Liberals trumped Conservatives who didn't pivot, says UVic professor

Michael Prince figured there would be a bit of a Liberal bounceback after Justin Trudeau stepped down as prime minister and leader of the Liberal Party on March 24, but the UVic political scientist didn’t anticipate such a huge red wave sweeping the Liberals almost into majority territory.

“Talk about a turn of events,” he says.

“I thought, you know, they've been in power almost 10 years, three mandates. People are not just tired of [Trudeau], they're kind of tired of [the Liberal] government.”

And as you know by now, that red wave was powered by the hot air blowing up from the White House: winds that both inflated Canadians’ sense of patriotism and deflated the Conservatives’ blue balloon that mere weeks ago was floating 20% higher than the Liberals’ wrinkled and worn red one.

But as David Frum wrote in The Atlantic, “Donald Trump pushed the Conservative Party of Canada down the political stairs.”

Prince sees the result of Canada’s 45th federal election as part existential circumstances gone wrong for a pivotless party and part Hail-Mary completion by a last-minute callup in Mark Carney, who not only caught the pass but ran it in for a touchdown.

“Looking back now, it looks like, you know, there's some Dr. Evil behind the Wizard of Oz, or somebody behind a curtain pulling levers, you know? Wow!”

Prince says that when Carney announced right from the get-go that the Liberals were cutting the carbon tax, it effectively took the Conservatives’ ace from their hand.

“Once the 'axe the tax' got taken off the table, it looked like [Pierre] Poilievre kind of lost his mojo for the first couple of weeks—he didn't know how to kind of pivot or reframe.”

And when Poilievre failed to distance himself far enough from Trump, Prince says, it left voters looking for the smartest person in the room to defend Canada’s honour—and that wasn’t Poilievre, who now finds himself, for the first time in eight federal elections, without a seat after the music stopped.

Could be a long way back for Poilievre

If Poilievre decides to run in a byelection, one of his party members will have to step aside in a safe riding, and he’d have to wait for the government to call a byelection which, as reported by CBC, could take as little as 47 days or as many as 230 days after the Speaker informs the chief electoral officer of the vacancy.

Prince credits Poilievre for moving the Conservative needle significantly—they won 41% of the vote, the best showing since Brian Mulroney in 1988, and drew 44% of the popular vote in powerhouse Ontario—but Prince says the seven-time MP didn’t help his cause by replaying “an old playbook out of the Stephen Harper” era.

“Like, you know, ignoring the press, not including them on his plane, cocooning himself, you know, insulting the journalists. I mean, Trump-like behaviours, right? Which just kind of reminded people of, well, we don't want a Trump, we already got a Trump.”

Carney hit the ground running

As for Carney, Prince puts the international banker in the same category as Mackenzie King and Lester B. Pearson—two political neophytes plucked from the public service who went on to political stardom.

Prince says Carney started revving his engine the moment Trudeau resigned, and he barely took his foot off the pedal.

“At the leadership race, he wins every single riding in the country, every single one, and he wins 85%, 86% of the vote on the first ballot. I mean, for a guy who's supposed to be a non-political animal and a rookie this is, you know, it's like the old liberal establishment said, ‘He's our guy.’’’

Minority governments typically run 18 to 24 months before an election is called, so Prince says it will be interesting to see how quickly Carney makes his moves.

“I think, like a lot of things in our lives over the last two or three months, it depends on good old Mr. Trump,” he says.

“Mr. Carney has talked about wanting to move quickly on engaging conversations with the Americans over a review upgrade of the North American Free Trade Agreement,” he says, “but that’s going to depend on Trump.”

Carney said he spoke with Trump yesterday and indicated the two planned to meet soon.

Prince offers a statistic that reinforces what a two-horse race this was in that 85% of total votes went to the Liberals and Conservatives.

“That's the highest since 1958,” Prince says. “You've got to go back to the Diefenbaker sweep of 1958 when it was basically a two-party election. This was a two-party election last night.”

The Liberals’ and Conservatives’ gains came at the expense of both the Bloc Québécois, which dropped from 35 seats to 23, and the decimated NDP, which received roughly 13% of the vote—down from 29% in 2021—falling to seven seats from 24.

Tough night for NDP

The New Democrats not only lost their leader, Jagmeet Singh, who dutifully and valiantly fell on his sword about five hours after the polls closed—“He did the right thing and he did it, I think, smartly,” Prince says—but they also lost their official party status and won’t be seen as the Parliament Hill power brokers they’ve been over the last decade.

The NDP loses access to regular question period privileges and financial backing, but Prince says the party gains some time and the permission to “kind of retreat into themselves” for a little bit.

“They’ve got some rebuilding to do,” Prince says.

As for the local races, which produced two Liberal, one Green, and one Conservative seat, Price was most impressed by Liberals Will Greaves, who took the Victoria riding by winning more than 50% of the vote, and former Alberta cabinet minister Stephanie McLean, who won out in Esquimalt-Saanich-Sooke.

In each case, Prince says, the electors were looking at the party leader here, not so much the candidate.

“I think Laurel Collins said, ‘You hear people at the door say, I really like you. Normally, I’d vote for you, but I was scared.' ”

He says there was also “a revival or resurgence” of some old liberal support.

“You'd have to go back to sort of like the David Anderson years here on the Island to see that that kind of level of support.”