Take Heart, Liberals

The distance between power and political wilderness is not as large as it may seem.

With a strong mandate and a new majority government, Prime Minister Stephen Harper is striding forward with a range of promised initiatives, from Senate reform and prison expansion to increased military spending and cuts to the public service.

Newly embraced by some immigrant constituencies, and in small-town and suburban Ontario – and still beloved in the West – the Conservative Party has a grip on power that is so comfortable it looks almost natural (as in “natural governing party”).

However grim these days may seem to the Liberals, members of that party might find it instructive to reflect on some election results from their own glory days, not so long past.

In 1997, the Liberals won their second of three consecutive majority governments. They had been in power for nearly four years, and it would be almost another decade before Harper's Conservatives would finally gain a foothold in government.

The right was split between Preston Manning's Reformers and Jean Charest's Progressive Conservatives, and nobody knew how to put these two regional and ideological strains together to make a winning party. In some sense, it was the worst of times for Canadian conservatives.

But what would it have taken to make Parliament look different that year? How many votes would have had to change for the Chrétien Liberals to be deprived of their majority, and perhaps even stripped of the aura of invincibility they enjoyed? Just more than 1,400.

The Liberals won the 1997 federal election with 155 seats, just four more than they needed to form a majority. A look at the closest five races in the country during that election reveals that if exactly the right voters had changed camps that year, it would have taken only tiny changes to put the balance of power into the hands of another party.

In second place, with only 60 seats, the Reform party was not even close to forming a government – but its increasingly frustrated supporters were indeed drawing closer to making the structural changes necessary to unseat those smug central Canadian Liberals. And they were closer to gaining power than it might have felt at the time.

This year, amid all the talk of Conservative momentum, the minimum number of votes required to deprive Harper of his majority would have been just 5,196. (This number comes from tallying the Conservative margin of victory in the 12 closest ridings. The closest three races were each won by less than 100 votes.)

These calculations about the 1997 and 2011 elections hold little meaning in themselves; as a colleague of mine says, such scribbling proves only that “we would have won if we hadn’t lost.” But these tiny margins are a stark reminder of the almost whimsical consequences of our first-past-the-post electoral system.

During the 13 years of Liberal government in the 1990s and early 2000s, frustration was building – particularly in the West, but also elsewhere, among those who did not appreciate the leftward drift of the country. For most of the 20th century, the building of, or opposition to, the social welfare state – especially universal entitlements like pensions and health care – were key axes of political debate in Canada. In recent years, social values have joined regionalism on the list of other national preoccupations.

On the regional front, “the West wanted in” during the ’90s. The subtext of that demand was that people out West were tired of being ignored, patronized, or, from their perspective, exploited by Central Canada through policies like the National Energy Program. Many westerners felt that Quebec exercised disproportionate power in the federal government because French-English accommodation was the name of the game, and therefore the Liberals’ electoral bread and butter.