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FEWER THAN 200 LIBERALS HOLD PROVINCIAL LEGISLATURE SEATS. WHY?

IT’S MORE COMPLICATED THAN A REACTION TO THE FEDERAL PARTY IN POWER, EXPERT SAYS

Tyler Dawson

IT WASN’T THAT LONG AGO THAT A MAJORITY OF PROVINCIAL GOVERNMENTS WERE LIBERAL. AND THEN THAT DISAPPEARED. AND A LOT OF THAT WAS DURING THE HARPER YEARS.

— DUANE BRATT, MOUNT ROYAL UNIVERSITY POLITICAL SCIENTIST

Asingle Liberal was elected in the Manitoba provincial election this week, highlighting the party’s burgeoning brand problems.

While 28 B.C. Liberals were elected in the 2020 provincial election, the party has since rebranded as BC United, making Manitoba’s Cindy Lamoureaux the only provincial Liberal elected between east-end Toronto and the Pacific Ocean.

And the party’s brand problems don’t end there. The polling aggregator 338Canada shows Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives with 38 per cent of the popular vote, compared to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals at 29 per cent. That projection also suggests that were an election held now, the Conservatives would win a majority government. The Conservatives have been leading the Liberals since summer 2022, but a more substantial divergence in support began in August 2023. At the time, the Conservatives had around 35 per cent of the popular vote, compared to around 32 per cent for the Liberals.

While the Manitoba Liberals are not officially linked to the federal party, National Post’s Tyler Dawson explains why the province is just one of many where Liberal parties have been struggling for years.

HOW MANY LIBERALS HAVE SEATS?

Of the 729 seats up for grabs in provincial legislatures across Canada, just 125 of them are currently held by legislators that ran under some variety of the Liberal banner in recent elections. (If the BC United party is excluded, the figure is just 97).

The Manitoba Liberal Party’s record is perhaps the worst in the country: The last time they formed government was in a coalition in 1949. The last time the party held a meaningful number of seats was 1988, when, with 35.5 per cent of the popular vote, the party won 20 of 57 seats in the legislature.

This is a cycle, says Mount Royal University political scientist Duane Bratt. When Conservatives are in power in Ottawa, provincial governments swing left. The reverse tends to be true when the Liberals hold power federally.

“It wasn’t that long ago that a majority of provincial governments were Liberal. And then that disappeared. And a lot of that was during the Harper years,” Bratt said. “We get fixated on how provincial Liberal parties are tied into the federal Liberal party without saying the same thing about the Conservatives.”

ARE ALL LIBERAL PARTIES THE SAME?

Provincial Liberal parties are not necessarily linked to the federal Liberal party led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, although at times they have been, such as in the case of the Saskatchewan Liberal party, which was officially affiliated until 2009, and then renamed the Saskatchewan Progress Party in July 2023. The Liberal parties in Atlantic Canada are still linked to the federal Liberals.

The parties are also not necessarily ideologically consistent across the country.

The Ontario Liberals may fit the same mould as federal Liberals, but in British Columbia, the Liberal party was actually the conservative party (hence why they’ve now been renamed to BC United). The Quebec Liberal Party also inhabits a slightly different ideological space than the progressive politics associated with other Liberal parties.

WHY MIGHT THE LIBERAL BRAND BE SUFFERING?

One of the major factors that has affected the Liberal brand more is that it’s rare for democracies to have a centrist party, and the Liberals are considered to be in Canada’s political centre, with the Conservatives, and the party’s previous incarnations, such as the Canadian Alliance and Reform Party, on the right and the New Democrats and Greens on the left.

“Centre parties always gradually lose votes and incentives push toward twoparty systems,” said Randy Besco, a University of Toronto political scientist, in an email. “The reason the Liberal party has historically done well federally is because on Quebec/language it’s not a centre party, it’s one side of the pro-french/bilingualism divide. But the decline of those issues over the last 30 years has also meant a declining share of the vote.”

“The Western provinces with Ndp/right competition are the ‘normal,’ and Ontario is the strange anomaly,” Besco said.

WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH THE B.C. LIBERALS?

In Western Canada, the Liberal brand is mostly defunct, and this is far from a recent development. The exception is B.C., where the Liberal party held government between 2001 and 2017, and only lost in 2017 because, with one seat short of a majority government, Christy Clark was dethroned by a supply-and-confidence agreement between the New Democrats and the Green party. Since then, they’ve been the official opposition, holding at present around one-third of all seats in the provincial legislature; in April 2023, the name officially changed to BC United.

The name of that party had been subject to perennial debate. As a right-ofcentre coalition, the party long attracted both federal Liberal and federal Conservative voters, but many members believed it was confusing to voters, who would automatically link the party with the federal Liberals. (Further confusing matters is B.C. actually has an explicitly named Conservative party. Though it has been a negligible force for decades, it now has two MLAS and is polling on par with BC United.)

It’s really the prairies, Bratt said, where the fate of the Liberal parties are most noticeable. “The Liberals are a dying species and have been for a while,” he said. And at least part of that is because the NDP have swallowed up progressive votes.

HOW ARE THE LIBERALS DOING IN OTHER PROVINCES?

❚ The Alberta Liberals were the dominant party in the province’s early years, although it saw little electoral success after its 1921 loss. It wasn’t until the mid-1980s that the party was an electoral force again, and was actually the official opposition through the bulk of the 1990s. The party has been in decline since the mid-2000s; while the party had 16 seats after the 2004 election, it has seen a steady decline, down to five seats in the 2012 election and one seat after the 2015 election that saw the NDP sweep the Progressive Conservatives after the latter had a 40-year run in power.

❚ In neighbouring Saskatchewan, the story is a similar one: the last time the party had double-digit seat counts was 1995, forming the official opposition against an NDP majority government. The party, following that decline, went through a similar trajectory to the B.C. Liberals; Jeff Walters, who led the party between 2021 and 2023, described the party’s views as distinct from the federal Liberals — a centrist party rooted in the tradition of prairie liberalism.

❚ Ontario’s Liberal party split from the federal Liberals in 1976. It had a politically successful run through much of the 21st century, winning every single election, under Dalton Mcguinty and Kathleen Wynne, until 2018. Then, the party lost official party status, despite winning around one-fifth of the popular vote. In the most recent election, in 2022, the party won 23.9 per cent of the popular vote, and eight seats — although this left them without official party status.

❚ In Quebec, the political landscape is markedly different than anywhere else in the country.

“For decades in Quebec, the divide wasn’t liberal — conservative, it was federalists versus separatists. And the federalist party was the Liberals,” Bratt said.

The Quebec Liberal Party found success through the 1980s primarily because they were the anti-statist party of business and sound fiscal management. They have, at times, been considered a more centre-right version of Canadian liberalism and have adopted more conservative policies, such as cuts to the public service under premier Jean Charest, and raising university tuition in 2012 that saw thousands of university students come out in protest. In turn, Charest’s government passed restrictive emergency legislation preventing students from exercising their protest rights.

But, Quebec’s political menu is far different now. The Liberal federalist position has been challenged by the Coalition Avenir Québec, a conservative nationalist party, and the Québec solidaire, a leftist sovereigntist party. Since the Liberal party’s loss in 2018 — to the democratic socialist Parti Québécois, which capitalized on the heavy-handed handling of the student protests — the Quebec Liberal Party has been the official opposition, holding, at present, 21 of the 125 seats in the National Assembly.

❚ In Atlantic Canada, the Liberal parties tend to be provincial arms of the federal Liberal party, in stark contrast with the rest of the country.

HOW MANY LIBERAL PREMIERS ARE THERE CURRENTLY?

❚ At present, only one province and one territory have a Liberal premier. Andrew Furey’s Liberal Party of Newfoundland and Labrador has been in government since 2015, when they won an astonishing 57.2 per cent of the popular vote.

❚ Yukon Premier Ranj Pillai is also provincial Liberal. Between 2002 and 2016, the party was basically wiped out, though five seats in the 2006 election was enough to make them the official opposition in the 17-seat legislature. Since 2016 the Liberals have held power.

❚ The New Brunswick Liberals are currently the official opposition, a role the party has held since 2018, with 17 of the 49 provincial seats. A similar case exists in Nova Scotia: Between 2013 and 2021, the Liberals were in a majority government, but the party now holds 17 of 55 seats in the legislature.

❚ The Prince Edward Island Liberals are at the weakest they’ve ever been: In the 2023 election, the party had its worst-ever popular vote (17.21 per cent) and three seats. That, though, was a good enough result to make them the official opposition in the 27-seat legislature.

Neither the Northwest Territories nor Nunavut have political parties.

More broadly, there’s the temptation to conclude that if the provincial Liberals are doing poorly, this probably means bad things are afoot for the federal Liberals, and vice versa. But, writes Besco, “there’s no real evidence for that.”

“It’s not that the provincial support affects the federal support, or something like that. People (mostly) can tell the difference between provincial and federal parties,” Besco said.

“Trudeau scandals or whatever don’t really hurt provincial Liberals. Rather, the same broad factors are bad for the Liberal parties provincially are also bad for it federally.”

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2023-10-07T07:00:00.0000000Z

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