The Liberal-NDP deal has changed the political game in ways we still haven’t grasped

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Last week’s column considered the diverting possibility that the Liberals could “lose” the next election but remain in power. That is, they could finish with fewer seats than their Conservative rivals and yet govern with the support of the NDP, as they do now.

The idea is both constitutionally proper – the government is whoever has the confidence of a majority of the House of Commons, not the party with the most seats – and plausible: The Liberals have been stuck at 30 per cent or less in the polls for most of this year and show no signs of breaking out.

Still, it remains controversial. Some object in principle to a “coalition of election losers” seeming to “overturn” an election result. Others consider it far-fetched: For the Liberals to win fewer seats than the Conservatives but still command a majority, in combination with the NDP, requires that the NDP win more seats than the Bloc Québécois – something it has achieved in only two elections in the past 10.

Is it that far-fetched, though? The NDP won 25 seats in 2021, to the Bloc’s 32. They did so, however, with less than 18 per cent of the vote. For the past year or more, their support has held steady at around 20 per cent, near their historic highs (apart from the freak Orange Wave of 2011). At that level, if the 1988 and 2015 elections are any guide, they could be expected to win a much larger number of seats: perhaps 40 or more.

Another objection might be that the Liberals, though they had a constitutional right to govern, would decline to do so for fear of seeming dictatorial and unsportsmanlike (see “coalition of losers”). I doubt it. Given a shot at power, parties generally take it; without it, they cede the initiative to their opponents.

True, the Liberals could always let the Conservatives go first, then team up with the NDP to defeat them afterward. But in the interim, much might change. The Conservatives might catch a lift in the polls. The NDP might get cold feet. The Tories might even refuse to hand over power, but rather demand the Governor-General call an election – plunging the country into a constitutional crisis, à la King-Byng, but one from which they might hope, based on historical experience, to emerge the victors.

But never mind. The point of last week’s column was not so much to dwell on one particular outcome as to suggest how the 2022 Liberal-NDP supply-and-confidence agreement has changed the game in federal politics, perhaps permanently – how, indeed, it has made it difficult to see how the Conservatives could govern again.

In the nearly 20 years since Canada’s conservative movement was unified under its current banner, its support has remained strikingly constant, mired in the low 30s most of the time save for brief intervals around the 2006, 2008 and 2011 elections.

By contrast, Liberal and NDP support, particularly after 2011, has oscillated wildly, as left-of-centre voters hopped back and forth between them (and, latterly, the Greens). That split in the progressive vote offered the Conservatives the occasional opportunity to scrape into government, despite a deficit in the popular vote versus the combined progressive parties of 20 points, on average (15 if only the Liberals and NDP are counted).

That changed with the Liberal-NDP pact. It made explicit what was already implicit: that the progressive vote is no longer the property of the individual parties of which it is composed, but has become a single voting bloc the parties of the left hold in common. The progressive popular majority (since 2004 the Liberals and NDP have averaged a combined 50.4 per cent of the vote) has solidified into a governing majority.

So whereas after the 1979 election the Liberals yielded power to the Conservatives – despite finishing four points ahead of them in the popular vote and with a combined 58 per cent of the vote between them and the NDP – if the circumstances were similar to today’s they might have toughed it out. Not only would the two parties have had a near-majority of the seats (140 out of 282) but with a formal governing agreement in place they would have had much more assurance of stability than a typical minority government.

Would the Liberals go for it? One early test will be what they say about the supply-and-confidence agreement in the run-up to the next election. Is it a one-off, to expire in 2025 or at dissolution, whichever comes first? Or is it something to be continued after, not just a short-term expedient but a template for governing in the longer term? Does it die with this Parliament, or would they renew it in the next?

In past campaigns the Liberals boxed themselves in, disavowing any possibility of a postelection alliance with the NDP – as if to validate Conservative charges that this sort of co-habitation, common as it is in other countries (and, increasingly, in Canadian provinces), was somehow dirty pool. But by 2025 the country will have been governed for three years under this arrangement and, while opinions will vary of its record, it can hardly be called a coup.

So what’s to stop the Liberals and NDP from telling the voters next time: While naturally we’d each like to govern on our own, if it takes both parties to put together a parliamentary majority then yes, we will once again govern in tandem. At a stroke they would disarm Tory charges that they were plotting to pull a fast one after the election. Nobody could say they weren’t warned.

To be sure, “getting into bed with the socialists” drags the Liberals to the left, in reality or in perception, probably putting a majority out of reach. But if they were unlikely to win a majority anyway (only twice in the past seven elections has either party managed it) and if it improves their odds of holding onto power after the election – if, indeed, it positions them as the more stable alternative in what the British call a “hung Parliament” – why not?

Equally interesting: what does the NDP say about it? The conventional wisdom about such arrangements, to which I have hitherto been a subscriber, is that they ill serve the smaller partner, a verdict that seemed to be borne out in the recent by-elections, where the NDP did poorly.

But as elections maven Éric Grenier has reminded us, the NDP always does poorly in by-elections. Even if its current 20-per-cent showing overstates its support, that’s better than it has done in most polls over the past 30 years.

So where the NDP seemed to need the deal more than the Liberals when it was signed, come the election it may be the Liberals who are the demandeurs. In which case, does the NDP declare: the price of our support just went up, we want a full-blown coalition now, with seats in cabinet?

All of which leaves the Conservatives, as I said last time, in a pickle. How will they respond? One alternative: throw an enormous tantrum, in hopes either of scaring the Liberals off the attempt or at least capitalizing on popular resentment afterward.

But it’s not clear that will succeed, for the reasons stated. People have gotten used to the Liberals and NDP governing together. The possibility would have been advertised in advance. And once the government was in place, well, how long can you kick and scream over a fait accompli?

At some point the Conservatives will have to come to grips with the fact that their predicament is unlikely to change, possibly for a very long time. They can no longer hope for the occasional lucky split of the vote to deliver them into power. Rather, they will have to find a way to close that structural 15-to-20 point gap between themselves and the Liberal-NDP alliance.

Everyone has their own theories about how the Tories might do that. Change your tone! Change your policies! Work harder, organize better, spend more! But what if none of that works? What if the problem is baked into the current electoral system?

Conservatives have tended to be fervent defenders of first past the post, thinking it is the only system under which they can form a government. But what if first past the post actually makes it less likely they will do so? It’s not as if the Tories have done terribly well under it: just five majorities in the past 100 years. Possibly that is not accidental.

The Liberal Party, on the other hand, are a party that would seem tailor-made for first past the post. It is well known that the system rewards parties that can cluster their vote geographically. As it happens, the Liberal vote has historically clustered in the most populous regions of the country – Ontario and Quebec – whereas the Tory vote has clustered in the less populous West.

That inbuilt Liberal advantage has persisted despite the arrival of third and fourth parties on the left. Since 1935 – the first election contested by the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (the forerunner of the NDP) – the Liberals have won 18 of 27 elections.

Perhaps that, too, is not accidental. The presence in any debate of two parliamentary parties on the left to one on the right has always made the Tories look like the odd man out. And yet for all their ideological affinity, each of the two also attracts its own peculiar following. They don’t just split an existing pool of voters, in other words: they expand it.

What the Tories need, then, is a partner – another party to the right, providing the extra gravitational pull needed to drag more voters across the centre line. The People’s Party is unlikely to be that party: Born of a particular historic moment, it’s the kind of fringe party that, under first past the post, tends to remain on the fringe.

But in the more fluid political environment typical of proportional electoral systems, a mainstream alternative has a better chance of developing and growing. For that matter, the Liberal coalition might prove easier to crack open; Blue Liberals might be more easily peeled off. If, likewise, regionalized politics favours the Liberals, deregionalizing it should favour the Tories.

Some Conservatives are beginning to get this. Former leader Erin O’Toole, for example, has lately expressed guarded support for proportional representation, specifically noting the more fragmented political environment we are now in. Could the very extremity of its plight lead the party to make one of those breathtaking about-faces to which Canadian politics is periodically prone?

And – here’s a thought – could we one day see the Conservatives and the NDP making common cause in support of electoral reform, against the Liberals?