first reading: the liberal party may never recover
never before in canada’s 157 years has the liberal brand stood so close to annihilation
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never before in canada’s 157 years has the liberal brand stood so close to annihilation. or – at the very least – a prolonged electoral darkness from which it may never emerge.
political fortunes rise and fall, but on multiple fronts the liberals are facing a level of ignominy they’ve never previously reckoned with.
the next federal election could realistically see justin trudeau’s liberal party consigned to their worst-ever showing – some projections even have trudeau losing his own montreal riding of papineau.
in ontario, the liberals are facing a third consecutive election in which they may well be consigned to third place – their worst string of failures in that province’s history.
the situation in quebec is much the same. the quebec liberals are probing depths of popular support unlike anything they’ve ever seen. recent polls have them at 17 per cent – only a few points ahead of the far-left separatist party québec solidaire.
and just three weeks ago, the nova scotia liberals were handed their worst electoral result since 1867. the party dropped from 14 seats to two, with leader zach churchill losing his own riding.
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only eight years ago, the vast majority of canadians lived under a liberal premier, and a liberal majority government reigned in ottawa.
in another two, canada will likely be a place in which liberals aren’t just banished from power – but where they will be lucky to form the official opposition.
if current poll numbers are any indication, the canada of 2026 will count just two provinces with a liberal premier: new brunswick and newfoundland and labrador, comprising about 1.3 million people total.
two more provinces – p.e.i. and quebec – are likely to see liberals in opposition, albeit weak ones.
everywhere else, liberals will either be at the political fringe, or they’ll have been exiled from elected office altogether. three provinces (b.c., alberta and saskatchewan) now have legislatures without a single liberal seat – and manitoba is down to just one. cindy lamoureux, mla for the winnipeg-area riding of tyndall park, is now the only liberal mla in the western provinces.
none of this means that liberal parties are on the verge of extinction.
as a rule, it usually takes quite awhile for a once-powerful canadian political party to die. take the example of social credit, which led governments in b.c. and alberta – while fielding not-insubstantial federal caucuses from the 1950s to the 1970s.
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social credit’s last embers were snuffed out just last year, when the b.c. social credit party was officially deregistered – 32 years after it was blitzed from government in the 1991 election, and 27 years after it lost its last mla.
or, the more popular analogue for a spent political force is the federal progressive conservatives.
even after a blowout loss in the 1993 federal election – in which a 156-seat majority was busted down to just two – the party limped along for two more elections before being subsumed by the new conservative party. and even then, provincial-level progressive conservatives stayed the course in ontario, manitoba and atlantic canada.
the fate that potentially lies in wait for the liberal brand is not collapse, but it could be closer to something that’s already happened to liberals in the west: the parties continue to exist, but they’re consigned to a kind of political purgatory, permanently occupying fringe corners of legislatures that they used to dominate.
consider the fate of the alberta liberal party. it last formed government in the 1920s and spent much of the next century jockeying for official opposition status.
it wasn’t until 2019 that the alberta liberals stopping getting mlas into the legislature. and while they’re still around, they received just 0.24 per cent of the vote in the 2023 alberta election – about 800 votes behind the alberta independence party.
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or the saga of the saskatchewan liberal party. last ousted from power in 1971, they dropped into opposition, then third-party status – and then decades of a fringe wilderness in which it was often an accomplishment if they could get a single mla elected.
it only officially came to an end last year. citing the massive unpopularity of the trudeau liberals, the saskatchewan liberals rebranded as the saskatchewan progress party. in the most recent saskatchewan general election, they got fewer than 500 votes.
what happened throughout the western provinces is that politics settled into a comfortable dichotomy between a left-wing party and a right-wing party — leaving no space for liberals except maybe as a protest vote.
it’s a phenomenon that just occurred in b.c. – and with remarkable speed. despite the b.c. liberals rebranding as b.c. united in a deliberate attempt to dissociate from the trudeau liberals, they were wiped off the map in a matter of months by a b.c. conservative upsurge.
now, like alberta, saskatchewan, manitoba and — increasingly, ontario – b.c. is neatly divided between right-wingers and the ndp, with liberals (if they exist) being consigned to the sidelines with greens.
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for the trudeau government, the polls are showing an immediate future that is poised to most closely resemble that of their ontario equivalent: a devastating defeat throwing them into an indeterminate exile in third place.
ontario liberal leader kathleen wynne led the party to their worst-ever defeat in 2018 – and the result would be much the same in 2022. they still represent just eight seats of a 124-seat legislature.
as per the results of a late november abacus poll, trudeau could well lead the liberals into their first fourth-place showing.
abacus found the liberals trailing the conservatives by 23 points (44 per cent vs. 21 per cent). a projection prepared by election modeller raymond liu found that if these results hold up, by this time next year canada will be governed by a conservative super-majority with the bloc québécois in opposition — and a liberal rump of 31 seats trailing the ndp’s 40.
in other news
rachel notley is leaving provincial politics. she hasn’t been alberta premier since 2019, and she hasn’t been alberta ndp leader since june – but she only just announced plans to resign as the mla for edmonton strathcona. the departure is being widely seen as a way to open up a seat for the new alberta ndp leader naheed nenshi, but it’s in keeping with a style of politics that used to be much more common in canada. party leaders – rather than immediately stepping aside after losing power – would just sort of hang around for a while and see how things went.
david bloom
the canada post strike is over – sort of. the trudeau government didn’t pass any kind of back-to-work legislation, labour minister steven mackinnon simply extended the term of the postal workers’ prior union agreement until may – which he apparently could have done the whole time. it’s probably too late for canada post to get anything delivered before christmas, and the canadian federation of independent businesses has estimated that the 29-day strike has wrought about $1.6 billion in economic damage. or, about $55 million per day.
this is an image posted online last thursday night by montreal man adam burgoyne, 39. he said he went to the hospital with chest pain, received some cursory tests, and then was consigned to a waiting room. six hours later he gave up and went home. “canadian health care, folks. best in the world,” he wrote in a caption. not long after this image was taken, burgoyne died of an aneurysm. (x.com)
x.com
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