Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in Ottawa, on Sept. 17.Blair Gable/Reuters
As bad as Monday night was for the Liberals, it could have been worse. How? Jagmeet Singh’s New Democrats could have won both by-elections.
In the coast-to-coast vote that must happen by next October, and will likely arrive much sooner, the Liberals are faced with two mortal threats. The biggest and most obvious, stalking them daily in Question Period and across the country, comes from Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives. The Tories are far ahead in the polls and stand on the precipice of a majority government.
The second and less noticed threat, which the Liberals have spent generations neutralizing, mostly with success, is from the left – from the NDP. The last time it took a big bite out of them was in 2011. But the potential for a repeat, though currently small, may be growing.
Yes, it was the Bloc Québecois, not the NDP, who early on Tuesday morning claimed the traditionally safe Liberal seat of LaSalle-Émard-Verdun. But Louis-Philippe Sauvé, the BQ’s soon-to-be MP, will need a small miracle to keep his job beyond the next election.
He won the riding by a whisker and with just 28 per cent of the vote, thanks to an almost-equal three party split. Absent that three-way split, he would not be heading to Ottawa. The BQ has a low ceiling in ridings like LaSalle-Émard-Verdun, and across much of the Liberal fortress of Montreal.
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The last time the Liberals lost here was in 2011. The near-mortal wound then wasn’t from the Bloc. It was the NDP.
In the Orange Crush election of 2011, the NDP’s Quebec caucus grew from one MP to 59. It mostly wasn’t about the province falling in love with the NDP. It happened because, as the election campaign ground on, it became clear that the Liberals were going to lose badly in the rest of the country. Seeing a sinking ship, a big chunk of formerly loyal Liberal voters in Quebec abruptly changed ships. They simply picked up and moved to the NDP.
After that near-death experience, a rejuvenated party under Justin Trudeau recaptured those lost Montreal-area seats. But an NDP candidate finishing fewer than 400 votes behind the Liberals, in a previously safe Montreal riding, should be giving the Liberals nightmares of a 2011 sequel.
LaSalle-Émard-Verdun has a slim francophone majority, and a large minority of anglophones and allophones. That’s why the BQ vote is likely near or at its ceiling.
If Liberal support evaporates in LaSalle-Émard-Verdun, and in other Montreal ridings such as Ville-Marie–Le Sud-Ouest–Île-des-Sœurs (Immigration Minister Marc Miller’s seat), Laurier-Sainte-Marie (Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault) or Papineau (Mr. Trudeau), the alternative for most voters is unlikely to be the BQ.
Mr. Singh is not Jack Layton. The Liberals have been sliding in the polls for a year and a half, yet the NDP has not risen. The party is a long way from a second Orange Wave, or even a wavelet. But deep Liberal unpopularity in the rest of the country may be laying a foundation for the possibility of a seismic movement in Quebec’s electorate. It has happened before.
Three parties had something to celebrate on Tuesday morning.
The Bloc won a seat in Montreal, and on the western side of the island to boot.
The NDP hung on to the Winnipeg riding of Elmwood-Transcona, against a nation-wide Conservative campaign to seduce blue collars, while upping its vote share in LaSalle-Émard-Verdun.
And the Conservatives turned a safe NDP seat in Winnipeg into a competitive race, raising their vote by nearly 16 percentage points. It means that outside of Quebec, most ridings are within the Conservatives’ reach.
As for the Liberals, they took more than 29 per cent of the vote in Elmwood-Transcona in 2015. This week, they got less than 5 per cent.
The outcome in Winnipeg is a stark reminder that, across much of Western Canada, the NDP is, and has long been, the main alternative to the Conservatives. For the Liberals’ Quebec caucus, that’s the incipient danger in what the NDP nearly pulled off in LaSalle-Émard-Verdun.