Does Erin O’Toole have a pathway to power?

One way to find out is to ask how the math worked for six (Progressive) Conservative wins dating back to 1962.  Excluding the freakishly large Mulroney win in 1984, examples of Conservative wins provide insight as to how O’Toole can find his pathway to power.

Of these six examples, only two resulted in majorities.  One example – Mulroney ’88 – was the ‘Quebec-Alberta bridge’, where the PC’s dominated in both.  The second example – Harper 2011 – was domination in English Canada.

(This article updated – first published in 2019)

Diefenbaker 1962

Dief won a minority government in 1962 following a massive majority he won in 1958.  In the ’62 campaign, Dief’s Tories won 44% of the seats on 37.2% of the popular vote. 

The plurality was based on winning two-thirds of the seats in the West and North and two-fifths of the seats in Ontario.  He lost the huge gains he had made in Quebec.

Won big in the West, fell short in Ontario

Clark 1979

It was a long wait for the PC’s to win another government and Joe Clark came close to a majority (48% of seats) with less than 36% of the popular vote.  No government has won a majority with less than 38%.  In fact, Clark lost the popular vote by over 4%. 

How did he win a plurality? Domination in the West by winning almost three-quarters of the seats there, and winning a strong majority (60%) of seats in Ontario.

While he won a majority of seats in Atlantic Canada, he was virtually shut out of Quebec. This template was virtually the one with which Harper won a majority with in 2011.

Won big in the West, won majority of seats in Ontario, but blown out in Quebec

Mulroney 1988

Brian Mulroney won everywhere in 1984 in what was truly a change election. However, in 1988, the ‘free trade election’, it was much more competitive.  In the West, Mulroney had to contend with an upstart Reform Party and strong NDP campaigns. 

Mulroney managed a majority of seats in the West (54%) but Conservative share of seats in that region was the lowest level of these six examples. While Alberta was dominated by PCs, BC went NDP and Liberals made gains in Manitoba.  The PC’s came close to winning a majority of seats in Ontario (47%).  The big difference was Quebec.  Unlike the five other examples, Mulroney won big in la belle province, taking 84% of its seats.  The Quebec-Alberta bridge delivered a majority – the PC’s held 57% of the seats in the House of Commons.

Won big in Quebec to complement bare majority (50%) of seats in combined West/Ontario

Harper 2006

In Stephen Harper’s first successful election, he won a plurality (40% of seats) with 36% of the popular vote.  The Conservatives won two-thirds of the seats in the West but less than two-fifths of the seats in Ontario.  The shape of Harper’s win was similar to Dief’s in 1962 except that Dief won in Atlantic Canada and Harper fell far short.  Both did poorly in Quebec. But after 13 years of Liberal government, a win’s a win!

Won big in the West, fell short in Ontario

Harper 2008

Stephen Harper fought hard for a majority in 2008 but fell just short with 46% of the seats on 38% of the popular vote.  The shape of this win was similar to 2006, except that the Conservatives amped it up in the West (76% of seats) and Ontario (48% of seats).  They continued to fall short in Quebec (13%) and Atlantic Canada (31%).  Compared to 1962 and 1979, the West/Ontario rose from 59% to 65% of the seats in the House of Commons making it more possible to win with a strong position in those regions, but Harper needed a clear win in Ontario in 2008 and he didn’t get it. In the aftermath of the 2008 election, Harper almost saw his minority mandate slip away when the opposition parties ganged up to – almost – catapult outgoing Liberal leader Stephane Dion into 24 Sussex Drive. It surely made Rt. Hon. Stephen Harper hungrier for a majority the next time.

Won big in the West, fell short in Ontario – again

Harper 2011

Harper finally gets his majority winning 54% of the seats on the strength of 40% of the popular vote. The Conservatives dominated the West (78% of seats) and Ontario (69% of seats).  They also raised their game in Atlantic Canada (44% of seats) while falling back in Quebec (7% of seats). 

The Harper win was a souped-up Joe Clark pathway to power – winning everywhere while being trounced in Quebec.  The difference was that Harper got more out of the West and Ontario than Clark.

Won very big in the West, won strong majority in Ontario

Table 1:   Popular vote, Percentage of total seats for examples

What it means for O’Toole

Given the Conservatives’ chronic lack of success in Québec, O’Toole’s Conservatives must dominate Western Canada while pushing toward a majority of seats in Ontario.  There are now more seats in these two regions than there were in the examples listed above.

• West (and North) 107 seats + Ontario 121 seats = 228 seats (67% of all seats in the House of Commons)

The Conservatives dominated Alberta and Saskatchewan in 2019 – 69% of the popular vote in Alberta and 64% in Saskatchewan, winning all but one seat. It was a Big Blue Wave from Yellowhead to Prince Albert. The swamping of the prairies helped the Conservatives win the national popular vote, which was cold comfort considering we measure power by the seats. Outside of Alberta and Saskatchewan, Scheer’s Conservatives didn’t measure up. They didn’t get enough out of B.C., Québec, the Atlantic, and certainly did not get enough out of Ontario. In fact, the Liberals virtually locked in their 2015 Ontario results onto the 2019 map.

Erin O’Toole’s team has clearly decided that winning big on the Prairies and losing big in Ontario is a pathway to Stornaway. The Conservative campaign has shifted its focus to appeal more broadly in urban and suburban ridings, especially Ontario. As is often the bargain, move in one direction and face a rearguard action from the other. Gains made in the middle have been challenged by populist rage on the right under the leadership of Mad Max.

O’Toole cannot replicate the Mulroney ’88 win – he doesn’t have the support in Québec and may lose seats in Alberta as well. It does not look like O’Toole has the support to pull off the Harper 2011 majority win which was dominance in the West and a strong majority in Ontario.

He’s looking at a Dief ’62 / Clark ’79 model – strong showing in the West and stronger showing in Ontario compared to Scheer, combined with modest gains in Québec and the Atlantic. B.C. is a wildcard – he really needs to push toward winning half of the 42 seats in B.C. (a gain of 4), but throughout this campaign, public polling indicates a competitive three-way race without any party pulling away to make major gains. We’ll see.

Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives lost 157-121 in seats. A simplistic view is for O’Toole to hold steady outside of Ontario and flip 20 seats in Ontario, for a narrow plurality. The Liberals won Ontario by 9-points in 2019 and have not been near that mark so far in public polling. So, if O’Toole can get to Joe Clark levels in Ontario, and nets out the same in the rest of Canada, he might get there.

But it isn’t that easy. Despite how tantalizing the opportunity in the middle is to Conservative strategists, a renegade crew of angry, non-vaxxed populists could put a barricade across the pathway to victory by weakening fortress Alberta and splitting the vote in key battlegrounds. In this respect, there are parallels to Mulroney’s ’88 win in that the PC’s had to fend off pesky Preston Manning and the Reform Party in order to protect the fortress. Mulroney defended his fortress in 1988 before watching the walls crumble in 1993; the assault on O’Toole’s fortress is happening in real-time.

Prime Minister O’Toole?  It could happen, but he needs a combination of Joe Clark math and Mulroney ’88 magic.

In a future post, I will look at the Liberal path to re-election.

**

Table 1: Results from six (Progressive) Conservative wins

With Election Day looming, the Liberals and Conservatives are basically stalemated.  The uncertainty of the outcome and the momentum changes are gruelling for those involved in the campaigns. I cannot help but channel my own past experiences and think of the various psychologies that must be at work in the war rooms and among grassroots supporters.

For the Liberals, about a week before the election call, they had the jaunty bounce of those who read positive poll results and gleeful reports of their opponents’ demise.  The pundit/Twitter consensus dictated that a majority was to be had, that the Conservatives were “in trouble”, and that the Liberals should “go now” to “get a mandate” – all of this very enticing. 

Who knows whether there were voices inside the room that expressed caution, advocated for going earlier, or later.  In the days leading up to the August 15^th election call, Afghanistan was careening out of control.  It’s hard when you have set out a campaign plan, signalled to the world that this is your intention, then face the prospect of pulling back from your plan when the plane is almost in the air.  At some moment, the Liberal campaigners must have considered whether the election call should be postponed.  But the hawks prevailed.

I can relate to that.  The Liberal campaign team has been through the wars.  A pitch-perfect come-from-behind win in 2015, a jarring 2019 re-election effort that was preceded by the JWR / SNC Lavalin controversy, blown sideways by blackface, followed by the onslaught of COVID, social movements of “Me Too” and “Black Lives Matter”, and the sorrow unleashed by the identification of 215 unmarked graves at the Kamloops Residential School.  They have collectively faced a lot of situations in elections and in government, and Afghanistan was the latest in a long list. Camaraderie, loyalty, and trust is built through tough and challenging times. Plus, let’s face it, Justin Trudeau is a political unicorn – he is a brand unto himself.  Every Canadian has an opinion about him, love him or hate him, and when you have that ability to command attention, it’s very unique.  The braintrust was undoubtedly confident in him, themselves, and pushed on.  

We know now the Liberals did not get their campaign off to an auspicious start, facing a hotter than usual national media corps that had Afghanistan on split screen, demanding to know “Why now?”  The Liberals didn’t give a good answer.  Immediately, some conjured up ghosts of David Peterson’s Ontario Liberals of 1990 who called a summer election at the seemingly high heights of his powers only to suffer a humiliating and decisive defeat to Bob Rae’s NDP.  

What is clear that two weeks into this campaign, the Liberals had an increasingly sticky problem.  Voters were shifting, particularly in Ontario.  Some excited pollsters proclaimed the Conservative “freight train” was on its way to a majority.  Pretty bold.  In the Liberal war room, confidence and experience could well have translated into slower reaction to events unfolding around them.  However, with confidence and experience, the ability to marshal resources to turn the campaign in another direction could make for a major impact.  That brings about memories about past campaigns like 2004 when Paul Martin entered the campaign period as the odds-on favourite, but was pressed hard by upstart Stephen Harper and the newly re-united Conservatives.  David Herle, Martin’s campaign manager, spoke on his podcast Curse of Politics about hitting the panic button in 2004 when Liberal polling numbers dipped below 30%.  The old plan was thrown into the garbage and a new plan was drawn up.  Martin’s Liberals rallied, went negative, dug up some primo opposition research, and formed a minority government.  

I was involved in the B.C. election campaign in 2017 where our team was stocked with experience and had an ample supply of confidence.  The start of this federal campaign was eerily familiar.  A flat start followed by (speaking for myself) a slow-to-realize reckoning about what was happening.  The voters were moving with their feet while our campaign heads were up in the clouds.  We scrapped and fought to get back on a better footing, but every time we made a step forward, or had a plan we thought would work, we had a setback to stall us.  We simply could not pull away from our competition nor could they pull away from us.  Similar feeling in 1996 in B.C. where we were way ahead, then we were way behind, and caught back up to even.  For the final two weeks, we could not generate momentum and neither could our competition.  That feeling you are looking for is when, no matter what you do, it comes up roses, is Momentum.  The campaign office buzz gets louder.  Everyone is walking faster, with more urgency.  Lawn signs fly out of the office.   I can only imagine that the second and third weeks of this campaign were challenging for the Liberals – they didn’t have that feeling.  They were imploring support, rather than receiving it. 

What about the Conservatives? I have been involved in and seen campaigns where there was no faith in the campaign team, the leader, or any prospect of victory.  It really comes down to a key distinction – does the campaign team and leader believe in themselves, or is the effort truly doomed?

On the eve of the election call, the Conservative campaign was roundly crapped on for running a juvenile social media ad that was a takeoff of a scene from the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  What were they up to? The political intelligentsia pounced on the perceived amateurism and a Conservative MP was compelled to call out his own national campaign team (never a good sign).  Meanwhile, the video got over a million hits.  Whether the Conservatives were playing 4-D chess or screwing around is beside the point.  The team could have fallen apart amidst caucus and internal discord. Instead, it looks like the Wonka controversy served to reinforce the Conservative campaign’s “us against the world” mentality.

The internal infighting is often the result of insecurity and not believing in the plan as grassroots supporters are influenced by media commentary. There’s nothing that rankled me more than to hear defeatists. “We should try to save our core seats” was a common refrain. My uncle, a WWII veteran, not to mention a candidate for Pearson in ’65, talked about those who got “hemorrhoids on their way to Halifax”, meaning some people weren’t really up for a fight.  Or you hear complaints about the campaign team not being up to the job.  In fact, I read about my job performance in the Vancouver Sun one day: “some Liberals must be wondering whether McDonald is over his head in this campaign”.  I’m sure the columnist had been hearing from a few Schadenfreudians.  There’s a lot of them when you’re losing, but they are hard to find when you win.

You gotta ignore the whispers, even when they’re loud, because battle-scarred politicos know that anything is possible.  If you have been around long enough, you have seen it happen.  I was part of efforts that were more like comets than campaigns – Sharon Carstairs’ Manitoba breakthrough in 1988, Gordon Wilson taking the B.C. Liberals from obscurity to Official Opposition, and watched from afar as Justin Trudeau went from third to first in 2015, and, last month, Nova Scotia’s PC’s taking power after being leagues under water months earlier.  Conventional wisdom is often wrong.  How many more times does that need to be proven? Most pundits and media experts play it safe.  They stick to the consensus.  Smart politicos understand and have a pulse for voters and know that they can move quickly, decisively, and sometimes imperceptibly, especially during the writ period.  Erin O’Toole and his campaign team likely believed, and likely still do, that they could win. Smaller parties, like the NDP, the Greens, and the Peoples Party cling to the hope of anything is possible as well.  Need I say it? Campaigns Matter!

As the campaign moved through its first week, the Conservatives would have been feeling good.  They launched successfully, including a smooth platform unveiling.  While the Liberals stumbled, Erin O’Toole had a clear path to introduce himself to Canadians.  The Conservatives were doing some things differently – the platform, charting a path for middle ground, and communicating and touring in a new way.  Likely, they were feeling, “Our plan is starting to work.”  They were probably feeling that on the ground too. As the first week rolled into the next, the public polling numbers were creating an environment that Conservative prospects were being taken more seriously, which made the Liberal call of the election a bigger story.  Had Justin blown it? A nice run of momentum started to unfold that must have felt like uncharted territory.  Who knows what Conservative internal polling numbers showed, but public poll numbers are avidly read by grassroots supporters and the 99% of headquarters staff that don’t see the closely guarded internal tracking. Things were looking up! The Conservative inside voice: “Do we dare to dream? Are we allowed to have nice things?”

Many campaigns go through phases, which makes sense.  As one party gets the upper hand, the main rival normally does everything in its power to push back.  In situations where a government has been in power for a long time, it’s harder for an incumbent government to push back when ‘time for a change’ is in the air.  It has to be compelling.  As much as the national media has its inherent biases, they like a big story more. Justin Trudeau blowing the election is a big story.  An exciting horse race is a bigger story than a dull pre-determined outcome, like the Chrétien re-elections in 1997 and 2000.  With Conservatives on the rise, and Liberals on the ropes, what’s gonna happen next? Is this the end of Justin, or will he prevail again? Stay tuned for more!

The Liberals have amped up the attacks and found one that seemed to hurt – on guns.  Frankly, I’m not even sure of the details of the issue.  All I heard was that the Conservatives had a policy, and they flip-flopped mid-campaign.  That is never a good idea.  It’s a tough spot – they likely felt they were taking water in urban and suburban ridings that they targeted for victory in the GTHA and Metro Vancouver, and among attainable younger and female voters. They must have come to believe that they could not persevere with the current policy so decided to course-correct.  One wonders how that decision was made, on what timeline, and who was in the room?  Was it decided by ‘committee’, were they forced by candidates threatening to speak out, was it a Leader directive?  Whatever the case, it created a new problem – a perception that the Leader is a flip-flopper when under pressure.  They may have believed their plan would work and talked themselves into it, perhaps without getting an outside read on it.  Whether or not voters even care about the gun issue or how the Conservatives responded, it will be having an effect on the Liberal war room by putting wind in their sails, and on the Conservatives who may have the sinking feeling that they were outfoxed by the Liberals on an attack that they had to know was coming. They should have been able see that big red missile from one coast to the other.

In 2013, the BC Liberal campaign seized on a mid-campaign flip flop by the NDP leader.  Similarly, it was an issue that everyone could see coming but the NDP tried to finesse it.  The narrative became not that issue – oil pipelines – but leadership. The leader was a weathervane.

We are at that point now in this election where it’s truly up for grabs – everyone knows it – with the final French language debate followed by the lone English language debate.  By the time the leaders walk off the stage on Thursday night, it’s a ten-day sprint to final voting day. 

The debates are high stakes.  My first campaign in 1984 was as a lowly, yet devoted young Liberal in no-hope riding.  John Turner was a very admirable leader with an impeccable record of public service.  Yet, he took on the leadership at the tail end of an almost-uninterrupted 21-year run of Liberal government- and he was rusty.  In that year’s election debate, Brian Mulroney delivered a devastating critique of Liberal patronage appointments.  The election was over that night, though it limped on for weeks.  In 1988, the rematch debate delivered a different thunderbolt when Turner delivered a passionate, patriotic attack on Mulroney over Free Trade.  The effect was immediate and the Liberals rocketed to the top of the polls after starting the campaign in third and withstanding an attempted leadership coup. However, Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives had time on their side and wheeled against the Liberals with a furious negative onslaught, prevailing on election night.  

In 1991, I attended the B.C. Leaders debate as part of a motley crew of Liberal campaign volunteers.  Leader Gordon Wilson strutted around the small CBC dressing room, bare chested, focusing on his breathing exercises, and astutely disregarding the scattershot advice being tossed at him by me and others. He knew what he had to, and he delivered the most memorable line in B.C. election debate history.  That debate blew up the campaign and led to the end of the Social Credit Party.  I was learning early in my political life that debates matter and how they could turn the psychology of campaigns upside down.

I never had fun watching a debate after 1991.  Henceforth, my party was expected to win and no longer a plucky insurgent. Debates brought stress – even when I had nothing to do with the preparation.  I could barely watch.  When things went well, we cheered, and when things didn’t go well, we rationalized that it wasn’t a big deal, but sometimes you had those “uh oh” moments.  Thinking back to provincial debates over the years, I don’t recall many dramatic moments – I just remember a lot of careful preparation undertaken by the debate teams and the pressure on the leaders.  

When I directed the 2013 BC Liberal campaign, I had little to do with debate prep. It was not my strength and certainly not my happy place.  We had a great team of advisors that thought through the content, the camera angles, and how best to rehearse.  But I do remember watching the debate and feeling good and feeling proud of our team and our leader, Christy Clark. It was exactly how you want to feel at a seminal moment of the campaign.  Then what followed was that feeling of momentum, not just in my bones, but in our nightly tracking.  The debate was a big factor in our ultimate success.

Debate night must be a moment aspiring leaders imagine for years.  Other than election night, it is probably the most exciting moment of the campaign, especially when there are fireworks. This is Justin Trudeau’s third election, and Jagmeet Singh’s second.  Erin O’Toole is the newcomer.  Their relative experience in debates will flow into their leaders’ teams.  How to protect against over-confidence?  How to build up under-confidence? How to get the leaders in ‘the zone’?  And uncluttered. A common problem with leaders is that they are over-scheduled.  Have their teams found the right balance to let the Leaders rest, think and prepare, amidst a frenzied election campaign?  Have they settled on their final debate strategy or are they spitballing until the stage lights turn on? 

The French language debates are over and on English language debate night, thousands of campaign volunteers will be watching every moment and the psychology of their respective campaigns will be impacted by how they feel their leaders performed.  In fact, the campaigns will tell their volunteers how their leader performed.  “We won!”.  Polls will be generated to show they won.  A furious spin war will be waged with edicts to grassroots supporters to share, tweet, Instagram, TikTok, phone, doorknock, and telepathically transmit that their leader won the debate.

That’s where this story ends for now.  The final ten days will be a roller coaster ride for all campaigns.  Their hopes are invested in their leaders and in themselves.  At the centre of it all is two campaign war rooms that are vying to govern.  The Liberal team, is no doubt, facing the Conservative challenge squarely in the eyes now, and drawing upon its collective experience and confidence in order to prevail, while exhorting supporters to stay true and steady in order to beat off the surprising Conservative challenge.  The Conservative team is thirsty for a win, yearning for its taste from the goblet of victory, made sweeter by the doubters, while keeping at bay the nagging feeling, nurtured by past defeats, that it could fall out of their grasp just when it seemed victory was so close.