Canada’s election was supposed to be a cakewalk for Justin Trudeau. It’s turned into a dogfight.
On August 15, Canada’s ruling Liberal Party called a federal election for September 20 – over two years ahead of schedule – in an attempt to go from a minority government to a majority. This is in spite of the fact that Trudeau was able to pass nearly everything he seriously put forward in the 21 months his most recent government lived before he pulled the plug. Canada had stammered through the COVID-19 pandemic better than many other wealthy nations (which doesn’t say a lot), despite a slow initial vaccine rollout, and the country had fared significantly better than the United States (always a helpful bogey for a Canadian leader to point to).
Nearly all Canadian political commentators called this election wrong at the start, expecting a long Trudeau victory lap. Initially we thought that Trudeau would have had an easier road than has been the case, although perhaps lacking enough wind in his sails to achieve a majority. Trudeau himself, seeing his opponents’ weaknesses but completely oblivious to his own, believed that a decent COVID-19 record and a recovering economy, combined with unpopular or unknown competition, would allow him a relatively smooth and unencumbered path to the coveted parliamentary majority. Conservative leader Erin O’Toole’s first year at the helm of his party had been that of an invisible captain of a rudderless ship. The Conservatives and the other parties, including the left-of-centre New Democratic Party (NDP), were all below their traditional levels of support, with the Greens engaged in vicious internal feuds to boot. With the Liberals needing to gain only 15 new seats, and with 2020 provincial elections in New Brunswick and British Columbia successfully turning minority governments into majorities, the path seemed both open and inviting.
This presumptive script has not been followed, least of all by events themselves. Canada has fallen into a fourth COVID-19 wave, with the prospect that this may be the longest and deadliest one yet – with numbers still rising, the news in some provinces is of cancelled surgeries and intensive-care units filled to capacity. On August 31, Statistics Canada announced that the economy had shrunk 0.3 percent in the second quarter of 2021, contrary to an expected growth of 0.6 percent. Trudeau’s announcement of the early election also happened to fall on the same morning as news broke of the Taliban’s retaking of Afghanistan and of the massive earthquake in Haiti – two countries of significance to Canada’s ruling class, for reasons including mineral profits and cheap textile labour. The Afghanistan debacle – a huge embarrassment not just for US imperialism, but Canadian imperialism too – was front-page news for the first half of the campaign and portrayed Trudeau and his government as incompetent and insensitive to the plight of people in Afghanistan who worked supporting Canada’s military.
Liberals Stumble
One genuinely surprising aspect of the election has been the Liberal Party’s astonishing lack of preparations for an election that they enacted, one which they had been building toward for months. Trudeau had crisscrossed the country over the summer months making large and splashy promises on childcare, housing, mass transit, and energy, promising that the Liberals would “Build Back Better.” But the Liberals have been unable to explain precisely why they called this election at all, or what they could accomplish with a majority but not with a minority, leaving everyone with the obvious (and correct) answer that simply winning a majority government was the sole consideration. Yves-François Blanchet, leader of the Quebec-nationalist Bloc Québécois party, caught Trudeau out on this in the first French-language leaders’ debate, rhetorically asking the prime minister, “If you were in a majority government, would we be in an election right now?” The content of Trudeau’s stammered response was inconsequential.
The subjective electoral factor of Liberal arrogance and hypocrisy also enters into play. From the start, Trudeau has presented himself as an anti-racist, environmentalist, feminist, and so on. The first of these claims has been exploded by his numerous failures on Indigenous rights, from hollow words in response to the rediscovery of thousands of unmarked graves at residential schools, to continued lack of clean drinking water on reserves, as well as the photos of a young Trudeau in blackface which came to light during the election of 2019. His environmental bona fides are highlighted by purchasing the Trans Mountain oil sands pipeline for C$4.5 billion in 2018, the planned expansion of which had been blocked by the courts until certain conditions were met. The expansion, which is now being built with a targeted completion date of early 2023, has cost at least an additional C$12.6 billion so far (some estimate up to C$20 billion). It will triple the pipeline’s carrying capacity to nearly 900,000 barrels per day, and further boost climate change, after a summer of the heat dome, heat deaths and raging forest fires.
What are the Conservatives’ Policies?
The Conservative Party has been the main beneficiary of the Liberals’ disorientation, and the two parties are now neck-and-neck at the top of the polls, with support for each fluctuating between 31 and 34 per cent. Erin O’Toole was elected leader of his party in August 2020 as a “true blue” conservative, having positioned himself to the right of moderate front-runner Peter MacKay. But O’Toole has run toward the centre in this campaign at nearly every key point, talking about substantial spending programs, declaring himself in favour of abortion rights, reversing his party’s previous opposition to gun-bans, marginalizing his more unhinged candidates, and relegating to the background his party’s talk of balancing the federal budget inside of a decade. He has rightly been criticized for changing his mind every week.
He is generally doing everything he can to appear as an unobjectionable and down-to-earth alternative to not only the smug, elite Justin Trudeau, but also to his Conservative leadership predecessors, the hardened neoliberal Stephen Harper, and the socially conservative Andrew Scheer. However, as O’Toole tries to move to the centre, he is also losing support to the far right.
The far-right People’s Party of Canada (PPC) has been able to capitalize both on O’Toole dropping long-held Conservative articles of faith and the controversy over vaccine mandates and passports. The leader Maxime Bernier (who lost the 2017 Conservative leadership election to Scheer by less than two per cent), has spoken to crowds sometimes in excess of a thousand people and has polled in the double-digits in at least three polls. Trudeau’s campaign stops, meanwhile, have been enlivened by many of the same people attending Bernier’s rallies, with PPC and some Conservative supporters disrupting Trudeau’s rallies and even pelting him and his campaign bus with gravel at one event. (Incidentally, police have so far made only one arrest in any of these incidents, that of a PPC riding association president days after the event – we leave to your imagination what their response might be if land defenders did anything similar.) This is another example of a vacuum on the left leading to a relative swelling of support for the false ideas of the right.
New Democrats Move a Bit to the Left
Finally, the role and position of the NDP (Canada’s party with social-democratic roots) is always a complex subject for Canadian socialists. As with many other nominally social-democratic parties, it has moved rightward over the past few decades, loosening its ties with labour and in 2013 reducing its reference to socialism in its constitution, replacing it with “democratic socialism” in its preamble. The NDP have correctly attempted to portray the Liberals and Conservatives as fingers of the same hand and have risen slightly in the polls. They are still barely breaking 20 per cent, however, which is not far above their traditional range. They are set to make modest gains and it seems likely that they will be the third largest party in the new parliament and, probably with a minority government, in a position to force significant concessions from the governing party. (Unfortunately, this has been the extent of the party’s parliamentary power since their foundation.) If this is the case, they should use this leverage for policies such as confiscatory pandemic profit taxes, immediate action to end poverty on Indigenous reserves, and a robust series of social housing construction. A Trudeau government, especially if it is returned with fewer seats than a month ago, would start in an incredibly weak position. An O’Toole-led government is very unlikely as he probably won’t win the most seats and other minority parties – NDP and Bloc – are unlikely to support the Conservatives. It would be a serious mistake for the NDP leadership to do a deal with O’Toole.
Underlying Dissatisfaction
Canada is stereotypically seen as a calm and polite country with uninteresting politics. This election has had an element of anger among a small number, mostly on the right, which has surprised many. Moreover, there is a wider undertone of dissatisfaction at all established political parties. This is most expressed in the lingering disgust that there’s an election at all – the very calling of one, early and during a pandemic, the Liberals assumed would be a topic of discussion only for the campaign’s first two or three days. But, as there are no big defining issues and many of the most critical issues such as climate change, inequality or redressing the continuing oppression of Indigenous peoples are not being addressed, their calling an election mid-pandemic continues to rumble. This dissatisfaction should perhaps not be surprising: there is no end in sight to the pandemic that has already lasted 18 months; COVID lockdowns and restrictions have been implemented, rescinded, and re-implemented by various levels of government with seemingly little rhyme or reason; already record-high wealth inequality has vaulted even higher (Canada’s 44 billionaires have increased their total wealth by C$78 billion (US$61 billion) since March 2020).
Everyone Will Spend More
The most concrete and significant of the Liberals’ pre-election promises was a $10-per-day national childcare program, with the federal government reaching funding agreements with most provinces and territories. Despite a recommendation for a national childcare program 50 years ago, and concerns about exemptions and the pace of implementation, this is a victory for the working class, especially women workers. This is also a key difference in the platforms between the Liberals and Conservatives, with O’Toole saying he’ll scrap the agreements and offer childcare tax credits instead, an approach that doesn’t work as it will not reduce the cost of child care and would help the better off, not low-income workers.
If there is one defining change in this election compared to the last (which was notable mostly for being so unnotable), it’s that the major parties’ platforms are all unashamedly unafraid of spending and deficits, including well past the hoped-for end of COVID-19. This is true even of the Conservatives, who propose to increase spending by a further $50 billion. Of course, their campaign ads do still talk of the Liberals’ deficits and “reckless spending.” Government pandemic expenditures, unprecedented in size since World War II, have pushed the federal debt north of C$1.1 trillion (US$875 billion). The NDP, Conservatives, and Liberals are all making large promises on housing, one of the campaign’s few solid issues. These three parties promise 500,000, 1 million, and 1.4 million housing units, respectively – impressive numbers on paper. However, only the NDP makes even a pretense to “affordability,” with the other parties content to give more handouts to the developer- and landlord-dominated housing industry. The NDP are also calling for wealth taxes and pandemic profit taxes on what they call the “ultra-rich” which, though fairly tame, is still a move forward from what any party has proposed in decades.
Looking Ahead
Socialist Alternative is not in the NDP, and we have many disagreements with the party’s policies. Provincial NDP governments have recently governed as regular capitalist governments in Nova Scotia, Alberta, and currently in British Columbia. However, we believe that a strong NDP showing will have the most beneficial impact on the status of struggle in Canada, particularly for young people. As we wrote at the start of the election, “[a] Liberal minority government, with strong NDP and weak Conservative showings, looks to be the best final alignment that the working class can reasonably hope for in this election. […] Voting NDP, considering their improved platform and the potential for events to push them further left, is the best call for working people on September 20.” A left wing emerging in the NDP is a possibility and would gain support similar to Sanders and Corbyn. Socialist Alternative would welcome this development, and warn against the associated shortcomings and work to help the new movement to avoid them.
This election and its fallout are part of a turning point in Canadian politics driven by COVID, recession, climate change, growing world instability and conflict between the US and China. A minority government is at this point a virtual certainty, facing uncertainty in Canada and the world. Whether the Liberals or Conservatives end up with the most seats, the autumn economy will still be in the basement, COVID-19 will still be spreading, and there may be a need – unfathomable to most just a few months ago – for a further extension of pandemic benefits. Whether these and other benefits are granted will depend on how bad the economy gets, as well as the willingness of unions, young people, the Indigenous movement, and others to immediately, without a breathing period, squeeze the new government through demonstrations and strikes.
Canadians often see themselves as sheltered from the larger world situation. This will increasingly not be the case. This unpredictable election is just a mild preview of what’s to come.
