The Conservatives won an election they thought they couldn’t win, electing Don Stewart as MP in the Liberal stronghold of Toronto-St. Paul with 42 per cent of the vote.
The results are truly dramatic and demonstrate the organizational strength of the Conservative Party of Canada, but also suggest that the end of Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party is near.
Trudeau can remain leader of the Liberal party, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to justify his position as leader of a party that can’t rely on winning the safest seats.
Compared to the 2021 federal election, the by-election saw an overall swing in votes of 19 per cent. Preliminary results showed the Liberal Party’s vote share fell from 49.22 per cent to 40.5 per cent.
While this does not represent a complete collapse of support, in constituencies where the Liberal Party is reliably able to win more than 50% of the vote it mirrors its dismal showing of 40.6% in the 2011 general election and is a real cause for concern for the party.
But this is perhaps less significant than the Conservative Party’s rise in support from 25.3% in 2021 to 42.1% last night – the highest support for a centre-right party in the Toronto-St. Paul constituency since 1988.
Two-way competition
The result was bad for all other parties, including the 84 independents on the ballot. The New Democrats’ share of the vote fell to just under 11 percent, and the Greens received just 2.9 percent, effectively rendering both parties irrelevant. The Toronto-St. Paul constituency, as is increasingly the case in the rest of Canada, became a two-party contest.
The by-election result can effectively be interpreted as a referendum on Trudeau’s leadership and the effectiveness of the Liberal government he leads.
Read more: By-election in the spotlight: What the Toronto-St. Paul election means for Justin Trudeau
Both the Liberals and Conservatives positioned themselves as representatives of survival and change and framed the vote in this way, revealing the extent of Canadians’ growing dissatisfaction, widespread discomfort, and desire for change.
The results suggest that even the Liberal Party’s most reliable base of support — affluent urban, well-educated and socially progressive — is ready to suggest that something new is needed.
The reality is that the Liberal Party is struggling to gain public trust on a range of economic and social issues that affect the daily lives of Canadians, including in urban areas, including sluggish economic growth, rising home prices, inflation, a tough cost of living environment, rising unemployment, open drug use and rising violent crime.
Trudeau’s unpopularity has as much to do with how his government is actually handling these issues as it does with the fact that he has failed to provide a convincing case for why the Liberals should remain in power for the foreseeable future.
Many recent policy initiatives, such as the National Pharmaceutical Benefit Scheme, increases to capital gains tax and tenant rights legislation, have failed to gain public attention.
Similarly, the government’s string of attacks on the Conservative opposition – its limited policy solutions, inevitable austerity, problematic stance on women’s rights and ties to the alt-right, to name just a few – have failed to slow the Conservatives’ momentum.
The Canadian Press/Christine Mussi
Conservative organizational strength
But the Conservatives also won the by-elections through their own efforts, particularly their incredibly effective local election campaigns.
The higher-than-usual turnout in the by-elections may indicate that the Conservatives’ ability to mobilize their supporters to vote was as crucial as the depth of anti-Liberal sentiment. This suggests that the Liberals are not only lacking momentum among their own core supporters, but are also facing an emboldened Conservative party with sufficient resources to compete aggressively in areas traditionally seen as uncompetitive.
The Canadian Press/Chris Young
The result doesn’t mean that all previously Liberal-dominated urban areas will switch to the Conservatives: by-elections are special events, and the Conservatives are unlikely to be able to devote the same attention and resources to similar constituencies in a general election.
Instead, the true meaning of the Toronto-St. Paul constituency can be summed up as follows: If the party can garner this much support; Toronto Midtownwhat can you do in a suburban swing seat that you absolutely must win?
All indicators suggest the Liberal Party is headed for a generational disaster, repeating the performances of 1958, 1984 and 2011. Canadian political history shows this is not the end of the Liberal Party per se, but rather a low point in the cycle.
As with previous historic defeats, the Liberal Party may show remarkable flexibility, embark on a process of organizational and policy overhaul and return to power in the short term, but the fact is that support for the Liberal Party has been in steady decline since the 1970s, and the party has fewer regional bases from which to rebuild.
Remove a leader
There is no formal way for other Liberals (ministers, MPs or individual members) to remove the incumbent leader from office short of a federal election defeat. If Trudeau wants to stay, he can stay.
But with no clear direction to emerge from this total defeat, the prime minister is sure to face growing pressure from his own party to resign, which would not force a change of government but could still make governing more difficult and exhausting for him.
Several prominent party members and staffers could defect, and the caucus could become uncooperative or even divisive, fearful of losing its seats.
Prime ministers have returned before after long periods of unpopularity — his father, Pierre Trudeau, may be the first to come to mind when he returned to power in 1980 — but if successful, Trudeau’s return would be unprecedented: No one has ever successfully reversed an approval rating of just 28 percent.
If the Liberals postponed the election for another year, a leadership change could turn their fortunes around, but that seems unlikely: Eight years in power is hard to overturn, and similar attempts to replace the party’s leader have been difficult before, from Brian Mulroney to Kim Campbell to Pierre Trudeau to John Turner, but none have escaped defeat.
