John Ibbitson is writer at large at The Globe and Mail. Darrell Bricker is chief executive of Ipsos Public Affairs.
Justin Trudeau’s Liberals are unlikely to hold onto the Greater Vancouver riding of Cloverdale-Langley City in the Dec. 16 by-election. The government is deeply unpopular, and it lost much safer seats in Toronto and Montreal in by-elections earlier this year.
But more is going on than simply voter resentment of a government that’s long in the tooth. The Liberal Party confronts a political phenomenon that emerged more than a decade ago and that has returned with a vengeance, threatening not only the Prime Minister’s electoral fortunes, but the future of the party itself.
It has been more than 12 years since the publication of our book The Big Shift, in which we declared that political elites were in decline in Central Canada, that the Conservative coalition forged by Stephen Harper had become a national governing party, and that progressives would respond to the Conservative challenge through some sort of merger of their forces.
Then Justin Trudeau won a boxing match, captured the Liberal leadership and soundly defeated Mr. Harper in the 2015 election. Rumours of the death of the Liberal Party proved, for the umpteenth time, to have been greatly exaggerated.
But the tectonic forces that were at work then are even more powerful today. The Big Shift 2.0 is approaching, stronger than ever, and reinforced by a surge in support for conservative governments among young people frustrated by their lack of prospects – the same surge that swept Donald Trump to victory again as president-elect of the United States.
These shifts in the political landscape put not only the future of the Liberal Party at risk, but the future of the country as well.
In our book, we wrote about what we called the Laurentian elite: the political, bureaucratic, academic, cultural, business and media leaders who inhabited the better neighbourhoods of Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and other cities between Windsor and Quebec City.
The Laurentian elite had governed by consensus through most of Canada’s history. The great disruptions of the past – the hanging of Louis Riel, the conscription crises, the Quebec sovereignty movement, the debate over free trade – stood out because they disrupted that consensus.
Though the Laurentian elite were not specifically Liberal, we wrote, the Liberal Party had long represented their interests, and other parties that formed government, such as the Progressive Conservatives under Brian Mulroney, also reflected those interests.
But by the second decade of this century, it was clear to us that the influence of the Laurentian elite was weakening, for two reasons. First, Western Canada was growing in population and influence. The four Western provinces had surpassed Quebec and Atlantic Canada in population, while the oil and gas sector of Alberta and Saskatchewan had become a major driver of the Canadian economy.
Second, hundreds of thousands of immigrants from developing countries were arriving annually. Many clustered in suburban communities surrounding Toronto and Vancouver. Others took advantage of Alberta’s booming economy.
The West – especially the Prairie provinces – and rural Ontario formed the base of the Conservative Party. The Laurentian Liberals occupied the city centres of Central Canada. Whichever side could win over the vast numbers living in the major suburban communities of Ontario and B.C. governed.
Canadian politics, we predicted, would eventually evolve into a contest between the centre-right Conservative Party and a consolidated party of the centre-left. What that party would be, how it would be formed, and what it would be called, we could not say. But “the values and priorities of the New Canada aren’t entirely – or even mostly – conservative,” we wrote. “They’re realistic, pragmatic, cosmopolitan, global, forward-thinking. Progressive politicians should be able to speak to them, too.”
As it turned out, the Liberals returned as the dominant progressive party. For the Laurentian elite, the universe once again appeared to be unfolding as it should.
“We shouldn’t have been so cocky,” we wrote in a 2015 postelection analysis. But “the conservative coalition is also broad and deep and coherent. If the party takes its time and chooses its next leader wisely, without being distracted by nostalgists or narrow ideologues, the Conservatives will be very competitive in the next election and in elections to come.”
As it turned out, the Conservatives were very competitive indeed, winning the popular vote in 2019 and 2021. But they failed to break through in the suburbs and so could not form government.
Today, the demographic forces that gave birth to the Big Shift are more powerful than ever, while new forces are at work that we had not anticipated. They are coalescing and expanding to the benefit of Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives, while throwing the Liberal Party into crisis.
Over the past decade, the population shift in favour of the West has continued. British Columbia and Alberta now have a combined population of 10.6 million, well above Quebec’s 9.1 million. Fifteen years ago, the two populations were almost identical.
The region’s economy also continues to grow. A July analysis by Bank of Nova Scotia observed that ”the Western provinces have outperformed their peers over the past two decades,” and that growth is expected to continue, in part because of the region’s younger labour force, bolstered by high rates of immigration.
The suburban cities surrounding Toronto continue to expand. The Greater Toronto Area has a population of 6.8 million, compared with 5.6 million in 2009. Because the GTA outside Toronto is growing faster than in the city itself, in the most recent redistricting of the House of Commons, the GTA outside Toronto gained ridings, while Toronto lost one. (Alberta’s representation grew by three ridings, and British Columbia’s by one.)
The Big Shift never went away. The Conservative base in the West steadily expands in size and influence. The Conservative Party has won the popular vote in five of the past six federal elections. The Liberals have been able to form governments – each one weaker than the one before – by hanging onto their base of Quebec and Toronto, and by mostly keeping the Conservatives out of the Greater Toronto and Greater Vancouver suburbs. In this Parliament, they have had to seek the permission of the New Democrats to remain in power – the overture, perhaps, to a future merger.
The Grits are in deep trouble. And this time, they might not be able to dig themselves out.
It’s not just a case of being behind in the polls. Losing an election or three is not the end of the world for a national governing party. But there is a deep rot within the Liberalism, reflected in the sorry state of Liberal parties at the provincial level.
They have virtually ceased to exist in the West. In Ontario, the Liberal caucus is so small it lacks party standing in the legislature. The provincial Liberals are polling around 20 per cent in Quebec. The party remains competitive in Atlantic Canada, but that region now accounts for less than 7 per cent of Canada’s population.
Trudeau biographer Stephen Maher recently observed in these pages that New Democrats and their ideological counterpart in Quebec, Québec Solidaire, have more federal, provincial and territorial seats combined than the Liberals, with conservatives of one stripe or another dominant over both.
“The Liberal brand is on the precipice of ruin,” Mr. Maher wrote.
A third element has emerged, one that is galvanizing conservatives both in North America and Europe. Traditionally, most younger voters have embraced progressive values and gravitated toward progressive parties.
But half a decade of pandemic, inflation, rising interest rates and unaffordable housing has left younger voters deeply stressed. They fear they may be the first generation in living memory who will end up, collectively, worse off than the generation that came before.
This has pushed many of them toward conservative parties. In the U.S., nearly half of voters under 30 cast a ballot for Donald Trump. Polls show far more voters under 30 in Canada support the Conservatives than either the New Democrats or the Liberals.
It’s too soon to judge whether this trend represents a permanent exodus of the young toward conservatism – a new, third tranche of the Big Shift. What we can say is that progressive parties are currently losing the fight for support among younger voters.
How will progressives respond to these demographic and political shifts? Will most rally around and renew the Liberal Party, or will the Liberals and NDP find some way to get along in order to advance beyond their downtown redoubts to recapture the suburbs?
We only know this: The Western Conservative base continues to grow. The progressive base in Central Canadian downtowns continues to shrink, relative to the immigrant-rich suburbs. That’s the Big Shift in action.
We’d be tempted to say we told you so, except we’re alarmed by something we missed completely when we wrote our book, something that is only now becoming clear to us and to others as well.
Canada under the Big Shift is dangerously unstable.
Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, whose Parti Québécois has a healthy lead in the polls, has vowed that a PQ government will hold a referendum on sovereignty in its first term in office. He envisions an independent Quebec before the end of the decade.
Federalists will face a challenge when confronting a sovereigntist government in Quebec that they have not faced in the past. Laurentian Canada and the Liberal Party have left Western voters so angry and alienated that Canada confronts not one sovereignty movement, but two. Danielle Smith in Alberta and Scott Moe in Saskatchewan talk about and have passed legislation that puts Saskatchewan First and declares Alberta Sovereignty.
The West is hardly uniform – one poll showed that British Columbians were more inclined to identify with Washington State than with Alberta or any Canadian province. But the four provinces have long shared a sense of separation from Central Canada.
Whoever is leading the country federally, if and when a referendum on sovereignty is held in Quebec, will be able to make no promises of constitutional renewal. And any concessions of federal power to Quebec in the areas of culture, immigration or elsewhere will have to be offered to all other provinces as well, which could leave Canada even more decentralized, and a federal power even weaker, than it already is.
Even talking about Quebec sovereignty will stoke sovereigntist talk in the West. These are dangerous currents.
The one thing Westerners and Quebeckers have in common with the rest of Canada is a diminishing sense of commitment to the Canadian idea. An Ipsos poll from June of this year revealed that 35 per cent of Canadians said they were less proud of being Canadian than they were five years ago, while only 16 per cent were more proud. (The online poll of 1,001 adults had a comparable margin of error of 3.8 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.)
Will a Western-born Conservative leader such as Pierre Poilievre be able to contain the latest surge of centrifugal forces that threaten the federation as prime minister?
The Big Shift we described more than a decade ago is back with a vengeance. Whether Canada will survive it is another story.