Prime Minister Justin Trudeau leaves after finishing for the day at the Liberal caucus retreat, in Nanaimo, B.C., on Sept. 10.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
Stephen Maher is the author of The Prince: The Turbulent Reign of Justin Trudeau.
Canada is likely on track for a significant milestone. If there were a federal election tomorrow, and Canadians vote as they say they would, there would be more elected NDP politicians at both the federal and provincial levels than Liberals.
According to the latest projection from poll aggregator 338Canada.com, the Conservatives would win 212 seats in a federal election, up from the 119 they won in 2021. The Liberals would have 77 MPs, down from 160 in 2021, and the NDP would have 16 seats, down from 25. In the short term, the NDP, tarnished by a governing deal with the unpopular Liberals, would look like they are losing momentum.
But if you include the seat totals of provincial and territorial legislatures based on the current occupants, the NDP (and its ideological sibling, Québec Solidaire) would have more politicians in office (208) than the Liberals (170) across the country. Small-c conservative parties, including Quebec’s CAQ, Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives, the Saskatchewan Party and Alberta’s UCP would dominate, with 617.
According to my back-of-the-envelope calculations, this would be the first time in history that the NDP and similar left-wing parties hold more seats at both levels of government than the Liberals. This looks like more than a typical partisan swing, but rather a new political alignment slowly taking shape. It’s a reflection of our polarized times, as centrist voters in Western democracies separate into camps on the left and right.
The Liberal brand is on the precipice of ruin. The NDP has supplanted them as the left-of-centre alternative in Western Canada and they are unusually weak in Quebec and Ontario. Canada appears to be on the verge of a long-anticipated structural realignment, which would result in a party system resembling Britain, where the Conservatives and Labour take turns governing, and the centrist Liberal Democrats do not.
Most democracies with similar voting systems are dominated by a party of the left and a party of the right, the result of what political scientists call Duverger’s law. Canada has always been different, because voters did not vote reliably along ideological lines. Instead, the Liberals dominated, governing federally for 70 years in the 20th century because they alone could build stable coalitions between French and English Canada, a dynamic described by University of British Columbia professor Richard Johnston in The Canadian Party System: An Analytic History.
The great Canadian cleavages were not about class interests, but ran along linguistic, geographic and religious fault lines, which forced the parties to become machines for delicate brokerage.
In The Duel: Diefenbaker, Pearson, and the Making of Modern Canada, The Globe and Mail’s John Ibbitson explains how the Liberals and Conservatives were vying with one another in the 1950s and 60s to modernize the country, desperately appealing to fickle voters across ideological lines. “Even as they fought each other, Diefenbaker and Pearson together constructed the social safety net that supports us today.”
It was at that time impossible to place the two parties on a left-right spectrum. The late Peter C. Newman wrote that what “separated the political camps was that one was in power and the other wanted to be. For much of our history, only the most theoretical of academics could define the differences between Liberals and Conservatives. Only minor variations were permitted to disturb the nation’s delicately balanced regional, racial, religious and economic differences.”
Those lines come from Mr. Newman’s 2011 book When The Gods Changed: The Death of Liberal Canada, which he wrote after Jack Layton led the NDP to the opposition benches and Michael Ignatieff led the Liberals to third place.
Mr. Newman intended the book to be a record of Mr. Ignatieff’s ascent. Instead, he ended up writing a lament for the party, predicting its ruin.
They did then look doomed. Mr. Layton had broken through in Quebec, and the NDP snatched 103 federal seats, compared with the Liberal’s measly 34. Then Mr. Layton tragically died, and Justin Trudeau took over the Liberal Party, leading Canadians, briefly, to sunlit uplands of hope and change, arresting the process that will likely continue after he is gone.
Mr. Trudeau, an unusually charismatic politician with an ancestral claim to the nation’s attention, brought the party back from the brink, but a decade later his charm has worn so thin that his party is losing strongholds. The Liberals are back at the brink, but it is worse this time. Provincial Liberal parties are weaker than they were a decade ago. They are still healthy in Atlantic Canada and Quebec, but disappear as you head west, with just nine seats in Ontario and one in Manitoba.
Part of what is happening is cyclical. When Mr. Trudeau became Prime Minister in 2015, there were Liberal premiers in Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia (though the BC Liberals were more of a centre-right party than a classic small-l liberal one). As those governments aged, and voters soured on Mr. Trudeau, they were replaced by leaders further to the right. That is normal.
What is not normal is what happened in British Columbia, where last month Kevin Falcon announced the assisted suicide of his political party, BC United, which had been the BC Liberal Party until last year, when he changed the name in a failed effort to better appeal to supporters of the federal Conservatives. It was an unusually hurried and amateurish denouement, but the trajectory has been the same throughout Western Canada, where right-of-centre parties have shifted further right, and the Liberals have been increasingly supplanted by the NDP.
As a result, the Liberals no longer have much of a farm-team system.
“I think the Liberal brand nationwide is weaker today than it ever has been, and certainly in my lifetime,” says Gerald Butts, a key adviser to Mr. Trudeau leading up to the election of 2015. “When we took over the Liberal Party in 2013, there were Liberal governments everywhere, across the provinces. And this is why I think we’re at such an important moment federally. Because if the Liberal Party finishes third or fourth in the next election, it’s over. Then we do have the strange death of the Liberal Party.”
Mr. Butts noted that the three most appealing progressive politicians in the country now are Western New Democrats: B.C.’s David Eby, Alberta’s Naheed Nenshi and Manitoba’s Wab Kinew.
Long-time NDP strategist Brian Topp points out that his party often produces appealing provincial leaders. A generation ago, they had Bob Rae, Roy Romanow and Gary Doer.
“You know, as [Brian] Mulroney said, the tide comes in and the tide goes out. But what is true is that the Liberals seem to be down to one crew – the A+ team, which is currently centred around the PMO. They could end up trying to move to Ontario if they lose office. That’s unusual for the Liberals. They used to have a very, very deep bench, and they don’t seem to have that deep bench any more.”
My family – Nova Scotia Irish Catholics – always voted Tory. A local historian once explained that we had likely been Liberal, like most Irish Catholics, until the 1870s, when local political champion Joseph Howe flirted with anti-Catholic rhetoric in his anti-Confederation speeches, at which point many Catholics switched teams. After that, webs of patronage and tradition kept the family in the blue tent for 150 years.
East Coast political roots run deep – the region is typically slower to shift than other parts of the country – but here, as elsewhere, voters are dividing themselves along ideological lines.
The polarization happening in Canada is not as profound as in the United States, where 38 per cent would be upset if their child married across party lines, 16 points higher than in Canada. Canadians are less socially polarized, but they have organized themselves into two increasingly antagonistic ideological groupings.
Political scientists call the process “sorting.” People used to vote a certain way because not doing so would make beloved ancestors roll over in their graves. Now they vote because of their views on same-sex marriage, abortion or the environment.
It used to be harder to distinguish between Liberal and Conservative party views on these types of issues. Brian Mulroney, for example, had strong environmental policies, but that would not have been clear in the election of 1984, back when Liberals and Conservatives had similar views about the environment, together viewing the NDP as a bunch of tree-hugging hippies.
In 1993, Liberals and Progressive Conservatives gave similarly moderate answers when researchers asked if they agreed that protecting the environment is more important than creating jobs. In the years since, the Conservatives have veered right on this question, more often answering that jobs are more important, and the Liberal and NDP supporters veered left, more often answering that the environment is more important.
Across a range of policy issues, the Liberals and NDP have converged as the Liberals moved left on economic issues and the Conservatives moved right on social issues.
“Those ideological signals get sent to the vast public, so people see that the parties are becoming more polarized,” says Eric Merkley, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Toronto. “So then ideology becomes a more important role in determining whether they’re a Conservative or Liberal than in the past.”
Many blue Liberals think the party has gone too far to the left and favour a return to the centre, perhaps under former B.C. Liberal premier Christy Clark, but Mr. Merkley isn’t sure that would work.
“They’re going to have trouble poaching Conservative voters who are very, very loyal, typically. They are existing, because of polarization, in a similar policy space as the NDP. They have to have a reason for existence. But why? Why the Liberal Party as opposed to the NDP? They have to answer that if they want to survive and defy that trend in other Western democracies where the centrist party disappears.”
If Mr. Poilievre becomes prime minister, we can expect buyer’s remorse will be reflected in subsequent provincial elections. The Liberals desperately need to come back in Ontario and Quebec, and they have a shot. The Ontario NDP and Québec Solidaire do not look willing to put enough water in their wine to win government.
But if the Liberals do not soon make a dramatic comeback, progressives will start talking, again, about merging their parties, which Jean Chrétien and others were pushing before Mr. Trudeau came along.
For the past decade, the party has been a vehicle for Mr. Trudeau. After he is gone, it will urgently need to find a new reason to exist or the long-term decline he briefly interrupted will resume.
That means the traditional Canadian consensus around centrist policies may disappear. Polarized parties must design policies to appeal to the median voter, and polling shows most Canadians’ views remain somewhere near the middle of the road – but there are no guardrails on the stretch of highway ahead.