Hello, dear reader! After a lengthy hiatus, I am back with another edition of your favourite amateur Canadian political newsletter, just in time for the fall season. I hope you had a chance to enjoy the dog days of summer, as I certainly did. As the air turns crisp and the daylight steadily retreats, it’s a good time to take stock of the political currents rippling across the country after a (hopefully) restful summer. With that in mind, I’d like to start with a recap of the recent change at the helm of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition (yes, you read that right, His…), the Conservative Party of Canada.
Editorial note: I’m experimenting with the format of this newsletter, one that hopefully provides answers to your burning questions about the hot topics of the day. I’m also hoping to produce content a bit more frequently going forward, and welcome (as always) your feedback on what you think works and what doesn’t.
Who is Pierre Poilievre?
As you’ve probably heard by now, on September 10th the Conservative Party of Canada elected Pierre Poilievre as its new leader. Poilievre is 43 years old and hails from Calgary, though he now makes his home in the Ottawa-area riding he has represented in the House of Commons since 2004. If you’re any good at math, you’ll have gathered from the above that Pierre has been a federal politician since the tender age of 25.
A lifelong right-wing activist, Poilievre has roots in the Reform/ Alliance movement that emerged out of Western Canada in the 90’s and early aughts and spawned the likes of Stephen Harper and Jason Kenney. As a young and feisty Conservative MP during the Harper government, Poilievre developed a reputation for an aggressive, hyper-partisan brand of politics, often revelling in the kind of trench warfare-style attacks on political opponents that his more experienced colleagues might have found unpalatable (notwithstanding the general nastiness of the Harper government, writ large).
Perhaps most infamously, Poilievre served as the Minister of State for Democratic Reform from 2013 to 2015, during which time he spearheaded a piece of legislation called the Fair Elections Act - an Orwellian descriptor of the Harper government’s naked attempt to re-write Canada’s election laws to make it harder to vote for large groups of (presumably left-leaning) citizens like postsecondary students and people without fixed addresses. The Conservatives’ brazen attempt to import US-style voter suppression tactics - which were largely repealed by the Trudeau government - is emblematic of the type of hardline ideological conservative that Poilievre is, and of the type of leadership Canadians can expect he will bring to the party.
A fun fact about Pierre is that his French-Canadian name, Poilievre, comes from his adoptive father Donald Poilievre, who is Fransaskois from Saskatchewan. Pierre is fluent in French, but is very much a prairie product.
Why did he win?
The hallmark of Poilievre’s campaign for the Conservative leadership was an emphasis on freedom and liberty- concepts that will likely rub many Canadians as uncomfortably American in tone. That said, his campaign also coalesced around the theme of inept government bureaucracy and so-called “gatekeepers”, a platform which allowed him to seize on everything from chaos at Canada’s airports over the summer, to the rising cost of living and the Bank of Canada’s monetary policy, to the astronomical price of housing in many major markets - ideas which will likely find at least some resonance with a sizeable segment of the voting public.
The Conservative leadership race, which was brought about by the party’s ouster of Erin O’Toole following his lacklustre performance in the 2021 federal election, was largely a coronation for Poilievre. While the narrative that emerged early on was that of a “battle for the soul of the party” - a war waged between the more moderate centrist conservatives on the one hand (the so-called “adults in the room”) and the more strident wing that embraced “freedom convoy” populism during the Trump/ pandemic lockdown eras - in the end the battle wasn’t close. Poilievre, who happily cozied up to the trucker convoy that wrought havoc on downtown Ottawa for much of last winter, and who glibly denounced pandemic restrictions and vaccine mandates, trounced his nearest rival, Jean Charest, on the first ballot by a crushing margin of 68% to 16%.
Who else was in the race?
Charest, who could at best be described as conservative-lite, was formerly the Premier of Quebec for a decade and, prior to that, the leader of the now-defunct Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, before that party was swallowed whole by the right-wing Reform/Alliance party to form the modern-day CPC. Charest’s campaign never really took off, unable as he was to shake the perception amongst Tory faithful that he was a) not a true conservative, and b) yesterday’s man. At any rate, if the soul of the party was truly at stake, it is now abundantly clear which side has laid claim to it, and if Charest’s camp was said to represent the adults in the room, then the kids are now effectively driving the bus. Having said that, it should also be noted that the great patriarch of the Conservative family himself, Stephen Harper, came out strongly endorsing Poilievre, despite having stayed above the fray in the previous two leadership cycles that elected O’Toole and Andrew Scheer. While this isn’t entirely surprising given Pierre’s background, it does perhaps indicate the degree to which the CPC establishment - which has been moulded in Harper’s image - views the moderate centrism of someone like Jean Charest as a threat to the conservative project.
Other notable candidates: Charest’s campaign was supposedly being aided and abetted by a parallel campaign by Patrick Brown, the former Ontario PC leader and current mayor of Brampton, who had also hoped to be a standard-bearer for more moderate conservatives. The two campaigns were said to be working together, or at least strategically relying on each other’s success, with Brown tapping into his base of support in the Greater Toronto suburbs and Charest shoring up memberships in Quebec. However, for reasons that remain somewhat mysterious, Brown was ejected from the leadership race by the party on account of supposedly shady campaign financing tactics. A thick cloud of scandal seems to follow Brown just about everywhere he goes.
Finally, it is notable that Pierre Poilievre, while undoubtedly a “true-blue” conservative on economic and fiscal matters, does not appear to have made significant overtures to the social conservative wing of his party during the leadership race. The most socially conservative candidate in the race, Leslyn Lewis, finished in third place with a modest 10% of ballots cast. In the previous Conservative leadership race of 2020, eventual-winner Erin O’Toole developed a strategic alliance with Lewis and the social conservative base in an effort to court second-place votes (the CPC uses a ranked-ballot and instant-runoff voting for its leadership races). While this worked for O’Toole as a strategy to secure the leadership, it backfired spectacularly for him in the general election when the inherent contradictions between his moderate pitch to voters and his previous record of dealmaking with the hard-right anti-choice crowd were laid bare by his opponents.
Poilievre suffers no such contradiction, as he did not have to resort to explicit appeals to the party’s social conservatives to win. Pierre’s pitch to the party membership could be loosely described as libertarian in spirit, with its emphasis on economic freedom, lower taxes and less government interference in your life. He mostly steered clear of hot-button topics like abortion, and was not endorsed by the so-called Campaign Life Coalition. On an individual level, one would be hard-pressed to describe him as a Bible-thumping social conservative. Poilievre is relatively young, considers himself to be pro-choice, has an openly gay father, and is married to a woman who is an immigrant from Venezuela. It will be interesting to see whether and when the Liberal Party will trot out the standard playbook of painting Conservative leaders as closeted bigots with a hidden agenda to take your rights away, and if such attacks will prove effective on a millennial-ish leader who doesn’t exactly fit the mould.
What happens next?
I will be watching to see whether or not Pierre grows up between now and the next election. As a young backbencher-turned cabinet minister, and then as the official opposition critic for Finance, he has developed a knack for getting under the skin of his opponents with smart-ass quips and clever attack lines about how “Justin-flation” is robbing you of your hard-earned cash. But whatever political skills he may have, gravitas and statesmanship are not among them. If Pierre can find a way to reshape his image from perennial attack-dog to prime minister-in-waiting, he will have a very good shot at unseating Justin Trudeau eventually. But that will require him to locate another gear, one that moderates his temperament and dials down the toxicity of his rhetoric - a gear with which I’m not sure his political machine is equipped.
Nonetheless, it is worth recalling the old adage that governments are not elected so much as they are defeated, and if the current Liberal government remains in office until 2025 as per the terms of its supply-and-confidence agreement with the NDP, it will have been a full decade since Trudeau’s sunny ways first graced the Prime Minister’s office. In those years more than a few storm clouds have accumulated, with likely more on the horizon. If Pierre can clean up his act in the years ahead, he may simply have to bide his time and wait for the incumbent government to defeat itself.
Can I tell you a story? Five years ago, two people went on a date. It was, by all accounts, a nice date. The couple sipped tea and coffee, they chatted, they laughed - they even rode bicycles together - before deciding, amicably, to go their separate ways. A good time was had by both, but ultimately neither found quite what they were looking for. It seems that both had their eyes set on other prizes. At the end of the date, the two said their polite goodbyes and went about their lonely lives.
Before you shed a tear for our two protagonists and their less-than-amorous encounter, I should tell you that things worked out quite well for the both of them.
One of them was Doug Ford, who in 2017 was the President of a company called Deco Labels and a former Toronto city councillor. The other was Jagmeet Singh, who was the Member of Provincial Parliament for the riding of Bramalea-Gore-Malton in the Ontario legislature. The date was organized by TVO, Ontario’s educational public broadcaster, as part of a series called “Political Blind Date” - a show where politicians of differing political stripes sit down together to discuss contentious issues and seek common ground. In this particular episode - which I highly recommend watching if you’re into this sort of thing - Doug and Jagmeet hash it out over how Toronto can best address its transportation woes. I’ll let you guess which one of the two gentlemen suggested the bike ride.
In the months and years since that date, both Mr Ford and Mr Singh would rise to new heights in their political careers. Ford would go on to lead the Ontario Progressive Conservatives to a majority government at Queen’s Park in 2018 (a feat which he will seek to repeat in the coming months), while Mr Singh would go on to become the leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party in October of 2017, a post which he continues to hold today.
The reason I recount the story of this abortive political romance is, it seems to me that if Mr Ford and Mr Singh were unable to “seal the deal” on that summer day in 2017, it’s because both were waiting for someone else to come along. And this past week, that person seems to have finally appeared to both of them - coiffed hair and sunny ways and all - in the form of one Justin Trudeau. In the still-brisk but warming air of early spring, the flickering embers of what could have been between Doug Ford and Jagmeet Singh have been ignited in the form of a love triangle.
NDP supply, Liberal confidence
Let’s take a look at the second side of this political love triangle, which emerged in the last couple of weeks. On March 22nd, Justin Trudeau announced that his Liberal minority government had reached an agreement with Jagmeet Singh’s NDP that will allow the Liberals to stay in power, with the parliamentary support of the NDP caucus, until July of 2025 - provided certain conditions are met. I will outline why I think this agreement is mostly a good thing for Canadians, and for the two political parties, but first, there is a lot to unpack in this deal so let me break it down by answering all the questions that I imagine you, dear reader, might have.
What is this deal all about?
The deal between the Liberals and the NDP is called a “confidence and supply agreement” and to understand what that is, you first have to understand why a deal was necessary to begin with.
Okay, fine. Why is a confidence and supply agreement necessary?
Great question, thanks for asking. The short answer is because the 2021 federal election (like the 2019 election before it) produced a minority parliament. This means that no party in the House of Commons controls a majority of the seats. The Liberal Party, as the incumbent governing party and the one with the most seats (but fewer than half of them), got to remain in power. But because they don’t have a majority, they need to secure support from other parties in the House on key votes in order to survive.
The longer answer is that this agreement isn’t actually necessary at all. What is necessary is for the government to maintain, one way or another, confidence and supply from Parliament. “Confidence” means that the government must be able to command the support of a majority in the House of Commons on crucially important matters. This speaks to their fundamental ability to govern. They don’t need to win every single vote in the House, but on core issues like getting a budget passed, or the Speech from the Throne (which outlines the government’s agenda at the start of their mandate), they need to demonstrate that they have the votes to get things done. If the government ever loses a vote on a matter of confidence, it basically means the House of Commons - the group of people you and I elected to represent us - is not buying what the government is selling, and the folks in charge have lost their democratic authority to continue governing. When the government loses the confidence of the House, one of two things happen: either the Governor General calls on an opposition leader to try to form a government, or, if that doesn’t seem likely to succeed, the GG will simply dissolve parliament and call an election. (It doesn’t literally dissolve into thin air; it just means all of the seats are declared vacant, subject to fresh elections.) Either way, the incumbent government gets the boot. So confidence is really important for a government, and especially so in a minority situation when they can’t rely on just their own party to sail through confidence votes.
Supply is a similar concept, but it just refers to money. Parliament must regularly approve the government’s spending plans, and these votes are always considered confidence matters by default. After all, it’s pretty hard to govern effectively when you don’t have control of the purse strings.
Got it. So… what about this agreement?
The agreement between the Liberals and the NDP (which if you’re interested, you can read here) commits the NDP to supporting the Liberal government on all matters of confidence and supply between now and the end of June, 2025. This means that they will vote in favour of the Liberals’ next four budgets, including the one that Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland will table next week.
Effectively, this agreement allows Justin Trudeau to stay in power for a full four-year term, much like one would expect in a majority government scenario. The certainty and stability provided by the agreement allows his Liberal government to make significant progress on a number of complex and challenging files like childcare (more on that later) and climate change, without the threat of a possible election looming around every corner.
So it’s a Liberal-NDP coalition?
At the risk of getting too pedantic, it’s worth explaining this point because you may hear nerds like me quibbling over it. While you can call this agreement whatever you want in layman’s terms (a coalition, a deal, a pact, an accord, a pinkie-swear promise, etc), in the strict parliamentary sense, a confidence and supply agreement is not the same thing as a coalition government. A coalition government would involve both Liberal and NDP members sitting together in cabinet. Under the current agreement, there will be no New Democrats sitting in Justin Trudeau’s cabinet.
To understand why this distinction matters we have to go back to our grade 10 civics class and recall the different branches of government: there is an executive branch, a legislative branch, and a judicial branch. The executive branch is “the Government” proper - the prime minister, his team of ministers (i.e. the cabinet, also sometimes called the executive council), and the very large bureaucracy that supports them. Cabinet ministers are sworn in by the Governor General, and get to sit in on the top-secret cabinet meetings where important decisions on how to run the country are made. There is also a strong convention that says cabinet makes decisions collectively, so that a decision made by one minister has to be publicly supported by all of the ministers. All for one and one for all! Being in cabinet means that you are accountable for every single decision made by the government- which basically makes it impossible to be a critic.
The legislative branch of government is the Parliament, which consists of all of the MPs from the various political parties, and is where laws are made and spending is approved. That is where this confidence and supply agreement takes place. The agreement means that the NDP will not bring the government down in Parliament (which would trigger an election), but crucially, it does not mean the NDP can’t criticize the government’s decisions, and it doesn’t mean the NDP can’t vote against the government on non-confidence matters. In this way, the New Democrats remain an independent opposition party in the House, and the Liberals maintain full control over the executive branch of government. In short- call it a coalition if you must, but know that it is not a formal coalition government.
Full control sounds great for the PM. What’s in it for the NDP?
In exchange for Jagmeet Singh’s signature on the dotted line, the NDP has secured guarantees that the Liberals will make progress on a number of key files. There are seven core “actions” outlined in the agreement, but the truth is that a number of them are things the Liberals had already pledged to do, irrespective of the NDP’s position. At best, what can be said for those items is that the agreement with the NDP might hold the Liberals to their word.
The two items that the NDP considers to be the real centrepieces of the agreement - the “wins” they say they’ve forced the Liberals to concede - are 1) a concrete plan to implement a dental care program for lower-income Canadians, and 2) a somewhat less concrete plan on a universal pharmacare program. The dental program is not something the Liberals have ever committed to before, and although they have made noises about improving drug coverage in the past, it had never been prioritized or funded.
The deal also includes some commitments around affordable housing, the phasing out of subsidies for the fossil fuel sector, and expanded access to voting in future elections. All noble aims, but if there is one criticism to level against the New Democrats, it’s that the concessions they achieved in this deal are not as ambitious as their supporters might have hoped for. Some of the items on the list are uncomfortably vague. For instance: “Making a significant additional investment in Indigenous housing in 2022. It will be up to First Nations, Inuit and Métis communities to determine how housing investments are designed and delivered.” What exactly constitutes a significant investment? It seems that New Democrats have left that discretion up to the government.
Still, if this deal pans out as it is expected to, at the end of the day the NDP can say that they managed to get the ball rolling on two very meaningful expansions to the country’s social safety net in dental care and pharmacare. And that is nothing to sneeze at. It’s also worth considering whether there were other political considerations that may have forced the NDP’s hand, or at the very least, made this deal look like the path of least resistance.
So, a Win-Win?
In a word, yes. In fact, I’d go so far as to call it a win-win-WIN. This deal is a political win for both parties, and a win for progressive policies in Canada.
The deal is a win for the NDP because, regardless of the strength of the concessions they may have extracted from the Liberals (and for what it’s worth I do think they are meaningful), the cold hard reality is that the Dippers are not in a position to contest an election anytime soon. In the 2021 federal election, the party reportedly spent around $24 million on their campaign, which is more than double what they spent on the 2019 effort, and not far off from their maximum allowable spending limit of roughly $30 million. This is a lot of money to spend for a party that sits in fourth place on the House of Commons seating chart, and that relies for fundraising on a voter base that skews younger and generally lower-income than the other major parties. The upshot is the NDP has a lot of debt, and needs time to raise the funds to pay it off before they can start thinking about gearing up for the next battle.
Because the other parties know this, and because the NDP is the party whose priorities most overlap with those of the Liberal government, it is likely that in a minority parliament, it would fall to Jagmeet Singh and his caucus to regularly keep the Liberal government from falling. The Conservatives and the Bloc Québecois will routinely vote no confidence in the government, and it will be up to the New Democrats to decide whether it’s worth pulling the trigger. Over time, one could imagine the Liberals trying to exploit the NDP’s weakness by ignoring their demands and daring them to do something about it. It wouldn’t be long before Mr Singh found himself in the untenable position of having to either a) support a Liberal budget that New Democrats didn’t like, and having to justify that position to his party base, or b) bring down the government and trigger an early election that Canadians did not want, and that his party was ill-equipped to contest. In this context, securing a durable agreement with the governing party takes some of the heat off of the NDP and dials back much of the brinksmanship that they might otherwise have to stare down.
The deal is also a political win for the Liberals for the obvious reason that it keeps them in power until 2025. A natural question that arises is whether Prime Minister Trudeau will stay in office until then and contest the next election as Liberal leader, or whether he will use his now generous runway to stage a graceful exit. There is no shortage of people who will readily opine that he should get out of the way and let Chrystia Freeland, his Deputy PM, take the reins. That being said, October 2025 (the currently scheduled date of the next federal election) would mark ten years since Justin Trudeau came to power, which is a nice round number for anyone seeking a legacy. And if on December 13, 2025 he was still the PM, he would officially nab a Top 5 spot in the ranking of Canadian Prime Ministers by length of time in office, surpassing both Jean Chrétien and Stephen Harper. Time will tell what trophies our dear leader decides to chase, and whether he joins the elite club of Macdonald, Laurier, Mackenzie King and his own father in being able to form a fourth government.
The far more important win with this accord, however, is not for any politician or party, but for the Canadian public: not only because it means that the seeds of a new dental care program and universal pharmacare will be planted, but also because it will allow two other legacy-defining policies of the Trudeau government to be cemented into the machinery of the federal and provincial governments: the Canada-wide price on carbon, and universal Canada-wide $10-a-day childcare.
And this brings us to the final side of our triangle.
Frenemies At Last
This past week, parents in Ontario received the long-awaited news that Premier Doug Ford had officially signed on to the federal government’s national childcare plan. Ontario was the final holdout, meaning that with Premier Ford’s signature, the federal government has now concluded deals with all thirteen provinces and territories to ensure $10-a-day licensed childcare from coast-to-coast-to-coast by 2025, with an immediate 25% reduction of average fees taking effect this month, and a further reduction to 50% by the end of this calendar year.
This plan represents, by a substantial margin, the most significant social policy advancement Canada will have seen in a generation, and if it holds up, it will define the Trudeau-Freeland legacy for decades to come. The province of Quebec has already had a similar program in place for decades (the federal government’s plan is in fact modelled on the Quebec program), and the impacts on female workforce participation, government revenues and overall affordability for families are irrefutable. The benefits of universal affordable childcare both in economic and social terms have been known for a very long time, and it is a credit to the many advocates who fought tirelessly for decades to push childcare onto the national agenda that it is poised to become a reality.
The significance of Ontario in all this cannot be overstated. Excluding Quebec, which already has a childcare program in place, the reality of Ontario’s sheer size means that roughly half of all daycare-aged children in Canada not covered by a universal program live in Ontario. Failing to bring Ontario onside with a national childcare program would spell failure for Trudeau and Freeland. Ontario also has, by a significant margin, the highest daycare fees of any province in the country, with parents in some Ontario cities paying as much as 10x more per month than comparable parents in Quebec ($1,866/month for infants and $1,578/month for toddlers on average in Toronto, compared to $181/month in Montreal). The federal government was able to bring provinces onside with its plan by offering up huge chunks of money - $30 billion over five years - but there was some debate about whether the funds on offer would be enough for Ontario to bring its average fees down to that $10/day benchmark, given the astronomically high starting point.
It was also an open question as to whether Doug Ford’s PC government would be politically interested in signing on, given a) Ford’s disdain for “big government” (from the aforementioned bike lanes to vaccine passports) and b) the rocky relationship between his government and the Trudeau Liberals, which has oscillated at various times between adversarial (recall Mr Ford’s vehement opposition to the federal carbon tax, and Mr Trudeau’s relentless scaremongering of how an Andrew Scheer government would be as bad as Doug Ford, in the 2019 election) to collegial (recall the Ford-Freeland friendliness during the early days of the pandemic). With a few short months before the next Ontario election, it wasn’t entirely clear which Doug Ford we would get on the childcare front.
And so it was with great relief that Ontarians found Mr Ford and Mr Trudeau looking about as chummy as ever last Monday, as they announced the much anticipated signing of the federal-provincial accord on childcare. And in retrospect, it is perhaps not hard to see why: Doug Ford would love nothing more than to walk into the upcoming provincial election flush with cash from Ottawa to dole out on childcare rebates and promises of reduced fees just around the corner.
For Trudeau’s part, he is likely a shrewd enough politician to know that Ontario voters have a striking tendency to hedge their bets. A PC government at Queen’s Park makes voters much more likely to favour a Liberal government in Ottawa, and vice versa (this trend generally holds true in Western Canada too, except with NDP governments at the provincial level). Looking ahead to 2025, the Liberals would much sooner contest key swing ridings in the GTA knowing that Doug Ford’s PCs hold the same seats provincially, than try to double-dip by winning the same seats federally that their provincial cousins already hold at Queen’s Park. And thus the chumminess between these politicians of competing stripes would seem to be a marriage of mutual convenience. Politics makes for strange bedfellows, as they say.
PM in the driver’s seat
What all this amounts to for Justin Trudeau is that, finally, after enduring four years of a choleric Trump administration and two years of governing through the worst public health emergency in a century, the PM appears to have taken control of the narrative. With a durable arrangement in Parliament thanks to the NDP, a Conservative opposition in a perennial state of existential chaos (more on that next time!), and a solid working relationship with the Premier of Canada’s largest province, the pieces are finally in place for the Liberal government to deliver on signature progressive commitments like universal childcare, meaningful carbon emissions reductions, dental care, pharmacare and more.
For the sake of all of us watching, let’s hope that our trio of lovers can keep it together long enough to turn those commitments into realities.
(Editor’s Note: over the next little while, I will be publishing articles on topics related to Western Canada, for all of my subscribers out west. This piece on Alberta’s equalization referendum is the first of three. Or four. Or maybe only two. Also the editor is me, by the way. This is just a me note.)
What if I told you that there was a province in Canada where a movement for provincial autonomy was growing? And that in that province, a new political party had gained ground in a recent election by pushing for outright separation from Canada? And that this province was also holding a referendum to try to change the terms of the constitutional arrangement between itself and Ottawa?
You might respond by saying “I get it, you’re drawing a clear parallel with Quebec in 1980 but you’re obviously talking about Alberta.” And, dear reader, you would be right.
I am of course speaking, not of la belle province, but of wild rose country. Not the birthplace of Céline Dion and Cirque du Soleil, but of Jann Arden and The Greatest Outdoor Show On Earth. The Rockies, not Roch Voisine. Cowboys and country bars, not coureurs des bois and comedy festivals. Nickelback, not Simple Plan. The Great One, not the Rocket. Berta Beef, not smoked meat… well, you get the idea.
Alberta will be holding municipal elections on Monday October 18th, and included on the ballot will be a question on whether the section in the Canadian constitution on equalization “should be removed.”
Folks, that is a very big question for such a small amount of words, and it’s going to require some unpacking. Spoiler alert: the correct answer is “no”, but as we will see, the journey is more important than the destination here. So buckle up and get set for a scenic ride through some rocky mountain passes with me, won’t you?
Equalization: what’s that?
Time for a quick bit of Constitutional Studies 101! Canada’s constitution sets out the division of powers between the federal government and the provincial governments, and it also outlines other cool stuff like the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Canada’s official bilingualism and multiculturalism policies, and Indigenous rights. The constitution is the highest law in the land, meaning that other laws passed by Parliament or provincial legislatures must comply with the constitution, or else they are null and void. And most importantly for our purposes, it is very hard to amend.
The constitution contains a little bit called Section 36(2) which states: “Parliament and the government of Canada are committed to the principle of making equalization payments to ensure that provincial governments have sufficient revenues to provide reasonably comparable levels of public services at reasonably comparable levels of taxation.”
So what does this mean? In a nutshell, it means that the federal government uses its taxing and spending powers to redistribute money from richer provinces to poorer provinces. It does this by taking in more money than it needs each year through federal taxes (think: your federal income taxes, the GST, corporate taxes, etc), and then giving that money to provincial governments through various transfer programs, including equalization. The amount that each province receives is based on a complicated formula that determines its “fiscal capacity.” That’s a fancy way of saying, how much tax revenue could a provincial government hypothetically generate, if they set their provincial tax rates to a level standard?
Let’s use an example. Take two provinces: say, Alberta and New Brunswick. These two provinces have very different tax rates. For instance, New Brunswick has a provincial sales tax of 10%. Alberta has no sales tax at all (they call that “the Alberta Advantage” and let me tell you as someone who used to live in Alberta, when you’re doing last minute holiday shopping before flying home to Manitoba, the advantage is real). However, for the purposes of the equalization formula, the actual tax rates don’t matter. What matters is how much each province *could* raise in a hypothetical world where their tax rates were equal. So, let’s imagine that Alberta and New Brunswick both had a provincial sales tax of 5% (meet in the middle why don’t we?)- how much money would that generate for each government? Now, obviously, the populations of the two provinces are different too, so the calculation is on a per-capita basis: how much revenue per person would a 5% sales tax generate for Alberta, vs for New Brunswick?
What you’d find is that Alberta would generate far more tax revenue than New Brunswick. That’s because Alberta has a younger population, meaning more working-age people earning and spending more money, and a higher concentration of high-paying jobs meaning more disposable income to spend on things like cars and TVs - things that generate sales tax revenue for governments. In this way, it can be said that Alberta has a higher fiscal capacity than New Brunswick: all else being equal, Alberta’s government has a much easier time raising revenue to pay for things like healthcare and education than New Brunswick’s government does, because it is a richer province.
The equalization formula is meant to smooth out these differences in fiscal capacity by topping up the poorer provinces so they can provide relatively equal levels of public services compared to the richer provinces. The formula calculates fiscal capacity based on all the different types of tax revenue that exist, and produces a total amount that each province should get. Some provinces get a little, some get a lot, and some (like Alberta) get nothing at all. That is the point, after all: to level up the “have-nots” to something closer to the “haves.”
To be clear, the equalization formula does not fully “equalize” the fiscal capacity of all provinces. It just brings them closer together. But even after receiving equalization dollars from the federal government, the “have-not” provinces still have less fiscal capacity than the “have” provinces. It’s not full-scale government socialism- a bit more like “third way” social democracy, if you will. Less Bernie Sanders, more Joe Biden? Clinton, not Castro… ok ok you get the idea.
Why does Alberta want out?
I suspect you know the answer to this one already, don’t you! In case it’s not obvious already, Alberta is a “have” province, meaning that it gets zero dollars from equalization. This of course is how it should be: Alberta is the richest province in the federation on account of the enormous sums of money it receives in royalties from its oil & gas reserves, as well as the tax receipts from the many high incomes and corporate profits in that sector. This remains true even in spite of the fact that Alberta has experienced a deep economic recession in the wake of falling oil prices since 2014.
Alberta also contributes an above-average share of federal tax revenue on a per capita basis, for the same reason that it doesn’t receive equalization: because Alberta is rich. High personal and corporate incomes combined with high levels of consumer spending mean that Ottawa receives more in tax revenue per person from Alberta taxpayers than it does from, say, Quebec or Nova Scotia taxpayers. This is not new: Alberta has been paying more in taxes to the federal government than other provinces, and receiving less (i.e. nil) in equalization payments, for decades. And by and large, Albertans have accepted this reality as simply the price of success. With great power comes great responsibility, Uncle Ben once said.
What has changed, however, is that in recent years Alberta has been struggling with high unemployment rates, declining investment in the oil & gas sector (largely due to the exorbitant cost of extracting bitumen from the tar sands in northern Alberta coupled with depressed global oil prices), and an increasingly challenging regulatory environment for oil & gas under the Trudeau Liberal government. Policies like the federal carbon tax, an enhanced environmental assessment process, and new legislation to protect ocean coasts and waterways, have conspired in the minds of many Albertans to hamstring their most lucrative industry and put them in the poorhouse. And it is in this context that political agitators in Alberta have decided that it’s time to start playing hardball with the eastern elites who, as they see it, are quick to thumb their nose at the resource industries of Western Canada, but happy to take the money that they generate.
Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, who actively courted the aggrieved Alberta separatist (or “Wexit”) movement when running for the leadership of his United Conservative Party, came under pressure from that wing of his party to do something tangible to direct the simmering discontent in his province. Although there was a long list of grievances to choose from, it was equalization that he seized upon as the talisman representing all the ways that Ottawa was screwing Alberta over. And so it was decided that Albertans would vote on whether or not they think the equalization program ought to be scrapped altogether.
Can they really vote to get rid of Equalization?
You may have noticed, wise reader, the passive voice used in my previous sentence. You see, Albertans are not voting to actively get rid of equalization; they are merely voting on whether they feel it ought to be gotten rid of. That’s because Alberta does not have the power to eliminate a federal government program- much less one that is enshrined in the Canadian constitution. The federal government is free to tax its citizens however it pleases (and last I checked, Albertans are still Canadian citizens), just as it is free to spend that tax revenue however it pleases. Eliminating the equalization program would require a constitutional amendment, which is basically a non-starter in Canada because it would entail many months and years of protracted negotiations between the provinces and the federal government, and just about every effort to do so in the past four decades has ended in failure.
Which is not to say that the equalization formula couldn’t be tweaked. Indeed, it is regularly reviewed by the federal government and approved by parliament every five years. (And snarkier folks than me will be quick to point out that Jason Kenney sat at the very cabinet table that approved the current equalization formula, back when he was a minister in Stephen Harper’s government. But why let history get in the way of a good showdown?) After all, Section 36(2) of the constitution merely commits Canada to the principle of equalization, not to any specific formula for redistribution.
And at the heart of it, that’s what this is really about. The Alberta government knows that it will not achieve the outright elimination of equalization, even if 90% of Albertans vote for it in Monday’s referendum. Their hope is that, with a strong enough mandate for change, they can force the federal government’s hand into renegotiating some of the specifics of the formula that will allow Alberta to keep a bit more of its riches; or, perhaps, to use that leverage to extract concessions on some other policy negotiation. Carbon tax? Pipelines? Oil tanker ban? Time to dust off that list of grievances.
For what it’s worth, it should be pointed out that much of the narrative used in Alberta to sell the “Yes” side of the equalization referendum is rooted in half-truths and oversimplifications. Chief among them is the notion that Alberta sends billions of dollars to Quebec each year to subsidize that province’s cheap daycare. The actual fact is that, while Quebec does receive the largest sum of money from the federal government in equalization, that is largely on account of the fact that Quebec has 8.5 million people, while the other “have-not” provinces are much smaller. On a per-capita basis, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick receive, by a substantial margin, the most help from the federal government, followed by Nova Scotia, Manitoba and finally Quebec. Ontario, BC and the three oil-producing provinces (Alberta, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland & Labrador) don’t receive any equalization - although Ontario did become a have-not province (just barely) for about a decade following the ‘08 recession and years of deindustrialization, and Newfoundland historically was as well before striking oil.
Below is a chart showing the dollar values each province has received in the last ten years under the Equalization program:
As you can see, Quebec does receive the lion’s share at over $13 billion of the total $21 billion program. But again, this is the population effect: per person, Quebec is receiving less than all of the other “have-not” provinces. What the chart also obscures is where the money comes from: general federal tax revenues. Equalization is not a direct transfer from rich provinces to poor provinces. Federal taxes are paid by all Canadians in every province and territory. So of that $21 billion, a chunk of it is money that citizens of the have-not provinces paid to begin with, that their provincial government is getting back. The rest of course comes from taxes paid by residents of the “have” provinces, but again, the population effect is relevant here: close to 40% of federal taxes are paid by residents of Ontario, because Ontario has a very large population. So when it comes to that $21 billion of equalization, it’s Ontarians who are actually footing most of the bill, not Albertans. Perhaps we ought to have a referendum too?
To Sum Up…
At the end of the day, Alberta’s referendum on equalization is more of a gimmick than a genuine attempt to alter Canada’s constitutional architecture. No one seriously expects it to lead to Canada abolishing equalization. Quebec, Manitoba and the Atlantic provinces will still receive money from the federal government next year and the year after that. There may be some tweaks to the formula, and that’s all fine and well. But ultimately, equalization is a good program and it should stay. It ensures that Canada is more than just a loose collection of communities, but an actual country where people care enough about each other to ensure we all have access to good schools and hospitals, roads and bridges and the like- not just those of us fortunate enough to live in a province blessed with oil & gas reserves or a global stock exchange.
And just because Alberta is a “have” province that receives nothing from equalization, there is no guarantee that will remain the case indefinitely. Alberta was a “have-not” province until the mid-1960s. Ontario, despite being the industrial engine of the country, was a have-not province through much of the past decade. Perhaps the lesson here is that nothing lasts forever, and most good luck runs out eventually.
I suspect that most Albertans are aware of this, and even though the referendum might pass (I suspect it will, based on recent polling), it is my genuine belief that most Albertans are kind, generous people who still support the basic principle that all Canadians deserve to share in the wealth that is created across this country. If Alberta votes “yes” in Monday’s equalization referendum, the real message it will send is not that they wish to rip up the constitution, but merely that all is not well in Alberta, and it’s time we had a frank discussion about it.
And it is certainly true that Alberta faces immense economic challenges. Simply put, the world is rapidly moving away from fossil fuels, and Alberta still has far too many eggs in that basket. And unemployment rates still remain stubbornly high in wild rose country. The downtown office vacancy rate in Calgary sits at a whopping 29% (no thanks to Covid-19 of course). But for my two cents - and as someone who lived in that province for many years, I feel qualified to say this - Alberta’s problems are largely of its own making, and it is time to reckon with that reality. No amount of sabre-rattling at Ottawa will change the fact that Alberta has failed to meaningfully diversify its economy and prepare for the structural changes that they knew would eventually come. It is not the fault of the federal government that oil prices fell by half overnight in the mid-2010s, and no amount of fiddling with the equalization formula will bring the boom days back.
Alberta doesn’t need more money from the federal government, any more than it needs more pipeline approvals for projects that have already been abandoned by their proponents. What Alberta needs is a credible plan for building a 21st century low-carbon economy. There is no shortage of talent, ingenuity and resources in the province to make that happen. Unfortunately, its leaders are more intent on fighting 20th century battles and making scapegoats out of eastern Canada. Perhaps, to quote the late Alberta Premier Jim Prentice, it’s time they looked in the mirror.
For more information on Alberta’s equalization referendum, see the Elections Alberta website here.
If you’re interested in reading the “Yes” argument, see Jack Mintz’ op-ed in the Financial Post, here (I don’t endorse it, or really anything written by Mintz, but I leave it for you to judge.)
For Trevor Tombe’s more cogent argument in favour of the “No” side, see his op-ed in the Calgary Herald, here.
Oh, did you hear? There was an election in Canada.
Yep, you may have missed it if you blinked but on September 20th Canadians went to the polls. The results are in and as it turns out, we got… more of the same.
The same Liberal minority government led by Justin Trudeau that we had before the election; the same constellation of opposition parties who all received more-or-less the same number of seats and votes as they did in 2019.
And yes, the same pre- and post-election chatter about how unfair and frustrating our electoral system is.
This has become routine of course. Every election, we are reminded that our First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) system of electing Members of Parliament (MPs) produces all kinds of distortions: it regularly turns a minority of votes into a majority of seats while awarding excessive representation to regional parties at the expense of smaller ones. Every election we have the obligatory hand-wringing about the merits of “strategic voting”, and every election we cast our ballots for local candidates whom often we neither know nor care much about (instead of voting for the party leader or just the party writ large), because that’s the way we’re asked to exercise our franchise. That’s just the way our system works, we are told. *Shrug.*
Except that all of that was supposed to change after 2015. You may recall that Justin Trudeau promised, repeatedly, that if elected he would ditch FPTP and replace it with a new voting system. He repeated the promise hundreds of times while in office too. Then that promise was very famously broken, and thus, here we sit, in 2021, with another FPTP election in the books.
The recent election results have made electoral reform, and particularly the concept of proportional representation (PR), a hot topic again in recent days- at least among the chattering classes - for a number of reasons that I want to discuss here. But first I need to do a quick bit of explaining, because I know that talk about different voting systems can get muddy.
First-Past-the-Post (where’s the post?)
First things first: how does our current system work? FPTP is actually quite simple. The country is divided into electoral districts, or “ridings” (338 of them in total), and each riding elects one MP. When you go to vote, you choose from the list of candidates running to be the MP in your local riding. The candidate with the most votes in the riding gets to be the MP. Usually, that candidate runs under a party banner. The party that gets the greatest number of its candidates elected as MPs typically gets to form government, and that party’s leader becomes the Prime Minister. That’s it, in short. There’s a lot of caveats but that’s basically how it works.
It’s a straightforward system, but in a multi-party environment with as many as six competitive parties, it can produce some pretty uneven outcomes. Consider that in any given riding, there is no threshold of support that a candidate has to achieve to get elected. All that matters is being the most popular candidate in a riding. In theory, this means that in a riding with many competitive candidates, someone might squeak into office with less than, say 30% of the votes cast. By contrast, an extremely popular candidate in another riding could win their seat with 70% of the votes or more. Both candidates get the same reward- a single seat. Meanwhile, all the votes for candidates who came in 2nd or worse amount to precisely nothing when it comes to the awarding of seats. Aside from the little sticker they hand out at some of the polling stations that says “I Voted”, unless you vote for the winning candidate in your riding, you gain absolutely nothing from the process. Nobody genuinely represents you in Parliament, nor did your vote help to get anybody elected. Sure, your vote is counted, but it doesn’t really count towards much of anything.
FPTP also fails to take into account the total proportion of votes that each party receives across the entire country. In truth, we don’t have one general election in Canada; we have 338 distinct elections in each riding, and they are, for all intents and purposes, independent of each other. This, of course, is not how the vast majority of Canadians think of our elections. Most voters cast their ballot based on either the broad-based values of their preferred party, the individual characteristics of the party leader, or the policy proposals in a party’s platform - or some combination thereof. Very, very few voters are motivated primarily by the personalities running in their local riding (only about 4% of voters, according to recent research on this topic). Most voters think that their vote is helping to achieve increased representation for their preferred party, and yet, the total support that each party receives across the country does not translate in any consistent way into parliamentary seats.
The Funhouse Distortions of 2021
Consider the 2021 election results, which I’ve summarized in the chart below.
I want to hone in on three key distortions that can be observed in these results, one for each tier of party. In the top tier- the Liberals and the Conservatives- we see that the Liberals once again got fewer votes than the Conservatives (just as in 2019), but significantly more seats. I wrote previously about the Conservative Party’s problem with an inefficient vote distribution and, unfortunately for them, this proved true again. The Liberals routinely win more ridings than the Conservatives do with fewer votes, because a greater proportion of their wins are in ridings that are close contests. By contrast, the Conservatives win many seats by very large margins (particularly in the prairies) - margins that don’t actually help improve their seat count. If 30% of the votes is enough to win a seat in a riding, getting 70% of the votes doesn’t do much to improve your standings. At the end of the day, under FPTP, a seat is a seat. Regardless of whether you support the Liberal or Conservative parties or neither, there is a basic unfairness here: votes should count equally, regardless of where the voter happens to live. It shouldn’t be the case that your vote matters more because you happen to live in a swing riding, or that your vote is effectively meaningless because you live in a “safe” seat.
The second distortion here (which again, is almost a carbon copy of the 2019 election), is in the middle tier of parties - the NDP and the Bloc. The NDP received significantly more votes than the Bloc (almost 18% to the Bloc’s 7.6%) and yet the Bloc won a bunch more seats than the New Democrats, once again securing 3rd place status in the House of Commons and relegating the NDP to 4th. This is a textbook illustration of the regional distortion effect of FPTP: parties that cluster their votes regionally (as the Bloc Québecois does by only running candidates in one province) are disproportionately rewarded with seats, while parties that achieve a similar or higher vote share, but in a thinner dispersal across a wider geography, are punished by their inability to win ridings. The result is that our Parliaments are often much more regionally polarized than is truly the case based on actual vote distribution. And in this case, our next Parliament will continue to perpetuate the fiction that the Bloc is more popular than the NDP.
The third distortion that last week’s election produced, and perhaps the most significant one (surprisingly), is in the bottom tier of parties that were scratching and clawing to win any seats at all, namely the Green Party and the People’s Party. The Greens suffered an unfortunate (but not unexpected) fall from grace, collapsing to a mere 2.3% of the votes- less than half the share they received in the previous election, and significantly below the far-right PPC (at just under 5%). Yet the Greens managed to hold on enough to win two seats, while the surging PPC were shut out. In many ways, the rise of the PPC under Max Bernier and his demagogic appeals to anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists, is the most notable new development to emerge from the 2021 campaign. It remains to be seen whether the party will remain a force beyond one election cycle or turn out to be a pandemic-induced flash-in-the-pan.
And while many of us may hope for the latter, those of us who support electoral reform have had to reckon with the observation, noted by many a Twitter analyst, that the PPC were unable to break through in any of the 338 ridings under FPTP, winning zero seats, while under a system of pure proportional representation, they might have received as many as 17 seats (~5% of 338). Is this a damning indictment of the pitfalls of PR?
PR: A principle, not a system
At this point, it is necessary to spell out just what we mean when we talk about proportional representation.
Every electoral system that’s used to elect a large body of representatives (a Parliament, house of representatives, etc) necessarily involves trade-offs. The mechanism that determines how votes are translated into seats inherently prioritizes certain objectives over others. FPTP is a system that prioritizes, above all else, geographic locality of representation. By carving up the map into hundreds of (relatively) small geographic units, and then forcing voters to filter their voting preference through the lens of a local candidate race, FPTP ensures that precisely one representative is elected from each and every geographic constituency in the country. While that may be a noble objective, it is incumbent upon us at some point to ask: is that the most appropriate way to organize a federal election? How important is it to Canadians that their MP comes from their local community? Or, to put it another way: if you could only have one representative, would you rather it be somebody from your local community, even if they may represent a political party you hate, or would you rather have a representative who shares your values and policy objectives- though they may hail from further afield?
To ask the question is to answer it. Nobody wants to be represented by someone they dislike and for whom they did not vote. This is why other electoral systems, such as those used in many countries in Europe, prioritize a different objective: proportionality of party-based representation.
The idea is simple: the share of votes that a party gets should resemble, as best as possible, the share of seats that a party gets. If the Liberals got 33% the votes, they ought to be entitled to roughly 33% of the seats in Parliament - not much more and not much less. A proportional system encourages voters to vote for their genuine party preference, knowing that their vote will count towards the overall vote share for their preferred party, which is then used to determine the seat count.
Proportional systems also eliminate the need for so-called “strategic voting” (voting for candidate A even though you’d rather vote for candidate B, because you think candidate A has a better shot at beating candidate C, whom you detest, in your riding). PR eliminates false majority governments - where a party wins a majority of the seats, allowing them to govern with an iron fist, despite receiving a minority of the votes - and lowers the effective threshold for smaller parties to achieve meaningful representation. In countries that use PR, typically a somewhat greater number of parties is present in parliament than what we are used to in Canada, and parties are generally obliged to work together to form coalition governments, instead of the one-party rule that is commonplace here.
But it’s important to note that PR is not an electoral system in and of itself. Rather, it is a family of electoral systems that use different mechanisms to achieve the same basic principle - proportionality. The purest form of PR (which nobody seriously advocates for Canada) is the party list system. Each party drafts an ordered list of candidates (in Canada, it would be 338 names long). When you vote, you simply vote for your preferred party- no candidate selection necessary. The party votes are tallied, and each party is awarded a number of seats that matches their share of the popular vote. To use the previous example again: if the Liberal Party won 33% of the votes, they would be awarded 33% of the 338 seats in Parliament - 111 seats - and the first 111 names on their party list would become MPs. Under pure party list PR, there are no ridings or geographic districts built into the system. The onus is simply on the parties to determine for themselves how important it is for their list of candidates to reflect the country’s geography.
What I have described are two extremes on a spectrum of electoral systems. On the one hand, FPTP is extreme in its emphasis on localized representation, while setting aside entirely the question of whether the electorate’s relative support for the national parties is accurately represented. This produces quirky and unpredictable outcomes that often feel unfair to voters. On the other hand, pure-list PR is extreme in its emphasis on party representation, while ignoring the regional dimension of elections, which is particularly important in a large country like Canada. This can potentially lead to situations in which certain regions of the country are over-represented in Parliament, while others have little to no representation at all.
In life and electoral systems: balance is key
It is for precisely this reason that I think the fear-mongering around how a PR electoral system would have given so many seats to the PPC is overblown. Sure, under a pure party-list PR system, they would have been entitled to something like 17 seats (leaving aside that voter behaviour would likely have been different under a different electoral system with different incentives). But nobody advocates for pure PR in Canada.
Every study, commission, citizen’s assembly or scholarly report on the question of reforming Canada’s electoral system (and there have been many) has advocated for some form of a mixed system: one that injects a moderate degree of party proportionality into the system, while retaining the important geographic dimension that is a hallmark of Canadian elections. Systems like Mixed-Member PR, Single-Transferable Vote, and others are designed to achieve precisely this balance- ensuring that voters still elect local representatives from their communities, but that parties are also fairly represented in the overall picture of the House of Commons.
What might that kind of system look like? It could entail the grouping of ridings into much larger, but still coherent, electoral districts, and then electing multiple MPs to each enlarged district on a proportional basis. To give you an example: take Toronto, where I live. Elections Canada has provided a handy breakdown of the vote totals in major urban centres. The Greater Toronto Area (as they’ve defined it) contains 53 ridings. In the 2021 election, all but five of them were won by Liberal candidates - a whopping 90.6% of the ridings (including every single riding in the City of Toronto!) But this landslide victory for the governing party masks a more complex reality: the Liberals only won 48.9% of the votes in the region. A full majority of voters in the region chose other parties, and yet the Liberals locked up nearly every riding. To paraphrase Henry Ford, in the GTA you can have any MP you like, as long as that MP is a Liberal.
What if, instead of 53 ridings each electing one MP, you had, say, 10 larger districts, and voters in each district elected five or six MPs? Each party could present a list of their five candidates in the district, and as a voter, you’d have the option of just voting for the party slate as a whole, or ticking an X next to your preferred candidate if you wanted to. When the votes were tallied, each party’s candidates would be elected on a reasonably proportional basis. Say the Liberal slate got 50% of the votes in one of the districts, they’d be entitled to three of the five or six seats in that district. The Conservatives might be entitled to two seats, with one seat for the NDP. Seats for each party would be filled in the order of candidates that the party established on the ballot, or based on voters’ preferences. The process would repeat for the other nine districts to elect the full slate of 53 MPs in the region, and likewise across the country.
What would this accomplish? Well for starters, voters in the GTA would have more diverse representation than the sea of Liberal red we’ve got right now. Each district would have moderately proportional results, but the regional dimension (i.e. the fact that there are still lines drawn around discrete electoral districts) would also ensure that every region of the country continued to elect MPs from their community. It would blunt the grotesque advantage that regionally focused parties currently have. And it would also effectively lower the bar for smaller parties to achieve representation: a small party wouldn’t need to have the most popular slate of candidates in the district, they’d just need to muster some 15-20% of the votes in the area to have a decent shot at one of the seats up for grabs.
It would also mean, importantly, that small fringe parties like the PPC would still have a tough time getting MPs elected. 5% of the votes probably wouldn’t be enough to get a candidate elected in a district with 5 or 6 seats available. They’d still need to focus resources on key areas where they could grow their support in order to win seats, but with a lower barrier to entry they might be able to squeak out a few wins. I think that is a small price to pay for a better, more responsive electoral system for everyone.
There are plenty of other ways you could design an electoral system to achieve proportional outcomes that respect regionality; the above example is merely to illustrate how PR could work in Canada without necessarily opening the floodgates to extremists. Fair Vote Canada has excellent resources for anyone interested in learning more about electoral reform.
The sudden rise of the People’s Party in this election has certainly given food for thought to electoral reformers as to the possible ramifications of a strictly proportional system. But at the end of the day, electoral systems ought to be designed to achieve fair and democratic outcomes - not to keep this or that particular party out of parliament. It remains true that proportionality is a key ingredient of any fair and just electoral system in a multi-party democracy, just as much as it remains true that local and regional representation are an important feature of Canada’s political culture. Real electoral reform that balances those priorities in equal measure, while moderating the excesses of both, is desperately needed in Canada- a truth that is in no way lessened by the existence of a far-right fringe party on our political landscape. If the PPC sticks around in its current toxic form for some time, well, that is a problem that Canadian society will have to reckon with one way or another. No electoral system can absolve us of that responsibility.
It’s election day! By many accounts, the 2021 federal election has been something of a snooze-fest. The late-summer campaign seems to have flown under the radar of many Canadians, and if polls are to believed, we may be headed towards a result that looks a lot like the Parliament we had before the election. We may well wake up on Tuesday morning asking ourselves “what was the point of that exactly?”
But while the history books may record the 2021 election as a fairly unremarkable one, I want to talk a bit about a different ‘21 election - one that was arguably far more consequential than today’s contest will prove to be. One that changed the course of Canadian politics forever more. One that really shook things up. I am talking, of course, about the 1921 federal election.
You see, 1921 was the first Canadian election in which a significant third party emerged to win a sizeable vote share and capture seats in parliament. Prior to that election, Canadian democracy was largely a straightforward contest between two established parties: the Conservative Party of John A Macdonald in one corner, and the Liberal Party of Wilfrid Laurier in the other. Five-dollar bills versus tenners. In the 50-odd years after Canadian confederation, these two old parties were fairly evenly matched with the Tories having a bit of an edge, especially in the early days. Of the 13 federal elections held prior to 1921, The Conservatives would win eight to the Liberals’ five. But all of that would change in the roaring twenties with the advent of what would become a permanent feature of Canadian politics: the rise of the protest party.
Step with me for a moment, a century back in time, and I promise I’ll return to the present day before too long.
The 1921 federal election saw the Progressive Party of Canada, a left-leaning coalition of farmers’ groups based in the prairie provinces with connections to the labour and socialist movements of that time, burst on to the scene, garnering over 21% of the vote and 58 seats in parliament. While the Progressive Party would ultimately fizzle within a decade, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) would emerge as its worthy successor during the depths of the Great Depression. The socialist-inspired CCF (who under Tommy Douglas would form government in Saskatchewan in 1944 and pioneer Canada’s universal single-payer health insurance system) advocated tirelessly for better working conditions for labourers and farmers and a robust welfare state. And so grew the Canadian tradition of the rabble-rousing protest party as a fixture on the political landscape. The CCF would eventually merge with organized labour groups to form the New Democratic Party (NDP) in 1961, a full four decades after the Progressive Party first made its debut. And in the 100 years and 30 federal elections since 1921, Canada would never again see a parliament with fewer than three parties represented. On that cold wintry day in December 1921, Canada’s two-party system died.
While no third party has ever formed government in Canada, it is no coincidence that in the hundred years that’ve passed since 1921, the edge once held by Sir John A’s Tories has shifted decisively towards the Liberal Party. Of the 30 elections since then (including 1921 itself), 20 of them resulted in Liberal governments, and those governments have held power for roughly two thirds of that hundred-year period. In my view, the rise of the leftist protest party and the century of relative Liberal dominance are intimately connected. The transformation of the political landscape from a two-party system, with one on the left and one on the right, to a three-horse race with a party on the right, left and centre, has decidedly favoured the centrist Liberals as the perennial “goldilocks” option.
But while the Liberal Party is the most centrist of the three major parties, it does not sit precisely at the centre of the traditional spectrum- the Grits are just a teeny bit to the left of it. It is in this respect that Canada’s political culture is peculiar amongst democratic countries. In most places, the political mainstream tends to coalesce around two dominant options- one on the centre-left and one on the centre-right. This is broadly true in Canada, except that we have a perennial third party that complicates the picture. The Liberals are the dominant centre-left option, and yet the NDP persists- even in spite of a punishing electoral system that systematically disadvantages third parties. What gives?
First, let’s establish that the Liberals, despite what New Democrats say, are in fact a progressive, if moderate, party in the minds of most Canadian voters. While certainly no socialists, the Liberals generally promote progressive causes like greater levels of government intervention in the economy, higher public spending, more progressive stances on social issues and issues of race, gender and sexuality, and more aggressive action on climate change than most conservatives would be comfortable with.
So the Liberal Party is a centre-left party that competes with the Conservative Party, a centre-right party. Except that the Conservative Party, in the absence of an established competitor party on its right flank, occupies a space further to the right of centre than the Liberals do on the left. That’s because the left wing has been, since 1921, occupied by the NDP and its forerunners. Thus, the Liberals sit in a most enviable place on the Canadian political spectrum: they are just far enough left of centre to lure progressive voters to their camp from the NDP and ensure that the New Democrats remain a perpetual third party, and yet they are closer to the political centre of gravity than the Conservatives, making them the more popular of two governing alternatives. The result is that the NDP, despite never forming government, contribute to a unique interplay that ensures the centre-left Liberals govern more habitually than the right-leaning Conservatives do. Put another way: by pulling the political discourse to the left, the NDP and its predecessor parties have shifted the political centre towards the Liberals and away from the Conservatives, ensuring that progressive governments in Canada are the rule - either in the form of a moderate Liberal majority, or a Liberal minority that relies on support from the NDP - with shorter periods of conservative reign as the exception.
We can observe this in another way by looking at the combined vote share of the Liberals and the NDP in past elections (the total “progressive vote”) and comparing it to the combined vote share of the Conservatives and other small-c conservative parties. It is worth noting here that while the Progressive/ CCF/ NDP tradition has formed the dominant “third party” in Canadian politics for many decades, there have been various periods of relatively strong third parties on the right as well- the most notable of which were the Social Credit parties that were influential in the 1940s through the 1970s, and the Reform/ Alliance movement of the 1990s. In general though, Social Credit was never as influential on the right as the CCF/NDP were on the left, only once briefly holding the balance of power next to John Diefenbaker’s PC government in 1962. (In contrast, the Progressives/CCF/NDP durably supported Liberal governments in at least six different parliaments, contributing to the adoption of many signature progressive policies including medicare and the Canada Pension Plan.) And while it’s true that the Reform Party was influential in the 1990s, the fluid dynamics of that era meant that it quickly ceased to be a third party, ultimately swallowing the historic PC party whole in the process of uniting under the modern Conservative Party banner.
Below is a table showing the combined vote shares of the two progressive parties (Liberals and NDP) and the combined vote shares of the one or more conservative parties over the last 30 federal elections.
Looking at the table, there are some striking findings. The first is that the combined progressive vote share is consistently, reliably greater than the combined conservative vote share. On average over the past century, the Liberals and New Democrats (and their predecessors) have captured a solid majority of over 53% of votes between them. In 18 of the 30 elections, the two progressive parties took a majority of all votes cast. In contrast, the Conservative Party and other right-wing outfits like Social Credit and Reform have averaged a little less than 40% of votes between them, and only managed to exceed the 50%-mark twice, in 1958 under Diefenbaker and in 1984 under Brian Mulroney. That solid 13-point spread between the progressive and conservative averages goes a long way to explaining the Liberals’ presumptive status as Canada’s “natural-governing party.” More often than not, their moral authority to govern on behalf of the majority is earned (at least partially) on the back of the NDP.
Another way to state the magnitude of difference between the progressive and conservative coalitions is that of the last 30 federal elections, conservative parties have been less popular than progressive parties in 28 of them.
The progressive vote share would be even higher had I included votes for the Green Party. I did not, simply because for most of the last 100 years the Greens didn’t exist. But they are certainly a progressive party, and adding their numbers would only serve to bolster the point that Canadians, on average, are more progressive than conservative. I also did not include parties whose ideologies are difficult to place on a traditional left-right spectrum - most notably the Bloc Québecois (a difficulty which I wrote about here), which explains why the two averages don’t add up to 100%.
So what does all of this portend for today’s election? Well, I don’t have a crystal ball, but I can confidently predict a couple of things. One is that, as per tradition, the combined vote share of the Liberals and the NDP will exceed that of the Conservatives and the upstart People’s Party (the latest, ugliest iteration of the right-wing protest party). The progressive vote will likely come close to 50% and almost certainly exceed it when Green votes are included. This means that, in the event of a minority parliament, the Liberals will have a greater moral authority to govern than the Conservatives - not to mention a more viable dance partner in the form of the NDP, who appear poised to make gains in the seat count.
And if that eventuality comes to pass, the Liberals will be obliged to work with the NDP to implement a progressive agenda including signature policies like universal childcare, strong action on climate change and meaningful steps towards reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. Notwithstanding the bluster and posturing of the leaders on the campaign trail, I predict that such an arrangement can continue to produce positive outcomes for Canada’s progressive majority. It did under Lester B. Pearson with the help of Tommy Douglas in the 1960s, under Pierre Trudeau and David Lewis in the 1970’s, and most recently during the Covid-19 pandemic when Justin Trudeau’s Liberals relied on Jagmeet Singh’s NDP to implement the suite of pandemic response programs and supports.
It’s too tight of a race to predict the outcome with much confidence, but if we do end up with more of the same in this 2021 federal election, it would continue a long tradition of dominance for Canada’s progressive coalition. And a minority government with strong, stable third-party support would surely be a fitting way to honour the centennial anniversary of 1921, the year when Canada’s multi-party system was born.