victory in 2018, a situation without parallel in the 2019 federal election.
As the federal Liberals did not win a majority, they may not control the timing of the date of next federal election. The two most recent federal minority governments, both Conservative Harper regimes, each lasted about two and a half years (from January 2006 to October 2008 and from October 2008 to May 2011). If the same were to be true of the incoming federal Liberal minority government, there would be a federal campaign in the spring of 2022. The next Ontario election is currently scheduled for June 2, 2022. The last overlap of federal and provincial election campaigns in Ontario happened in 1945. If this occurs in 2022, we could see a repeat of this year’s federal-provincial dynamic.
Update and further analysis:
Since the election additional polling from Leger has made it clear just how unpopular Doug Ford continues to be, with 73% of those Ontarians with an opinion, expressing a negative view of him. Now that the federal Liberals find themselves in a minority situation they will be thinking how they might turn their current position into a majority in the next election. Ideally, they would like to have Doug Ford there to run against, but Ontario is not where the Liberals can find additional seats.
In the rest of Canada the October 21 election looked in some ways like a reversion to the long term average for the Liberals. In Atlantic Canada, Manitoba and BC, the CPC and NDP picked up some long held seats lost to the Liberals in 2015 wave election. The place with the greatest potential next time for Liberal gains is Quebec. There the Bloc Québecois won 22 more seats while the Liberals had net loss of five. Many of the Bloc seats could be picked up by the Liberals next time with just a small increment in the popular vote. While they need to pay some attention to the unhappiness in Alberta and Saskatchewan, there is little political benefit to the Liberals in making strenuous efforts there. It is Quebec that matters.
However, making gains in Quebec will be thorny. A key factor in the Bloc gains was a xenophobic nationalism protective of the provincial government's Bill 21, the legislation that bans the wearing of religious symbols. How that may evolve over time is unclear. The federal Liberals (like their provincial counterparts) have so far been deferential to the legislation. They need an electoral competition in Quebec next time with a different focus.
The Liberals have won support for the throne speech from the Bloc, but there is a danger for them in relying for support on what remains, at least nominally, a party that supports Quebec independence. They need to find support from the NDP for at least some of their measures. In the elections following 1972 and 1974 winning back disaffected voters in Ontario brought the Liberals additional majorities. However, four of the last six elections (2004, 2006, 2008 and 2019) have produced minorities and the path to another Liberal majority is much less clear.
