OTTAWA — As Canada’s two largest political parties spend the final few days of the federal election campaign fighting for power, Canada’s smaller parties enter the race’s final leg with arguably even more on the line — survival.
According
, the Liberals and Conservatives are poised to dominate in this election to a degree not seen in almost 70 years.
Polls in recent weeks have been consistent and unequivocal in showing that the Liberals and Conservatives are expected to combine to easily win about 83 per cent of the votes cast. That’s a chunky increase over the 2021 federal election, when they combined for 66.3 per cent of all votes.
These gains have come at the expense of their smaller rivals — the New Democratic Party, the Bloc Québécois, the People’s Party of Canada, the Green Party and others. All of the parties, other than the big two, combined to win about one-third of the votes in the 2021 election, almost exactly double what they’re on course to win this time and almost identical to where they collectively were in the polls as recently as mid-January.
“It looks like it will be catastrophic,” André Lecours, a political science professor at the University of Ottawa, said about the struggling smaller parties’ fates in this election.
With less than a week before Canadians cast their ballots, the Liberals are leading the most recent polls with about 44 per cent of the vote, ahead of the Conservatives by about 5 percentage points. Barring a significant last-minute change, the two main parties should eclipse the 80 per cent mark. That hasn’t happened since 1958.
The danger for the small parties, beyond the short-term failure, is that a party needs to win at least 12 seats to be recognized as an official party in the House of Commons. If a party falls below that threshold, it isn’t allowed to ask questions in the House as often and is granted less money for research. There’s also a sense that smaller parties and their positions on issues just don’t matter as much.
While opinion polls are quite effective at measuring popular vote, anticipating the number of seats that a party might win is much more difficult. Of the parties other than the Liberals and Conservatives, the Bloc is seen as likely to just get over the 12-seat hurdle, based on the polls, while the NDP has only a small chance.
But the bigger question for these smaller parties is whether this election is likely to be a one-time blip, triggered by the tariff threats from U.S. President Donald Trump, or a long-term restructuring of Canada’s political landscape. Specifically, could tariff-focussed Canadian voters, essentially kill off some of the smaller parties, leading Canada to return to what is effectively a two-party system, similar to the United States and many other countries?
Academics say that it’s unlikely that this election will lead to a long-term realignment where the Liberals and Conservatives dominate to this degree, or the way they used to.
Lecours says the circumstances of this election are “exceptional” in that Canadians are viewing the leadership candidates and their parties largely through a single issue: the U.S. tariffs.
That single, overriding issue isn’t likely to top the political agenda in future years, academics say, which means that Canadians will likely revert back to focusing on a variety of issues and supporting more parties and voices.
Sanjay Jeram, a political scientist at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, said there are four main divisions that most influence Canadian voting patterns — region, language, culture and ideology — and that the importance of those differences will re-emerge in future elections.
“This is a point in time,” Jeram said, “but it won’t last.”
And following the 1958 election, a massive landslide by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker and his Conservatives, it didn’t then either.
In that election, the Tories won the largest majority government in Canadian history and the second-highest percentage (53.7 per cent) of the popular vote. (Only Conservative Prime Minister Robert Borden’s 1917 win, with almost 57 per cent of the vote, was greater).
Although the Liberals were crushed in that election with just 33.8 per cent of the votes, the two main parties combined to win a historic 87.5 of all ballots cast. It was the third consecutive election that those two parties had combined to top 80 per cent.
But the two-party dominance couldn’t maintain that level, just as academics expect this time around too.
In the next federal election, 1962, the combined Liberal-Conservative vote fell to 74.7 per cent of the popular vote, as challengers on both the left and right of the two main parties made gains.
The NDP, in its first election after morphing from the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), jumped to 13.4 per cent of the vote, up from the CCF’s 9.5 per cent in 1958. Social Credit, seen as more conservative than the Conservatives, jumped to 11.7 per cent of the popular vote, up from 2.6 per cent in 1958.
The two main parties’ combined totals remained in a range between 71.9 per cent (1965) and 78.6 per cent (1974) for the next 35 years.
But in 1993, there was a major restructuring on the Canadian political landscape with the emergence of the Reform and Bloc Quebecois parties. The Progressive Conservatives placed third in the popular vote (16 per cent) but split the right-of-centre vote with Reform and won only two seats. Efforts to unite the two right-of-centre parties began shortly thereafter, eventually leading to the 2003 formation of the Conservative Party of Canada.
So what would it mean for Canada if the Liberals and Conservatives dominated the electoral landscape in the coming years, as they did in the 1950s?
Lecours says the Liberals would be the big winners because it would mean a consolidation of the progressive vote in both English and French-speaking Canada. The Conservatives, by contrast, are challenged on the right only by the People’s Party of Canada, which won 4.9 per cent of the vote in the 2021 election but are tracking at about one per cent this time.
National Post
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