Matt Gurney is a Toronto-based journalist, broadcaster and freelance contributing columnist for the Star. Reach him via email:聽matt@readtheline.ca
When my editor asked me recently whether I had any thoughts on a Conservative election post-mortem, my reply was simple: we have to use the term post-mortem in a more literal sense than normal. The Conservatives don鈥檛 need to merely review the campaign. They need to figure out precisely what killed them. Because unless they find an answer, they won鈥檛 know how to stop it from killing them next time.
There鈥檚 been a lot of criticism of the Tory effort, and I鈥檝e made some of it myself. It was clear from the outset and even the lead-up to the vote that the campaign was overly invested in a plan conceived before U.S. President Donald Trump鈥檚 trade war began, before talk of annexing Canada began and before Mark Carney had replaced Justin Trudeau as prime minister. There was a process of acceptance among Conservatives that took far too long. They did talk about Trump and Canadian sovereignty, but only in a pro forma way at first. It was a box-ticking exercise: there, we did it; now let鈥檚 talk about the carbon tax.
The Liberals, meanwhile, made Trump the centre of their campaign 鈥 and won. The Conservatives鈥 delay in recognizing that their own campaign was off-target is a leadership failure, full stop. Staffing changes at the top seem warranted. None seems imminent.
All that said, though, looking at the numbers renders any analysis of what happened in the election a complicated business. Pierre Poilievre鈥檚 party captured a greater share of the popular vote in this election than did the parties that won our last five majority governments. Whatever criticisms of the Conservative campaign exist, the party achieved a result that would have been entirely sufficient under normal circumstances.
And that鈥檚 why this post-mortem must be more like a literal autopsy than most after-action campaign reviews are. The Conservatives need to know what it was about this election that caused them to lose despite an outcome that should have been good enough. They need a cause of death.
The obvious and somewhat glib answer, of course, is that the Conservatives lost because the Liberals got more votes, and that鈥檚 true. Both parties achieved eye-poppingly high vote tallies and shares. The Liberals benefitted from a consolidation of voters who would normally have gone to the smaller parties behind them. That wasn鈥檛 a neat process: some NDP voters went to the Conservatives, too, as their party collapsed. But they went to the Liberals more, by a two-to-one margin. The Bloc Qu茅b茅cois also bled heavily to the Liberals. For Carney, that was enough.
The Conservatives need to know in how many ridings this shift from the Bloc and NDP toward the Liberals made it impossible for them to win. Only after they determine that can they start to ask the questions they really need to: How likely is this Bloc and NDP shift to be permanent, or at least to be a feature of the next few elections? Specifically, did the NDP get hit by a perfect storm, or is the party obsolete and functionally dead?
I have no opinion on that. I鈥檓 still trying to figure out what happened in the first place. But 鈥淗ow likely is it that the federal NDP is dead?鈥 seems like a critical question for the Conservatives to answer.
If they conclude that it鈥檚 not likely, that may well complete the post-mortem. If the NDP bounces back, that could be enough to assure future Tory wins.
If the Conservatives conclude that the NDP is likely out of the fight for the time being, though, then they need to figure out how to win elections entirely different from the ones we鈥檝e gotten used to over the past few decades. And that won鈥檛 be easy. As we鈥檝e already seen, this iteration of the Conservative Party ain鈥檛 great at adapting.
Opinion articles are based on the author鈥檚 interpretations and judgments of facts, data and events. More details
Matt Gurney is a Toronto-based journalist, broadcaster and
freelance contributing columnist for the Star. Reach him via
email:聽matt@readtheline.ca
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