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Looking For Votes In All The Wrong Places

Looking For Votes In All The Wrong Places

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One in six Canadians who voted Liberal in last year’s federal election now say they would vote NDP. That’s according to an Angus Reid survey released last week.

At first blush, it might look like the start of a comeback for a party reduced to just seven seats and 6.3 per cent of the popular vote in the last election.

It isn’t. At least not yet.

The question now is whether NDP leader Avi Lewis understands what those numbers mean for his party and its political strategy.

In his first major interview after becoming leader last March, Lewis argued that the NDP now has “wide-open political space” to advance “a really populist left agenda.” The Angus Reid poll suggests he’s looking for votes in all the wrong places.

The wide-open political space isn’t on the democratic left. It’s immediately to his right.

That’s because Mark Carney didn’t make the Liberal tent bigger. He picked it up, stakes and all, and moved it to the right.

Carney’s Liberals now occupy much of the political ground that once belonged to moderate conservatives.

The more the Liberal party occupies traditional centre-right terrain, the more it crowds Pierre Poilievre and the Conservative Party into Maple MAGA territory.

And as long as progressive Liberal voters continue to see Poilievre as the only realistic alternative, most will hold their nose and park their support behind Carney.

But Carney’s strategy has also created a constituency of Liberal voters who no longer feel entirely at home in the party they supported for years.

That is Avi Lewis’s opportunity.

The Angus Reid survey points to climate policy as the immediate catalyst. That’s hardly surprising after another summer dominated by catastrophic wildfires and growing unease over the government’s retreat from signature climate commitments.

But climate is only the entry point. The larger question is whether progressive Liberals still recognize the direction of a party that has repositioned itself across a much broader range of issues.

Nor is the opportunity confined to defining issues such as climate change. Lewis also needs the political agility to respond to the smaller, more transactional decisions that rarely dominate election campaigns but signal a government’s true colours.

The recent debate over the Gordie Howe International Bridge shows what that opportunity looks like.

Conservatives attacked Carney for negotiating a bad deal with Washington. They focused on the economics.

The real issue for many progressive Canadians was about living up to the Elbows Up slogan.

The message to them was that when Donald Trump applies enough pressure, the Liberal government folds.

That is an argument the Conservatives are poorly positioned to make because of their own complicated relationship with Trump.

The NDP isn’t.

Lewis could argue that the real issue is not the value of the deal but the effect of repeatedly accommodating an American administration that has made bullying Canada part of its political playbook.

That is a message capable of reaching well beyond the NDP’s traditional base and appeal to progressive Liberals.

For decades, the NDP tried to influence Liberal governments by pulling them leftward and measuring success by the number of New Democratic ideas they adopted.

It was a permanent opposition strategy.

If Lewis truly wants to rebuild the NDP, he has to think less like the leader of a permanent opposition party and more like someone assembling the first pieces of a governing coalition.

That coalition won’t be built exclusively from traditional New Democrats.  The Angus Reid numbers suggest that process may have started already.

If one in six Liberal voters switched, the NDP’s support would climb from 6.3 per cent to roughly 13.6 per cent.

When 338Canada projected the NDP at almost exactly that level during the 2019 election campaign, it projected the party would win roughly a dozen seats — that’s official party status.

And it’s before the NDP has made any deliberate effort to attract progressive Liberals.

But political opportunities rarely last.

The Liberal Party’s greatest strength has never been ideological consistency. It has been its ability to redefine the political centre before its opponents do.

Lewis now has an opportunity to respond in kind. Not by abandoning New Democratic values but by giving voice to compatible centrist preoccupations.

To paraphrase Mark Carney, Avi Lewis and the NDP need to see the country as it is, not as they wish it was.

Mark Carney’s Coalition Numbers Don’t Add Up

Mark Carney’s Coalition Numbers Don’t Add Up

It was often said of former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that her greatest political asset was her ability to count. To count votes, certainly — but more importantly, to count what allows a coalition to endure over time: sensitivities, idiosyncrasies, and invisible red lines.

Mark Carney holds a PhD in economics. He knows how to count. Yet, eight months after his government’s election, it remains unclear whether he has mastered the kind of political arithmetic required to govern a minority government in a federation as diverse as Canada’s.

Since his election last April, Carney and his government have embarked on a sweeping overhaul of major federal policies, marked by limited consultation and transparency.

Virtually nothing has been spared: international trade, internal trade, environmental policy, national defence, climate policy, immigration. All of it has been pursued under the cover of a political consensus that hangs by a single thread — Donald Trump.

While decisiveness is essential when governments face challenges requiring immediate responses, strategic restraint are just as crucial when the issues at stake are structural in nature.

Unfortunately, restraint has been largely absent. Between visits to Paris, London, Doha and Beijing, Mr. Carney has appeared intent not only on rebuilding the foundations of Canada’s major public policies, but also on reshaping the Liberal Party’s governing coalition.

For decades — from Pierre Trudeau to Justin Trudeau — the backbone of that coalition has been formed by Atlantic Canada, Quebec, and Ontario (particularly the GTA and its suburbs).

Since his election, however, Mark Carney has devoted disproportionate attention to the grievances of Alberta and Saskatchewan while relegating to the sidelines Quebec’s concerns over pipeline development and carbon emission reductions and Ontario’s interests in the health of its automotive sector.

The issue is not whether Alberta and Saskatchewan have legitimate claims tied to the development of their natural resources. They unquestionably do. What is striking is the contrast between the urgency with which those claims are addressed and the relative indifference shown toward the concerns of other provinces that remain central to the Liberal Party’s traditional electoral coalition.

On paper, the Carney government appears to have gained stability since the election. In Parliament, it has survived its first major political tests, including confidence votes on the Speech from the Throne and its budget. Before the holidays, two Conservative MPs — one from Nova Scotia and one from the Greater Toronto Area — crossed the floor to sit as Liberals.

On the ground, however, the picture may be quite different. The Liberals and Conservatives remain neck and neck in the polls. And while it is still too early to speak of entrenched trends, early signs of erosion are already visible in the Liberals’ traditional strongholds.

This is true in Quebec, where Liberal support has declined by roughly five points since the election; in Ontario, where the drop approaches six points; and in Atlantic Canada, where the decline exceeds five points since April. Notably, Liberal support has remained essentially unchanged in the Prairies and in Alberta.

A closer look at the electoral map helps clarify the magnitude of the political risk facing Mr. Carney and his government.

In the last election, the Liberals lost seven ridings in Alberta and Saskatchewan by margins of a few thousand votes. By contrast, they won 26 seats in Ontario and Quebec by margins of less than 5,000 votes. Even a marginal weakening of Liberal support in Ontario, Quebec, or Atlantic Canada would be enough to shift dozens of seats into Conservative or Bloc Québécois hands.

The chart below illustrates the asymmetric electoral reality facing the Liberal Party: while close losses in the West are relatively few, dozens of seats in Ontario and Quebec rest on razor-thin margins.

Mark Carney and the Liberals returned to power in the shadow of Donald Trump. They benefited from voter anxiety and a reflex of solidarity among Canadians confronted with American political chaos. That consent was real — but it was circumstantial. It did not constitute a mandate to upend the country’s industrial, economic, and political foundations.

In a federation, knowing how to count is not simply a matter of tallying seats or securing markets. It requires acknowledging and accounting for what may not be immediately visible: diverse values, regional diffrerences and sensitivities, and thresholds of acceptability.

Mark Carney is a smart man. What he lacks is the lived political experience — and the humility that comes with it — needed to understand how electoral coalitions are built, and how they unravel. Canadian political history is clear: coalitions do not always collapse with a crash. More often, they erode — slowly. And when the numbers no longer add up, it is usually too late to start counting again.