Monday is election day here in Canada. We’re having a federal election (for my American readers, Canada has three tiers of government: Federal, provincial and municipal) and all the polls are showing that it’s a neck-and-neck race between the incumbent Liberal party under Justin Trudeau and the Conservatives under Andrew Scheer. The popular vote projection at 338Canada.com shows the gap between the two parties as less than the margin of statistical error. (For my American readers again, there are three-hundred and thirty-eight seats in the House of Commons, hence the name. In order to have a “majority” government, one party needs to hold at least 169 seats.)
While the outcome is impossible to predict, it’s clear the Liberals are going to lose the majority they’ve enjoyed — and done very little with — over the last four years. Whether we end up with a minority Liberal government or a minority Conservative government is… well, it’s too close to call, really. It’s so close that I haven’t even bothered to have a bet riding on this one, although my personal preferred outcome would be a weak Liberal minority government with the NDP holding the balance of power in either a formal or informal coalition agreement.
But, yeah… this one is way too close to call. I’ll likely spend Monday evening with an elbow on the bar watching the outcome… then living up to the name of this blog by pontificating on the outcome Tuesday morning.
If the above numbers from 338Canada.com are how it plays out, even with support from the NDP and the Green Party a Liberal-lead coalition will not have a majority. The Bloc Quebecois might end up playing kingmaker for either the Liberals or the Conservatives, whoever offers them a better deal. While the BQ is a centre-left party, they’re also a regional one; leaving aside the whole separatism thing, the BQ doesn’t work for all Canadians, just the ones living in Quebec. We shouldn’t be happy that a narrow focus on one region’s politics is going to have so much influence over the national debate for the next however-many years.
Of course, the operative question is if these numbers play out. 338Canada and various other polling services are all in agreement that nobody’s getting a majority, but I’ve never been convinced that predictive polling accurately reflects the voting intentions of the majority of Canadians anyway. Certainly the outcome of the 2015 election — a crushing Liberal victory — wasn’t reflected in the projections and polls until almost the day of the election. (Hell, the projections said the NDP was supposed to win that one for a while.)
Ultimately, the only poll which really matters is the one that gets tallied on the evening of the 21st. Obviously, I want a progressive outcome but mostly I hope the overall voter turnout is better than it’s historically been. Regardless of who you vote for, I think we can all agree that having only a small fraction of our electorate actually exercising their franchise isn’t a good thing for democracy — especially the younger vote. (The impressive increase of people voting at advance polls bodes well for a higher turnout overall, though: Like 4.7 million other Canadians I voted early because I’d already made my decision and I hate lineups.)
I have to admit a certain schadenfreude about the projections: The PPC’s prospects. Which are nil. They’re polling in single digits nationwide in the popular vote, and are not projected to win a single seat — even Bernier’s own seat in Beauce is too close a race to call between the PPC and Conservative candidates. PPC supporters are apparently aware of this and are already spinning conspiracy theories to explain away the real truth — which is that fewer than three percent of Canadians approve of the PPC’s overt racism, xenophobia and ties to white supremacist and fascist groups. (When one of your party’s founding members is a foreign neo-Nazi who spent time in jail for racially-motivated attacks, that’s a concern you really do need to address before the vast majority of the electorate will take you seriously.)
The PPC will never be in a position to form an official opposition party, much less a government, and despite the frothing virulence of some supporters, I have no doubt that Maxime Bernier knows it. I suspect that Bernier’s goals are to undercut Andrew Scheer’s bid for a majority government out of spite, and to set himself up as a right-wing pundit on the talking-head circuit for the rest of his life. The PPC will almost certainly be a flash in the pan and fade away after a couple of electoral failures.
The real concern I have with the PPC’s involvement in this election — aside from their open collaboration with violent fascist groups, for obvious reasons — is that the mainstream media is normalizing their extreme-right views by treating them as just another political party, when clearly they’re a lunatic-fringe outlier at best. Admittedly some large media outlets are belatedly addressing the issue but this should have been an issue from day one (although it has been in smaller progressive media sources.) As it is, the Overton Window in this country is being dragged much further to the right than any of us should be comfortable with.
Still, silver linings. I’m trying to stay optimistic. However Monday’s election turns out, we need to keep the conversation going on how to address far-right violence and white nationalism in this country. And if there’s one thing those purple PPC signs do, it’s to let people who are comfortable with (if not outright supportive of) white supremacy out themselves to the neighbours.
I had a conversation with a friend the other day about that — they’re an LGBTQ+ person and were upset when a near neighbour put up PPC signs. I immediately counselled against doing anything like vandalizing their signs, which is a pointless and immature gesture (as well as actually being illegal); as an example I pointed out that our NDP signs have been repeatedly vandalized this election and it hasn’t done anything to change my mind about who I support, and in fact only inspired me to request bigger signs as replacements. My advice was to let the neighbours be… while never forgetting that those neighbours decided they were comfortable openly supporting a party that’s taken the positions it has. (This is the same attitude I have about houses displaying Christian Heritage Party signs, by the way, and in our area CHP signs greatly outnumber CPP signs. Mind you, that isn’t actually saying all that much.)
Whenever I’ve written about elections in the past, I’ve always stated that “How you vote matters less than whether or not you vote.” I don’t really believe that anymore. If you can’t be bothered to vote then you’re part of the problem, of course… but this election has really demonstrated that Canada has a serious problem with white supremacy and xenophobia and that a small — but significant — percentage of Canadians have no problems openly supporting that. That should concern us all. This isn’t a difference of opinion about trickle-down economics, the role of unions, the benefits and risks of pipelines or even electoral reform; this is about a fringe political party which embraced racist language, pseudoscience and worked with far-right groups like the Proud Boys and Northern Guard (both of which espouse and practice violence against political opponents) being treated like it has a place in our politics.
I’m personally hoping that after this election is over Canadians will take a hard look at why an extreme-right, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim party which openly used fascistic rhetoric enjoyed even a three-percent support in our public discourse… but I strongly suspect when the election is done most Canadians will go back to our national pastime of ignoring the intrinsic racism built into our colonial society and pretending that we’re all just really nice people who aren’t facing a national crisis.
