Last month, Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, called a snap election 2 years before it would normally have been held. His goal was to attain a majority for the Liberal Party so that he wouldn’t have to keep making deals with the smaller parties, typically the New Democratic Party (it’s like the left wing of the Democratic Party in the United States) or the Bloc Quebecois, a party with seats only in French-speaking Quebec.
He failed. He had started with 157 seats (he needed at least 170 for a majority of the 338 seats in the House of Commons) and, if the current numbers hold up even after the absentee ballots are counted, will end up with . . . 157 seats.
So when Trudeau said in his victory speech early this morning “You are sending us back to work with a clear mandate to get Canada through this pandemic,” he’s making it up. It’s not a clear mandate.
Of course, in another sense Trudeau succeeded: he will remain as Prime Minister.
Something else that would interest those of my American friends who think that the party with the most votes should win is that if that were the case in Canada, we would now be talking about incoming Prime Minister Erin O’Toole. As of early this morning, the Conservative Party received 34.1 percent of the vote and the Liberal Party received 31.8 percent. That’s a 2.3 percentage point gap. It’s larger than the 1.2 percentage point gap in the 2019 federal election, when the Conservatives received 34.3 percent and the Liberals received 33.1 percent.
UPDATE: More recent numbers show that the gap in the popular vote in 2021 is almost identical to the gap in 2019. Conservatives got 33.73 percent; Liberals got 32.62 percent. Gap: 1.11 percent.
I’m, by the way, a dual citizen of Canada and the United States.
You might think I would be disappointed that O’Toole lost. I’m not. He caved on a number of issues that the Conservative Party had held near and dear and on which I agreed with them. But also, he was worse on international travel. Here’s a snippet from a news report in April 2021:
Flights from all hot-spot countries must be stopped, he [O’Toole] said — maybe all international flights, “(until) we can rectify and secure our border.”
Also, although I can’t find the link, O’Toole called just last week for restricting travel into Canada.
Trudeau, on the other hand, opened up travel for returning Canadians in early July. Before that, they were required to quarantine for 14 days even if they had been vaccinated and even if they tested negative for Covid. Then he opened it up for Americans on August 9, who hadn’t been allowed in at all. Trudeau, in short, although bad on freedom to travel, was substantially better than O’Toole.
READER COMMENTS
Tom West
Sep 21 2021 at 5:08pm
I’m obviously an NDP supporter, but I have to say that I have a mild disappointment that the Conservatives didn’t do better. On the meta level, it is important to have at least *two* more-or-less-identical parties so that when one party has been in power too long and has to be removed, there’s a second party ready to replace them. (Just see how Quebec had to bounce between separatist and federalist because there was only one of each party.)
O’Toole’s push towards the centre (and quickly eliminating Bozo candidates) didn’t gain him any seats, and I worry that the lesson the Conservatives will learn will be to lean harder into their fringes.
For me, the main threat in this election was that the PPC might make it onto the stage, and I was happy to see it pretty thoroughly crushed. I’m not one of these who believe “it can’t happen here”. After all, Toronto elected Rob Ford, who was a sort of Trump-lite.
If the PPC gets a foothold, it may push the Conservatives right in order to preserve their fringe-y voters, who are not all that rare.
Anyway, I consider this election a loss for everyone (although it could be seen as a victory for everyone). Each party had a high point that they didn’t meet, and a low-point that they avoided.
David Henderson
Sep 21 2021 at 6:08pm
You wrote:
Interesting. I’ve read your comments over the years and that wasn’t obvious to me. I had you either as NDP or Liberal.
You wrote:
You clearly know more than I do. I didn’t know about the Bozo candidates. I think their leaning harder into their fringes will be good or bad depending on which fringes. Anti-immigration: bad. Pro-nationalist: bad. Anti-compulsory vaccination: good.
You wrote:
Well put.
Tom West
Sep 22 2021 at 1:20am
Well, I have a weak spot for idealists (which is why I fraternize with Libertarians, even if I’m not one). It might be different if the NDP were in danger of winning :-). Although I quite liked Bob Rae, which became verboten among the true NDP-ers.
“Bozo eruption” was a term I heard in Alberta when Wild Rose candidates kept turning out to “have a past” and the party faced difficult decisions of whether to expel candidates that might be popular, but had embraced problematic beliefs (by Canadian standards).
Liberal, Conservative, and NDP all faced this problem in this campaign, and I was happy to see all such candidates quickly disavowed. This (to me) is an indication that none the major parties have reached the point of deciding the median voter no longer matters.
Scott Sumner
Sep 21 2021 at 10:32pm
David, You said:
“Something else that would interest those of my American friends who think that the party with the most votes should win is that if that were the case in Canada, we would now be talking about incoming Prime Minister Erin O’Toole.”
I’m not sure I’ve ever met anyone who thinks the Prime Minister should automatically be from the party that gets the most votes. BTW, if Canada used proportional representation (which I favor) then Trudeau would probably still be the PM.
In my view, the US president should be decided by popular vote. If a system has no president, then the PM should be the leader of the coalition that has a majority of seats.
David Henderson
Sep 21 2021 at 11:57pm
You write:
I’m not sure I have either. But I have met many people who think that the President should be the one who gets the most votes.
You write:
Please explain.
Scott Sumner
Sep 22 2021 at 12:33pm
Yeah, I think the rules should have been set up in such a way that Clinton would have won in 2016, as I think the outcome should be based on majority vote, as in other countries that elect presidents. (Of course this assumes the same vote totals under a different system–obviously the voting might have been different if no Electoral College.)
In Canada, the PM should be the leader of the legislative coalition with a majority of seats, as in other parliamentary systems.
I can’t imagine anyone but the Liberals leading such a coalition after Canada’s recent election, as there’s no way the Conservatives could have put together a coalition with 50% of more of seats under either proportional representation or “first-past-the-post”. Ideologically speaking, the Liberals represent the median voter.
Henri Hein
Sep 22 2021 at 2:14pm
In the parliamentary system I am most familiar with, the Danish one, the PM is not always from the party with a majority of seats. Sometimes they elect a PM from a small party in the center which is in a better position to negotiate. Sometimes a coalition of smaller parties manage to hold together long enough to elect a PM – the coalitions don’t tend to last long, but they do happen.
Tom West
Sep 22 2021 at 1:57am
The fact that the Liberals lost the popular vote last election (and this) was a useful fact for when my peers were questioning Trump’s legitimacy. While personally I feel he that while he was an awful human being and bad for America, de-legitimizing institutions when they produce an unwanted outcome is not a game I ever want my team to be playing.
Scott Sumner
Sep 22 2021 at 12:38pm
You said:
“The fact that the Liberals lost the popular vote last election”
This is a meaningless claim in a multiparty parliamentary system.
Mark Z
Sep 23 2021 at 2:43am
Isn’t it kind of meaningless in any system other than a popular vote, including ours in the US? Americans’ decisions whether to vote and how to vote, and campaigns’ decisions too, are themselves affected by the knowledge that we have an electoral college rather than a popular vote. One can’t assume that, if the popular vote mattered, it would be the same as the popular vote we observe in our world where it doesn’t matter, because the relevant actors in our world aren’t even trying to maximize their popular vote, but their number of EC delegates. So the fact that someone ‘won the popular vote’ doesn’t actually tell us whether they would’ve won the election if we had a popular vote system.
David Henderson
Sep 23 2021 at 8:42am
Is the fact that the Libertarian Party, the NDP, the Green Party, and the Blog Quebecois lost the popular vote meaningless also?
Zeke5123
Sep 23 2021 at 8:39am
A popular vote for President comes with its own problems.
1. You incentivize corruption in your strong holds. For example, Democrats in California don’t need to cheat to win California. But if adding 100k votes could be meaningful generally, then why not? This isn’t dem specific; Republicans in Republican strongholds would face the same incentive.
2. You would need uniform voting rules. Far from obvious that is ideal. If you don’t have uniform voting rules, then in a real sense the popular vote isn’t the popular vote.
3. How do you deal with recounts on a national stage if the vote is close?
4. Geography could matter — isn’t obvious the sole reason someone wins is because they are liked by the largest population centers.
I propose an intermediate solution; keep the electoral college but decide the votes district by district with winner of the state getting 2 additional votes. Solves some of the issue of being a red or blue in the opposite state without running into the problems articulated above.
if the concern is that the Wyoming’s of the world punch too far above their weight, perhaps add an extra “vote” for 25 most populous states.
Andrew_FL
Sep 21 2021 at 10:37pm
Rule by absolute plurality sounds like great idea for Canada and a terrible idea for America!
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