Mike's Musings - Advice for Canada’s federal parties

Another federal election is complete and, yet again, everyone has called it the “worst ever” – and for once, that might actually be true! 

The results were disappointing for every party except the Bloc, and as others have said: “When the Bloc wins, Canada loses”. I agree, but I’ll save that for future musings. 

In this column (and the next one), I wanted to dissect each campaign and, even though nobody asked for it, I offer my unsolicited advice to all the parties.

For the Liberals, the results can only be seen as mixed.  Sure, they won the most seats and on election day outperformed (at least in terms of seats won) the expectations set by the most recent polls going into election day.  But when you dig into the numbers, the fact remains over 1 million voters switched from the Liberal camp to another since the last election. In 2015, they received a little over 6.9 million votes; in 2019, they got a little over 5.9 million. That’s a lot of disaffected Canadian voters! Liberals, take heed.  

Considering what they had to deal with during the campaign – the blackface scandal and the cloud of the SNC Lavalin scandal, to name the most obvious – their campaign showed great resilience and very effective on-the-ground organization at mobilizing their vote. The received wisdom among political pro’s over the past two decades has been that the Tories hold the advantage in “ground game”, but I’m not sure that advantage still holds. Liberals were better organized this election and mobilized their vote very well, even if they had fewer supporters.    

Going forward, my advice to the Liberal party and to PM Trudeau in particular would be to demonstrate a little more humility.  The Prime Minister’s hubris and consistent rejection of opposing views – even opposing views coming from his own caucus and cabinet - is grating on Canadians and that smugness is wearing thin. The good news is that a minority parliament forces the government to compromise, but my fear is that Trudeau will only turn to the “left” for those ideas and compromises, which will be costly for Canadians in the long run. Canada’s conservative movement does have some good ideas for problems around economic competitiveness, natural resource development, housing affordability, Western alienation, Quebec’s place in Canada and, yes, even the environment.  The Prime Minister would be well advised to listen and take the best ideas and adopt them as his own.

Much was written in the last weeks of the campaign about the rise of the NDP, but again, the numbers don’t bear this out.  While Jagmeet Singh and his 24 member caucus hold the balance of power, and a helluva lot more influence than they’ve had in decades, they LOST 612,000 votes (3.4 million to 2.8 million) between 2015 and 2019 … and if you look back to 2011, 1.6 million (!!!) Canadians have since switched from the NDP to another party.

The fact that the NDP could not win a single seat in Toronto or the surrounding “905” is an indication of two things:  They have a vote block that is simply not concentrated enough to win seats in this region, and (more importantly), they don’t have the “ground-game” organization they need to compete and win. The fact that in the week before the campaign officially started in September, they still had not nominated approximately 100 candidates is egregious political malpractice.  It’s not like they can claim the fixed election date snuck up on them!   

The NDP also can’t (or at least shouldn’t) claim a lack of resources.  In the pre-election period, according to Elections Canada filings, a group of seven unions and progressive activist groups spent $2.6 million on election oriented activities and advertising. This was wasted money and had little effect on the final results. If these unions had instead devoted those resources to working with their NDP brothers and sisters to build political infrastructure in every riding of Canada (or at least the top 100 most winnable seats), the NDP could have capitalized on the renewed interest in Jagmeet Singh that came to him after Trudeau’s “blackface” pictures came to life. 

The best that can be said about the NDP campaign is that they stopped the bleeding and now Jagmeet Singh has an opportunity to start over and build a new “orange wave”.  His ability to unify the party behind him in this quest is questionable – not to mention the fact the NDP is nearly bankrupt - but he certainly has the charisma and energy to do it.  Let’s see if he can pull it off. 

I think an under-reported story in this election is that the Green’s ran a horrible campaign.  In a race where a lot of Canadians were saying they wanted something “new” and where “none of the above” was leading by a mile … and where climate change was a dominant issue for a large block of voters … they started the campaign at 11% in the polls and seemed poised to grow from there.  This means approximately 1.9 million Canadians were willing to give them a look (11% of 17 million voters) at the beginning. The Greens should have become a credible "new" alternative to the old-line parties, but after 6 weeks of listening to Ms. May, instead of growing their vote, they actually shrank support by nearly 800,000 and managed to win only three seats. In other words, after that campaign where no party distinguished themselves and where our Prime Minister was found to have done blackface masquerades, 800,000 Canadians said to themselves “nah, I’ve changed my mind … the other parties aren’t so bad in comparison after all”.  Damning with faint praise, don’t you think?!?

My advice to the Green’s:  Elect a new leader.  Now!  Don’t wait.  Do it immediately.  Ms. May is doing you no favours.  (My suggestion – recruit Jody Wilson-Raybould.)  Once a new leader is in place, devote some time and effort to building some local political infrastructure. To be a serious player, the Green’s need to have a better, professional political infrastructure in place in ridings outside of Vancouver Island. And if they don’t, they should look seriously at just folding themselves into the Liberal Party.  Being a perpetual fifth party with no real power or voice is a waste of their time. 

Mike Ras is a keen observer of public policy, politics and media. For his day job, he’s director of government relations with a prominent Canadian financial institution. A resident of Mississauga, part-time “professor” in the Government Relations program at Seneca College and an active volunteer with a number of local charities.
Connect with him on Twitter here.