The Conservatives protect their right flank, at the cost of losing the centre

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Yes, they were only by-elections, and no, none of the four seats changed hands: the Liberals held the affluent urban ridings of Winnipeg South Centre and Notre-Dame-de-Grâce–Westmount in Montreal, while the Conservatives held the small-town ridings of Portage-Lisgar in Manitoba and Oxford in southern Ontario, much as would be expected.

But look a little deeper, and there are larger portents in these results, most of which should make Conservatives, in particular, distinctly queasy. Consider: The Liberals have just come off several months of relentless pounding in Parliament and the media – over the Chinese interference mess, yes, but also over inflation and spending and health care and housing and a general perception that the country is in the hands of a government that is exhausted, directionless and overwhelmed. Over all, a recent Abacus poll found just one in five Canadians think the Liberals deserve to be re-elected.

But what happens when this is actually put to a test – when the government’s popularity is measured, not by the abstraction of a public approval poll, but in a live-fire exercise against the competition? The Liberals’ share of the vote goes up. We saw this in the Mississauga-Lakeshore by-election in December, where the Liberals’ margin increased from six percentage points in the 2021 election to 14. And we saw it again Monday night: an average increase of five points in their share of the popular vote.

The impression, however, was less of any great surge in affection for the Grits than a general dismay with the alternatives. Take the Conservatives, who suffered a decline in support in three of the four ridings. Remember, these are by-elections: a chance to give the government a kick for its perceived failings without actually having to replace it. And still the Conservatives could not attract disaffected Liberal voters their way.

Here again we saw a repeat of Mississauga-Lakeshore. As before, the Conservatives benefited from the collapse of the People’s Party of Canada, which saw its average vote share cut in half. Presumably most of those votes went to the Conservatives, who under Pierre Poilievre have pitched hard for the same voters: witness the ferocious and ultimately successful battle to defeat PPC leader Maxime Bernier in Portage-Lisgar, where the main issue seemed to be who had or had not attended meetings of the World Economic Forum.

And yet everywhere else the Tories’ overall share of the vote fell. That suggests the Conservatives lost more votes to the Liberals than they gained from the PPC. Far from luring centrist voters away from the Liberals, the Conservatives have been repelling the ones they still had.

The party can explain away the results in Oxford, where its margin shrank from 27 points to six: the consequence, it will be said, of a split among the riding’s Conservatives after a messy nomination fight. But the result in Winnipeg South Centre is harder to rationalize. Indeed it is devastating.

This is the sort of riding the Conservatives used to be competitive in – the sort of riding they need to win to form a government, as in fact they did in 2011. They stood to benefit, what is more, from a certain lack of enthusiasm among local Liberals for their candidate, Ben Carr (he is the son of the late Jim Carr, who held the riding through three elections until his death last year).

Yet what was the result on election night? The Liberals ran away with it: a margin of victory of 32 points, nearly twice as large as in 2021. Clearly Mr. Poilievre’s hard-edged approach isn’t working, where it needs to work. It may serve to inflate Conservative margins in seats they already hold. But it is costing them crucial votes in winnable swing ridings.

And there is another factor at work: the continuing decline in the NDP vote. Like the PPC, the NDP lost ground in all four ridings, as they did in Mississauga-Lakeshore. Perhaps this is the consequence of the party’s 2022 agreement to keep the Liberals in power – the sort of arrangement which often leaves the smaller party in the larger’s shadow. Possibly it reflects the difficulties its leader, Jagmeet Singh, continues to have in getting people to take him seriously.

Or perhaps this, too, is Mr. Poilievre’s handiwork. It is, after all, the perennial ambition of the Liberals to frighten NDP voters into their camp with tales of the unspeakable carnage the Tories would visit upon the country if ever they were let into power. A Conservative leader whose every word or gesture seems to validate such fears is the stuff of Liberal dreams.