Minority win hides Liberal weakness

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/09/2021 (1084 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Much of the discussion of the results of the 2021 federal election has centred on the somewhat-annoying fact that the parties’ standings were pretty much the same after as they were before the writ was dropped, with Justin Trudeau leading a minority government, the Conservatives as the official Opposition, et cetera.

The question buzzing around the nation’s Tim Hortons — what was the point of that!? — is an entirely fair one.

But that discussion obscures something that was particularly notable about this election: the Liberal party’s vote share dropped yet again, this time to 32.63 per cent of the vote. Justin Trudeau will now form a government with the support of less than one-third of Canadians who voted last week. Never in Canadian history has a government been formed with so little support from the people.

Further, the Liberals received fewer votes than the Conservatives, but won anyway because they secured more seats in the House of Commons.

Obviously, this has enormous democratic implications. In a democracy, the majority is supposed to rule. Governing with the support of only one-third of voters sounds more like oligarchy than democracy. And how did we get here, anyway?

I’m glad you asked. As it turns out, the Liberal party used to win Canadian elections with a majority of the popular vote. In the 1900 election, for example, Liberal leader Wilfrid Laurier scored roughly 50 per cent of the vote and a majority of the seats. Fast forward 100 years to the 2000 federal election — once again, a Liberal leader, Jean Chrétien, won the election and formed a majority government. But Chrétien did so with only a little more than 40 per cent of the vote, 10 points less than Laurier.

Looking at these bookend elections to the 20th century illustrates how the Liberal party’s vote share, like those of most old democratic parties, experienced a long-term secular decline from 1900 onward. Yet the 20th century was also characterized by Liberal success, with the party sitting in government a remarkable seven out of every 10 years in that century, while the Conservatives languished on the opposition benches, throwing buns at each other rather than winning elections.

This seeming contradiction between the declining Liberal vote share and its success in winning elections is explained by Canada’s single-member plurality electoral system, which is designed to give winning parties a boost in seats. So Laurier in 1900 scored roughly 50 per cent of the vote but won 60 per cent of the seats. And Chrétien in 2000 won roughly 40 per cent of the vote, but that translated into 57 per cent of the seats, a whopping boost of 17 per cent.

By the 1990s, the Liberals were entirely reliant on the electoral system to form majority governments. Now, in 2021, Liberal support has plunged so far that majority governments appears out of reach. Instead, the Liberals are now reliant on maximizing the efficiency of their vote to win the most seats with fewer votes than the Conservatives.

The idea of vote efficiency is simply that, in a system like ours in which a candidate wins the seat with a one-vote or a 30,000-vote margin over their opponent, parties face incentives to spread their resources out to win seats but not rack up massive landslides. So parties will move resources — including volunteers and money — out of ridings that are either hopeless or safe and into competitive ones where the extra boost might push them over the top.

Relatively new technology which relies on both polls and data collected by volunteers on the ground as they canvass can detect these marginal seats during the campaign with startling accuracy.

The Liberals have become quite skilled at maximizing the efficiency of their vote through this moving about of resources. The Conservatives are less good at this, which helps to explain why the party could receive more votes but fewer seats than the Liberals. There’s another reason for this: the Conservatives are so popular in some parts of the country that CPC candidates rack up massive local vote shares. But there’s no consolation prize for these huge margins, so landslides in Conservative heartland seats in Alberta and Saskatchewan, for example, inflate the party’s vote share but not its seat share.

Short-term Liberal success, however, should not obscure long-term Liberal decline. The party used to win outright majorities of the vote, but as its vote share declined, the party relied on the electoral system to boost its seat share. Now, the party’s vote share has declined so much that the Liberals must rely on campaign techniques designed to maximize the efficiency of the party vote in order to hang on to power.

From a historical perspective, the party is in a remarkably precarious position.

This is something the Conservatives should perhaps keep in mind as they contemplate descending into yet another round of leadership squabbling and drama.

Royce Koop is a professor of political studies at the University of Manitoba and academic director of the Centre for Social Science Research and Policy.