Fellow Conservatives, rejoice! Justin Trudeau has handed the Conservative Party another key to victory. And no, I’m not talking about his ill-timed joke about the situation developing between Russia and Ukraine.
I’m talking about his unwillingness to join with Tom Mulcair and the NDP to run as a united party in the next election. If this were to happen, it would ensure the defeat of Stephen Harper and the Conservatives.
Let’s look at the facts. Following the fragmentation of the Progressive Conservative Party in the early 1990’s, Canada entered a period of domination by the Liberal Party, at the time led by Jean Chrétien.
During his tenure as Prime Minister, there was never a serious threat to the government from the right-wing parties struggling for power amongst themselves.
If the Liberals and NDP ran together in the last election, together they would have defeated Stephen Harper.
It was not until the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives united as the Conservative Party that they became a threat to the Liberals’ hold on power, reducing the Liberals to a minority government in the 2004 election, the first in which they ran as a united party.
The subsequent election in 2006 led to the Conservatives gaining their first victory in close to 20 years, despite being in the form of a minority government. Five years later, the Conservatives achieved a majority government, which we enjoy today.
At the time of the 2011 election, there were already some among the Liberals and New Democrats who proposed running as a coalition of the left. The Liberal leadership rejected the proposal, believing they did not need the New Democrats to defeat Stephen Harper. They made Canadian history that year as, for the first time since Canadian Confederation, Liberals formed neither the government nor the opposition.
If they had run as a coalition, the current situation in Canada would be very different.
Out of the 167 seats won by Conservatives, 45 were won with a minority of the vote, the remainder of the vote split between the two left-wing parties. Of those 45 seats, six are cabinet ministers, including both the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration.
Assuming all Canadians who voted made the same decisions, the coalition would have won 182 seats, with Conservatives only winning 121. Stephen Harper would be the Leader of the Opposition, and given Liberal power before the election, Michael Ignatieff would be the Prime Minister.
Both the Liberals and the NDP plan on courting the Canadian middle class and the province of Quebec in the buildup to next year’s election. With Quebec having played such a key role in the NDP’s surge to Official Opposition status, they will likely have to fight to keep the province. It was largely ignored by the Conservatives in the last election, but could become a battleground and the focus of large scale efforts by the two left-wing parties.
As next year’s election moves ever closer, the parties that seem bent on defeating Stephen Harper move farther and farther apart. Both Mulcair and Trudeau want to see the Conservatives defeated. But each wants to take responsibility for that victory, and that could be their downfall.
