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Tag: Pierre Poilievre
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The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
Recent federal polling might remind those with long political memories of the January 23, 2006 election, that first brought Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party of Canada to power in Ottawa.
To indulge briefly in a few too many numbers, take the January 22, 2023 update for the 338Canada opinion poll projections.
In a 338-seat Canadian House of Commons it gives Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives 152 seats with 35% of the Canada-wide popular vote. The Trudeau Liberals are assigned 129 seats with 30% of the vote. (In the minor but still numerically important leagues the New Democrats are given 25 seats with 21%. And the Bloc Québécois has 30 with 7%.)
Going back almost exactly 17 years to the real-world Canadian federal election on January 23, 2006 (with a 308-seat House) the Harper Conservatives won 124 seats with 36% of the popular vote. The Liberals took 103 seats with 30%. (The New Democrats here won 29 seats with 18% and the Bloc 51 with 11%.)
In both cases — the real-world 2006 and the polling-based 2023 — Conservatives won the most seats, but not enough for a majority government.
In 2006 a bare majority was 155 seats (170 in 2023) : Stephen Harper’s party had only 124. And the consequences 17 years ago arguably haunt the prospects for a federal election in 2023.
The January 23, 2006 “snap election” became inevitable when Jack Layton’s New Democrats finally joined the Conservatives and the Bloc Québécois in seeking the end of Paul Martin’s Liberal minority government, in late November 2005.
Yet New Democrats could not be expected to keep a Stephen Harper Conservative minority government in office. (And in any case in 2006 Conservative and NDP seats combined were still not quite enough for even a bare majority.)
The Liberals could similarly hardly prop up a Conservative minority government. The reality of the House bequeathed by the Canadian people in late January 2006 inevitably pointed the Harper Conservatives towards Gilles Duceppe’s Bloc Québécois.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the consummate political strategist, may have been more prepared to work with M. Duceppe than some of his fellow Conservative MPs.
There was also nothing between Conservatives and Bloquistes in 2006 (or later) remotely like the formal supply and confidence agreement between Liberals and New Democrats in 2023.
Stephen Harper, however, did work with Gilles Duceppe after the 2006 election. The zenith of the resulting symbiosis arguably came on November 27, 2006, when the Canadian House of Commons voted on a motion advanced by Prime Minister Harper.
The motion read: “That this House recognize that the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada.” It passed by an overwhelming majority of 266 to 16.
Going back (or ahead) to the January 22, 2023 update for the 338Canada opinion poll projections, if a Canadian federal election were held today, the Conservatives would once again win the most seats but not enough for a majority government.
As back in 2006, neither Liberals nor New Democrats could realistically be expected to support a Poilievre Conservative minority government. Once again to remain in office any length of time the Conservatives would have to work with the Bloc (now led by Yves-François Blanchet).
What price, some might ask, would the Bloc demand this time? What further motion on the Québécois nation in a united Canada might loom in the Ottawa political air? And would this be a good thing? (As the November 2006 motion arguably enough was — and still is today!)
Questions of this sort may have lingered at the back of some minds during Pierre Poilievre’s recent Quebec tour.
As for Jagmeet Singh’s pulling the plug on the Justin Trudeau Liberals, as Jack Layton did in 2006, the New Democrats are at a healthy 21% of the popular vote in the latest 338Canada projection (compared with 18% in 2006). The March 2022 Liberal-NDP supply and confidence agreement is arguably working for the NDP.
Moreover, for the Canadian people at large the Liberals and New Democrats together, even on 338Canada’s latest Conservative friendly numbers, also have a 51% majority of the Canadian popular vote — as well as a majority of seats bequeathed by the latest 2021 federal election.
Diverse observers who do remember 2006 in Canadian federal politics might see several good reasons why it should not and in any case cannot quite be repeated (or even rhymed) in 2023.
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
This content is restricted to subscribers
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
This content is restricted to subscribers
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
This content is restricted to subscribers
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
This content is restricted to subscribers
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
This content is restricted to subscribers
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
Liberal MP Sven Spengemann announced in May that he was leaving federal politics to join the United Nations and work on humanitarian relief and development in Asia. A by-election was scheduled in his Ontario-based riding of Mississauga-Lakeshore for Dec. 12.
That by-election, which occurred on Monday, produced an unsurprising result.
Charles Sousa, who served as Finance Minister under former Ontario Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne, won a decisive victory with 12,194 votes, or 51.2 percent. Ron Chhinzer, the Conservative candidate, finished a respectable second with 8,673 votes (37.3 percent). NDP candidate Julia Kole was well back in third place with 1,163 votes (4.9 percent).
A Liberal seat stayed with the Liberals. Seems pretty straightforward, right? Not in the eyes of some columnists, media commentators and political strategists.
There were suggestions that Mississauga-Lakeshore was a “test” for Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. He had won a massive victory in the Sept. 10 Conservative leadership race, and was leading in some opinion polls over Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Here was a by-election in the vaunted 905 area code, one of the battleground locations in recent federal elections. If Poilievre’s success in building a fiscally conservative message with grassroots members, and appealing to non-traditional Conservative voters, was real, then surely it would translate into victory.
When this scenario didn’t come to fruition, the usual banter began to appear. Poilievre was “too conservative” and “too extreme.” Mississauga-Lakeshore had “rejected” his message and the party’s ideology. The Conservatives needed to move back to the “centre” and represent “moderate values.” Poilievre and the Conservatives had “failed” an important test, and were backtracking and making “excuses” for losing a winnable riding.
Really? This is what some of you believe happened in the by-election – or, even worse, want people to believe what happened?
Let’s try to understand what really happened.
To begin with, the federal riding of Mississauga-Lakeshore was never in play during the by-election. This isn’t an excuse, ladies and gentlemen. It’s reality.
Mississauga-Lakeshore, formerly known as Mississauga South, has mostly been in Liberal hands since 1993. Paul Szabo held the riding from 1993-2011, earning between 44.17-51.8 percent of the popular vote. Spengemann won by comfortable margins in 2015 ( 47.71 percent), 2019 (48.4 percent) and 2021 (44.94 percent). The only exception? Former Conservative MP Stella Ambler, who beat Szabo in 2011 and lost to Spengemann in 2015.
The Liberals have therefore held this riding for 25 of the past 29 years. That’s an iron grip, not a limp wrist.
Hold on. The Ontario PCs have the provincial riding of Mississauga-Lakeshore. Rudy Cuzzetto beat Sousa in 2018 (42.33-35.03 percent), and defeated Liberal candidate Elizabeth Mendes this year (45.09-36.76 percent). Shouldn’t that provincial success translate into the federal arena?
No, it doesn’t. Ontarians, like many Canadians, have had a historical tendency of splitting their vote in federal and provincial elections. This scenario has regularly led to different parties holding one seat or the other. It doesn’t always happen this way, but it’s happened frequently enough. And for the record, Spengemann and Sousa have held Mississauga-Lakeshore for the federal Liberals during Cuzzetto’s tenure as a PC MPP.
OK, but shouldn’t a by-election produce a different result than a federal election?
Absolutely not. By-elections rarely operate in a logical, coherent manner. There are occasional waves of voter frustration with a government in a by-election. Yet, there have been plenty of waves that established a high-to-moderate degree of voter contentment and/or mild frustration that didn’t lead to political upheaval.
Another important factor is low voter turnout in by-elections. This often helps the government in power unless there’s a whiff of frustration, change or reform in the air, and mitigates the political damage to the incumbent party. Mississauga-Lakeshore had a total voter turnout of 26.48 percent. That’s pretty low, and wouldn’t hurt a Liberal Party that controlled this riding for 86.2 percent of the time between 1993-2022.
What about respected political strategist Dan Robertson’s Dec. 13 tweet to me? He agreed it wasn’t a “test” for Poilievre, and knows that “by-elections have next to no significance.” Nevertheless, “when…the NDP loses HALF its vote to the Liberals, well that *is* something and certainly worth paying attention to.”
That’s a good point in theory, but there are several reasons why it doesn’t mean much.
Sousa was a high-profile centrist Liberal candidate who likely pushed some NDP/progressive votes into his camp. It’s happened in general elections and by-elections before. The NDP have also historically fared poorly in this riding. In the fourteen elections and one by-election, the highest vote tally the NDP received was 16.8 percent in 1980, and the lowest was 2.1 percent in 1993. Moreover, the NDP has finished in single digits in this riding in eight elections – and hasn’t been in double digits since 2011.
When you combine this with Jagmeet Singh’s ineffective tenure as NDP leader, and existing frustration related to the three-year Liberal-NDP working agreement, it’s obvious why they couldn’t maintain the piddly 9.75 percent they earned in the 2021 election. They don’t have enough support in Mississauga-Lakeshore to play spoiler, either.
This also helps explain why the Conservatives didn’t place much emphasis on the by-election, and why Poilievre didn’t make an appearance in the campaign’s final few days. Some Conservative MPs made an appearance in Mississauga-Lakeshore, but they did it out of party loyalty and to support Chhinzer – who, by all accounts, was a good candidate. They all knew what was going to happen, and realized that Sousa had a straightforward path to victory.
In summation, the Mississauga-Lakeshore by-election wasn’t a test for the Poilievre Conservatives, significant failure for the Singh NDP, or great success for the Trudeau Liberals. The result was exactly what should have transpired, and was never in doubt from start to finish.
Michael Taube, a long-time newspaper columnist and political commentator, was a speechwriter for former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper.
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
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