Canada election grab-bag

Canada's Federal Election yesterday (October 21) saw Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party reduced to a minority government, with 157 seats in the House of Commons: 170 are needed for a majority.  If you want to look at the outcome in more detail, here is the CBC's results page.  In the meantime, here are a few thoughts about what just happened.

Trudeau does a Trump.  Although the Liberals emerged as easily the largest party in the House, the Conservatives actually won a noticeably higher share of the popular vote -- 34.3 percent to 33.1 percent. When Donald Trump pulled off a similar feat in 2016, the explanation lay in the workings of the US Electoral College. In Canada the explanation is different: the Conservatives routinely rack up massive majorities in Alberta, boosting their share of the national vote but not helping them to elect enough members to unseat the Liberals, whose vote is more evenly spread across the rest of the country.  To use a term sometimes employed by the psephologists, the Liberal vote is more "efficient" than the Conservative vote.

NDP: half-empty or half-full?  Before the campaign started there were serious questions about whether the left-leaning NDP would be almost wiped out on voting day.  During the campaign its leader, Jagmeet Singh, performed very strongly, with polls showing the party with the support of about 20 percent of the electorate.  On polling day, however, the party's share of the vote was just under 16 percent and it lost a number of seats, especially in Quebec. So: better than was feared at the start of the campaign, but puzzlingly not as good as as expected on the big day. 

The Bloc is back.  The Bloc Quebecois, that is, which seemed to be on its deathbed a year ago but managed to triple its seat count on voting day, to be the third-largest party in the Commons.  There does not seem to be any real revival in Quebecers' appetite for sovereignty.  Rather, the Province's voters appear not to trust Trudeau to look after their interests. The SNC-Lavalin scandal earlier this year likely explains this.  In the rest of Canada there was strong criticism of Trudeau for his attempt to interfere in the legal process, but in Quebec the perception was that he had not tried hard enough to protect jobs and investment.   

All over for Scheer?  Conservative leader Andrew Scheer had a bad campaign. It emerged a few weeks back that he is in fact a dual Canadian and US citizen, something he had not seen fit to disclose before.  There was also a bizarre episode in which he claimed untruthfully to have worked at one time as an insurance agent, in an effort to pad out his strikingly thin resume. The victory in the popular vote may serve to keep him in post for now, but it probably will not take too many mis-steps for the knives to come out.

No coalition. It is unlikely that the Liberals will seek to set up a formal coalition with the NDP.  Trudeau will want to pursue the Trans-mountain pipeline expansion, to which Singh's party is strongly opposed.  Trudeau can rely on the Tories for support on that issue.  On most other issues, the Liberal and NDP positions are similar enough that a Liberal minority can probably survive for quite some time without a formal deal, though this will require Trudeau to temper his customary disdain for the House of Commons.

Welcome back, Doug. The unpopularity of Doug Ford in Ontario, less than eighteen months into his Premiership, is remarkable. He basically went into purdah during the campaign, no doubt at the behest of the Tory party leadership, who were terrified that he might harm the chances of Andrew Scheer. Not that it helped: the Liberals heavily outpolled the Tories in the province, winning every single seat in the City of Toronto.  Ford will no doubt re-emerge at any moment and may find it hard not to take a few potshots at Scheer. 

Bye-bye Bernier. One truly heartening aspect of the results is the abject failure of the People's Party of Canada, led by Maxime Bernier, to make any impact. Bernier set up his populist vanity project after losing the Conservative leadership to Andrew Scheer. Its campaign, to the extent it could be noticed at all, seemed to consist solely of anti-immigrant rhetoric and attacks on Greta Thunberg.  With any luck this will be adieu to Bernier and not just au revoir. He won't be missed. 

It was a relatively short election campaign and it never really caught fire. Some of the leaders, notably Trudeau, have complained that it was mean-spirited, but the rhetoric, Bernier perhaps excepted, pales in comparison with the vitriol routinely heard in Trump's Washington or Brexit Britain. Still, let's hope we won't need a do-over any time soon.