EXPLAINING CANADA

STRUCTURAL UNDERPINNINGS OF THE RECENT ELECTION

So, once again, quaint little Canada has received much attention from around the world as a consequence of its recent federal election. And, as has been the norm recently, I've seen lots of Americans and Europeans forwarding analyses of what happened during that election. Many have been particularly keen to pontificate on what went wrong. Though, it's always amusing how many of such commentators preface their analysis with the concession that they, in fact, don't really that know that much about Canada. And in fact don't really follow Canadian politics very closely.

Which always leaves me a little curious about why they're commenting in the first place. I would think you'd have to know minimally something about the history and political culture of a country to presume to say anything about its elections. Though I suppose there is a sufficiently superficial level of analysis that allows some kind of generic imposition of a simplistic, standardized analytical model, without accounting for any of the structural factors that in fact mold and direct any country’s political destiny.

So, let’s see if we can do better than that. I will attempt here a modest correction to a lot of what I’ve (and probably you’ve) heard said about the recent Canadian elections. Obviously, in a mere 3500ish words one cannot even approach anything like a sufficiently detailed explanation to unpack all the relevant considerations. And certainly I know there are people who actually are informed about the relevant Canadian context who will quibble, at least quibble, if not downright dispute some of my claims here. But this is a perfectly credible and empirically defensible explanation of how to understand this most recent Canadian election.

I’ll organize my comments into the three levels of micro (outcomes, strategy and coalition); meso (the 21^st century electoral landscape); and meta (federalism, demographics, and constitutionalism). I would describe that as moving from the most superficial to the most structurally relevant observations.

This, of course, is not the first time that I've written on this blog about Canada in an effort to help non-Canadians (and frankly, even some Canadians) understand the dynamics in the country. I'd particularly recommend the piece I wrote about how the Charter of Rights has been weaponized in the interest of managerial liberalism (see here and here). That post was written from my perspective at the moment (which of course is always true). That is to say I framed it through the analytical lens of my then most recent book, The Managerial Class on Trial. If I were writing that piece today, I'd also frame it as reflecting the increased hegemony of spatialism, with the benefit of my more recent model of the phenotype wars. Still I continue to think that that analysis stands up well, and might be a valuable read for folks interested in the topic of this post.

And a second caveat to throw in here is that, frequently on this Substack (and elsewhere), I've made the point that I don't think mass electoralism usually is a winning method for what I now would call temporals, and their ability to influence institutions and policies away from spatialist priorities and managerial liberalism. I have repeatedly made the case that North American agrarian populism largely collapsed as a result of its attempt to leverage mass electoralism.¹ In my forthcoming book on the pluralist constitution, I'll indicate that the same fate befell the Social Catholic pluralist corporatism movement, in part in France, but certainly in Germany.

So, I don’t think regular readers will be unaware of my opinion that mass electionalism is ill-advised for those who would aspire to advance a temporalist, pluralist, or corporatist agenda. So obviously my interest in such things is not toward a refinement of the mass electoral method. Still, I do think that such elections can be valuable markers, significant signals, of deeper processes and structures within the relevant jurisdiction. That's why I'm going through the trouble of dissecting all this, not only to help Americans and Europeans better understand what happened in the election and what is happening in Canada, but because I do think there are lessons to be drawn from such events.

Micro: outcomes, strategy and coalition

First, in response to the MAGA online influencers, bloated with delusions of ultimate victory, and who see the rest of the world through American navels²: if the sure-fire recipe for success of the Conservatives was to act unabashedly Trumpy, and go on all their popular U.S. podcasts and video channels, why is it that the party whose leader, Max Bernier, did exactly that only managed 0.7 percent of the popular vote in this recent election? In fact despite many years of playing the “Canadian Trump” card, and regularly appearing on big U.S. pod and video casts, his party has seen a continuous fall of popular vote since its founding?

Obviously, Bernier’s cringe, tone deaf, relentless Trump mimicry is not the sole explanation for his party's implosion. It is difficult to imagine though that the approach helped one iota as it's near impossible to do much worse in the popular vote than they did. Canada simply is not a mini-U.S.; its regionally varied history, political culture, legal and governance traditions, and constitution (and Constitution) are between significantly and dramatically different from the U.S. What works politically in one context offers no recipe for success in the other.

Two other claims I’m hearing from both American and European commentators is that Poilievre and the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) totally blew the election, squandering a giant lead in the polls from back in late 2024, and had a dreadful election night. There is an additional claim one hears, probably more among Canadian commentators, that the problem for the Conservatives was the collapse of the New Democratic Party (NDP) vote. None of these claims really stand up to scrutiny.

On this supposed squandered lead from last year, often polled at over 20 points: first of all, calling it a squandered lead is quite misleading – implying a loss of popular support for the party. In fact, over the last year the CPC hit its high watermark average at about 45 percent of the popular vote. However, in the election, they wound up with over 41 percent. So, at most you can say they lost something just over three percent of the popular vote. Not great, but not some historic collapse as many (particularly those MAGA online influencers) continuously repeat. The truth though is that those lost percentage points started abandoning the CPC immediately after Justin Trudeau’s announced resignation.

In fact, they were never real Conservative votes. They were Liberals who hated Trudeau, but couldn’t stomach the NDP (many considering its leader Jagmeet Singh as Trudeau’s water-boy), so parked their votes with the CPC. There was never any doubt that if Trudeau resigned those people would return to their natural party, the Liberals. And that’s indeed what the polls showed: that three percent or so returned to the Liberals immediately after Trudeau announced his resignation, and as the Liberal leadership contest unfolded. If Trudeau had fought the next election, it is quite possible those people would have voted Conservative. Once he was gone, the world of Canadian politics began very quickly defaulting back to normal. What caused the dramatic shift in relative popular support between the top two parties was the complete collapse of the NDP, most of whose vote went to the Liberals. (Though, as we’ll see below, the story isn’t quite that straightforward.) The CPC didn’t blow that giant lead because in reality-land they never had it.

As for the CPC having a dreadful night. Well the leader losing his own seat wasn’t great. Though it’s surprising how many non-Canadian commentators neglect to mention that the project to unseat Poilievre was exceptional and plausibly accused of being unethical. A group claiming to be motivated by a desire to see electoral reform away from the “first past the post” system in Canada supposedly made a stunt (as admittedly, they have in the past) of flooding Poilievre’s riding with 80 additional protest candidates.

In the end, the ballot in that riding had 91 listed candidates. Oddly, the leader of the political party that broke its 2015 promise to introduce just such electoral reform, and whose riding was basically next door to Poilievre’s, did not see his riding’s ballot swamped in this manner. Given the ostensible purpose of the action, that does seem peculiar. To what degree such a ploy contributed to Poilievre’s riding problem, that action combined with the remarkable turnout level in his riding, indicates that conventional electoral practices were not at work here.

The bigger question though is, if we acknowledge that the phony lead of 2024 was always a mirage, how in fact did the Conservatives do? To fully understand my reasoning you’ll have to wait for the meso analysis just below. But I think they had a pretty good night. The last time I checked the numbers (due to recounts changes may occur), the CPC had increased its seat total about three times more than had the Liberals. That’s no chump change on its own. However, even more important is how they came to have such a dramatic increase of seats, which brings us back to the NDP collapse.

While many commentators say that the NDP collapse explains the electoral gains for the Liberals, this is not quite true. It was more likely the smaller though still significant collapse of the Bloc Quebecois provided the Liberals with their seat increase; in terms of seats, the NDP collapse appears to have been more beneficial to the Conservatives. It’s certainly true that most of the NDP popular vote – estimates are around two-thirds – went to the Liberals. However, this proved to be a very inefficient vote, gathered up in either ridings where the Liberals couldn’t win or more dramatically in heavily spatialist, managerial class metropolitan ridings where the Liberals were going to win already.

In contrast, the approximately one third of the NDP-defecting vote, which went to the Conservatives, was largely blue collar workers, including a strong union representation, which tipped the scales in many otherwise closely contested votes in industrial ridings of Ontario. Depending of course on how you parse it, arguably the majority of the 25 increase in CPC seats came from such Ontario ridings. At least in recent history, the idea of a heavy blue collar vote for the Conservatives would seem anomalous. But that’s the point: Poilievre is building a genuine new Canadian political realignment around a conservative-labour coalition, and the fruits of that strategy were tantalizingly displayed on election night.

While there is obviously a long way to go if the CPC is to continue down this path, this new coalition is the most intriguing realignment in Canadian politics since the 1980s. Poilievre's loss of his own seat threatens the sustainability of that realignment, but if he can retain control of the party and continue to build that new coalition, the next election might prove quite interesting.³ To fully flesh out this result from election night, though, we need to dig a little deeper into the meso-level of analysis.

Meso: the 21st century electoral landscape

In the short series on the Canadian Charter referred to above, I pointed out an apparent new reality in 21st Canadian federal government politics. Last week’s election only further contributes to the validity of that observation. There I ponder the prospect that this was due to the breakdown of the political legitimacy of managerial liberalism in Canadian federal politics – following the logic of my then recent book, The Managerial Class on Trial. At that time I did not have the phenotype wars model as a frame through which to assess those developments. Today I’d rewrite those posts with at least some additional nuance. However, even leaving aside for now phenotype war considerations, the following seems now indisputable.

In the 21st century Canadians do not give out majority governments easily (unless you have one of the most famous names in Canadian political history). They test out Prime Minister candidates with multiple minority governments before giving them a majority. They gave Paul Martin two minority tries before rejecting him. They gave Stephen Harper two minority tries before accepting him. After dissatisfaction with his unique untested majority, they offered Trudeau two more minorities to win back their support; a test which the polls showed that he clearly failed. Carney has now received the same treatment.

Again, why this is happening is open to debate. Notwithstanding my earlier explanation, it is notable that there has been other such periods in the past. Between 1962 and 1980 there were five minority governments, with only two majorities tucked between; which led, as of 1980, to a run of six consecutive majorities. Since the last in that series of majorities, as of 2004, there have only been two majorities and now seven minority governments.

Parenthetically, this testing out with minorities option may well be one of the features of the Canadian parliamentary system. It certainly leaves Canadians less vulnerable to tumultuous gales of ideological absolutism, and so less inclined to collapse into institutionalized partisan polarization than in the U.S. system – seemingly doomed to repeated erratic, destructive fluctuations, in which every new President’s first act is to sign dozens or even hundreds of Executive Orders, presuming to overturn the prior administration’s “regime.” Maybe I’m just expressing a Canadian preference; I’m guessing though many Canadians welcome the ability provided by the minority option to make slower, more measured and cautious political transitions.

In any event, in the next election, likely within the next couple years, if Poilievre can retain power in the CPC, and maintain, entrench, and expand his new coalition, he and his party will likely have to win at least one minority government before Canadians will give him a majority. Again, you have to actually know something about Canada's history, constitution, governance, and federalism to understand all this. Such understanding, though, leads to some considerably more probing insights into what’s unfolding within Canada, and what the recent election may be signaling.

Meta: federalism, demographics, and constitutionalism

Now I want to get into what is arguably the most important issues manifest in the election. Doing so better explains what happened in the election, what it “means” through different political lens, and what the election’s consequences may prove to be. I’m not going to repeat the history behind the discussion below. But for those not up to speed, I’d suggest reading at least the appendix to the second post on the Charter (see here).

Canada is a federation, with a dramatically skewed population distribution, and no formal institutions to balance out the representation of regional differences in values or interests, on the one hand; but on the other, it also has a constitutional amending formula which gives the more populous regions that benefit from the existing arrangement – Quebec particularly – a veto over the capacity to create or reform such institutions. Something like a U.S.-style Senate in which every province was equally represented, and which had real legislative power, would address this problem. The Supreme Court of Canada though has ruled that all ten provinces must approve such institutional and constitutional reform.⁴ As I’ll address momentarily, provinces that benefit from the current arrangement hardly can be expected to forsake such a veto if the proposed amendments compromised their benefits from the status quo.

Additionally, in the House, the Atlantic provinces are vastly more represented by seats than are the western provinces, particularly the prairie provinces. The Atlantic provinces simply have demographically disproportionate power within the House. According to my research assistant, oddly named Grok (what were his parents thinking?), the prairie provinces have on average 115,912 constituents per House seat, while the Atlantic provinces on average have 81,053 constituents per House seat. Grok assures me that this means that the prairie provinces have 43 percent less representation per capita than do the Atlantic provinces.

From the perspective of the west, a main problem here is that most of the Atlantic region and Quebec are heavy recipients of inter-provincial equalization transfer payments.⁵ In the west, this is felt to be especially egregious in the case of Quebec, where its vast wealth in hydroelectric power is not fully included in the calculations determining which provinces pay into the equalization program and which receive payments from it. Whereas the western provinces – underrepresented in the House, and without regional balancing representation in the Senate or other federal institutions – pay to support those recipient provinces.

So, it is in the economic interests of Quebec and the Atlantic provinces – over-represented in the House, and with a veto over reforming the Senate, or any other federal institution, to be regionally balanced – to keep the constitutionally and federally disadvantaged western provinces out of power. If the later gained power in Ottawa, there is a legitimate prospect of them reforming or eliminating the equalization payment policy.

So, for over half a century now, federal elections have become a repetition of the same battle over and over. With a few, brief fluctuations over that time, Conservatives have hardened into the party of the west, while the Liberals are the party of the east. This federal polarization took shape following the prairie oil boom of the late 1940s, out of which a new economic and demographic formation provided ideological and financial fuel to the Conservative party as advocate of western interests with the election of the Diefenbaker majority government of 1958.

Of course, on occasion there are complicating developments. For instance, the two Conservative majorities of Brian Mulroney in the 1980s were built from a coalition with Quebec nationalists. So, though Mulroney’s government did end the hated National Energy Program, overall it was focused more on addressing Quebec concerns than western ones. In broad strokes, though, this federal election polarization (Conservative west, Liberal east) is the impasse at which Canada has arrived. There does not appear to be constitutional solutions. Without such solutions, long term, the break-up of the country seems inevitable.

Increasingly there is talk in the west of secession. Alberta gets most of the attention in this regard, but there are some indications that such sentiment may be even greater in Saskatchewan. And it’s worth remembering that British Columbia is the birthplace of western separatism – though Vancouver and Victoria today might be regarded as colonial outposts of eastern interests and values.⁶ British Columba would have a tough logistic and geographic set of considerations to ponder were Alberta to seriously start down the secession path. But institutionally, undoubtedly, Alberta is the vanguard of western secessionist activism today.

And, interestingly, the day after the election, the Premier of Alberta announced changes to the province's referendum initiation law, dramatically lowering the bar for citizens initiation of referenda. Currently such an initiative would need to gather over 6,500 signatures a day within the designated time period. With the changes to be introduced, the threshold would be dramatically reduced to 1458 signatures a day. And according to the Alberta Prosperity Project, which has been accumulating for years a database of Albertans sympathetic to holding a secessionist referendum, they could meet that threshold today.

I appreciate there is some opinion that the federal government will attempt to use legal means to obstruct secessionist referenda in the west. That may well be true, but again, a more detailed knowledge of the Canadian context is necessary here. First, unlike the United States, the Supreme Court of Canada has clearly laid out a path for provincial secession from Canada. This court ruling has been codified in what’s called the Clarity Act. There’s no need for quibbling about the intentions of the founders; a clearly stated secessionist path is black letter law in Canada.

It’s notable too though that some in the Alberta secessionist movement are openly talking about working around the Clarity Act – with its challenging conditions of having seven other provinces onside to approve of the secession – and going the traditional secessionist route of garnering international recognition for Albertan independence. And, after all, with the Clarity Act and Supreme Court ruling which led to it, the legitimacy of secession has been legally acknowledged, quite in contrast for instance to Texas v White (1869). So, the dominant Canadian federal institutions cannot claim provincial secession is illegal in principle.

Nevertheless, certainly, we should expect legal challenges from the federal government if a province chooses that traditional path to secession. And, in any event, I appreciate that the current Liberal government, and the current Supreme Court, may have rather different views on these matters than those institutions did with the Clarity Act, in relation to potential Quebec secession back in the 1990s. But that brings us to the most important, and misunderstood, part of the Canadian Constitution, sec. 33 of the Charter.

While some people, especially uninformed Americans I’ve noticed, laughingly dismiss sec. 33 of the Charter, commonly referred to as the Notwithstanding Clause, assuming apparently it allows courts to over rule the Charter. In fact the section’s inclusion was demanded by the provinces during the Charter negotiations precisely to protect provinces’ federal authority from judicial overreach. (My regular readers will recognize this as a deeply heterarchical pluralist disposition embedded in the Canadian Constitution.) So if the courts attempt to block Alberta or any western province’s exploration of the secession option, with or without the Clarity Act, their range of legal predicate will be dramatically constrained by the provinces’ access to sec. 33 protections.

Finally, arguably the most consequential politician of western protest and autonomy, Preston Manning, founder and leader of the Reform Party and the influential Manning Centre⁷ and its associated conference – destination event for conservative Canadians – leading up to the election, published in the Globe and Mail an opinion piece anticipating that the election of the Liberals to another term will provide fuel to western secessionism. Following through on his threat, if that’s the right word, Manning is now involved in initiating what he’s calling a “Canada West Assembly,” which is to provide a forum for exploring different proposals for the west’s options and agreeing on the best course moving forward. All this is obviously still very preliminary, though as noted, Manning does have a track record of accomplishment on this front.

So, if we want to tie together these disparate points, it can be observed that for anyone with the required understanding of the Canadian context, what was at stake for Canada in the recent election was whether it was possible to build a federal coalition of western provincial autonomists and eastern blue collar workers, which pulled the rug out from under the longstanding east-west polarity. I’d assess that an informed understanding of the Canadian situation would lead to the conclusion that the election results were a valuable though only tentative step in that direction.

The seats gained in industrial Ontario embolden optimism along those lines. Though, at this point, there’s still a steep hill to climb. In the next election even further industrial riding gains would need to be made in Ontario and there would need to be a breakthrough on that front in the Atlantic provinces as well as in B.C., particularly on Vancouver Island. And the numbers may wind up requiring the winning of industrial riding seats in Quebec away from the Bloc — which may be asking a lot.

I wouldn’t presume to predict where any of this will lead. If such a coalition could be built it could at least for a while create a Canada-wide governing axis that might compensate for the absence of institutions to address the imbalance in regional representation. However, as with all political or electoral coalitions, it would only last as long as the exogenous circumstances prevailed. Any number of potential shifts in the economy or world affairs could break apart such a coalition. Whether that happened one election from now or five, at the end of that road Canadians would find ourselves back facing the same federal cul-de-sac. And regardless of the precise details in the fate of a potential governing coalition, secession offers no certain path to the future either.

There certainly have been outpourings of western secessionist sentiment in the past, which have amounted to nothing consequential. But it’s true that this may be the moment to strike while the proverbial iron is hot. It is plausible to claim that circumstances have not previously been as fortuitous as at the moment: e.g., a strong pro-sovereignty (if so far cagily silent on secession) Premier in Alberta; a surge of secessionist sentiment in Saskatchewan (and even surprising levels in B.C.); and the long preparatory work put in place by the Alberta Prosperity Project.

Plus, as the man falling off the high-rise building was heard saying as he passed each floor on the way down: so far, so good. Or, in another analogy, the turkey who expects the approaching farmer to come and feed him, and care for his creature comforts, doesn’t know it’s Thanksgiving Day. It would be a mistake to assume that just because past secessionist surges haven’t resulted in secession, or even a referendum, that none ever will. No country lasts forever. And Canada’s origin raises particular doubts about how sustainable it was ever going to be. But that’s a discussion for another day.⁸

There’s so much more to be said about the Canadian history and constitution (and Constitution) that could be unpacked to explain the specific tensions and structures that have catalyzed this recent election. Hopefully, though, these few remarks will at least provide a deeper historicity. While a lot of foreign (and some domestic) commentators saw this election through the lens of globalism vs nationalism (the latter a nonsensical term in relation to Canada), an actual grounding in localist analysis would recognize that the election and its implications were far more a product of particularist Canadian institutions and history.

So, to all the regular readers: with that little digression in place, in the next post we return to our exploration of Schmitt’s spatial revolution, with an examination of Karl Polanyi’s “great transformation.” So, if you want to be the first on your block to see that exciting discussion (and especially if you’re new to these parts), and haven’t yet, please…

And if you know someone else who’d be interested in what we get up here abouts, by all means, please…

Meanwhile: Be seeing you!

1. I make that case broadly in A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars. Though one can go to the source and see my doctoral thesis for the argument in relation to Canadian agrarian populists. I also think this is a fair reading of Lawrence Goodwyn’s major history of U.S. agrarian populists. For the concise version: Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

2. And indeed for some commentators of at least Canadian nativity, who amazingly (and this may be part of the issue) seem to know close to nothing about their native land’s history, political culture, or constitutional governance.

3. As I’m writing this, it appears a deal has already been made for an Alberta MP-elect to step down and offer his seat to Poilievre, which of course is standard practice for such situations in parliamentary systems.

4. The Supreme Court is another institution which could be federalized, allowing for regional balance to offset demographic voting. But it too, through constitutional requirement and standing precedent, is dominated by the demographically most populous provinces.

5. To be precise, the money is collected through taxation by the federal government and redistributed from there. Formally this is not a direct transfer between provinces. For many in the west, though, that is a distinction without a difference.

6. Those who would dismiss the idea of British Columbia joining western secessionism, due to the influence of the Vancouver and Victoria managerial class, should be reminded that in the early 1970s Toronto was very much the second ranked city in Canada. It was only after the initial election of the secessionist Parti Quebecois in 1976 that a massive flight of people, capital, and business HQs from Montreal to Toronto shifted the financial and demographic standing of the two cities. There’s little doubt that if Alberta went seriously down the path of secession, then B.C. citizens started entertaining the practicality of joining them, there would be a comparable flight from Vancouver to the east.

7. Rebranded with the, I must say rather anemic, name of the Canada Strong and Free Network.

8. I'm leaning toward, once the pluralist constitution book (almost complete) and the spatial revolution book (currently taking shape on this Substack) are done, writing a book about the phenotype wars in Canada, which given its huge geography and small population is a fascinating case study in the conflict between corporate pluralism and managerial liberalism.