Has the parliamentary peace deal between the federal Liberals and the NDP got centrist Canadians feeling dispossessed? With Canadian conservatism apparently eeny-meeny-miny-moe-ing between Pierre Poilievre’s Trumpian truculence and Doug Ford’s new Davisian avuncularity, longtime Liberal strategist and H+K VP John Delacourt takes us down the rabbit hole of political possibilities.

John Delacourt

One of the more predictable and yet unfortunate responses to the new Confidence and Supply Agreement between the Liberals and the NDP is the argument that this accord has left so many centrist Canadian voters – the most reliable and predictable constituency of any federal election – “homeless.”

It is a compelling argument for many, one only bolstered by the landslide victory of Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives in Ontario. Ford and his team have emerged from a rocky two years of unforced errors during the pandemic not only unscathed but reinvigorated. The Ontario premier has done this by appealing to voters not as a firebrand or ideologue but as a pragmatic, transactional consensus builder, emulating a style of leadership that harks back to a Davis-era conservatism, one that, incidentally, worked well with Liberal governments in Ottawa. Jean Charest’s bid for the leadership of the federal Conservatives would seem to be the living proof that this strategy might be replicated, should his party see an opportunity that an NDP-Liberal alliance might offer for centrists in search of a political home.

And yet. Post-Trump, post-pandemic, post-convoy/occupation-of-Ottawa and, most pointedly, post-Erin O’Toole, even the most steadfast of centrist Liberals might sense that maybe the ground has shifted – not only for progressive voters but for conservatism in Canada. And if one were looking for who might embody the spirit of this shift in the tectonic plates of Canadian politics, you need look no further than the perceived frontrunner of the Conservative leadership race, Pierre Poilievre. 

Liberals and Conservatives alike needed no further evidence to confirm this than the first leadership debate at the Canada Strong and Free Networking Conference in May. There was a combative tone among the contenders that seemed new to the Canadian federal stage. Appeals to consensus building and party unity from not only Jean Charest but fellow contender Roman Baber did not exactly raise the roof. But Poilievre’s persona as the true defender of the Conservative faith certainly seemed to. Efforts at attacking his policy positions on digital currency, his defense of the convoyistas or his lack of support for the pro-choice faction within the party could not even be considered as glancing blows on Poilievre, who has honed his bare-knuckled rhetorical style from almost two decades in the House of Commons. 

Which brings engaged Liberals to a second plot point in this narrative: the new membership numbers these candidates are reporting. Over the first two weeks of June,  it became a remarkably public battle among the Poilievre, Brown and Charest camps regarding the veracity of new memberships the respective contenders are signing up. What is clear, however, with even a cursory scan of the visuals of Poilievre events, is that he has momentum, energy Liberals still fondly recall from the days of 2015, with the wave of support for Trudeau that became a tsunami. 

The Liberal response I’ve observed has taken two forms. Let’s call them Clintonian (as in Hillary against Trump) or – risking its awkwardness – Bidenian. I’d further break down the Clintonian into two subgroups: early-phase Clinton and later phase – the early being alarm-bell-ringing, and later being the defeat-is-imminent phase. 

The early-phase Clintonians are generally older-era Liberals, the ones who’d would happily call themselves centrist and identify themselves as Chrétien or Martin-era vintage. They view the anti-vaxxers, crypto bros and convoyistas of the People’s Party of Canada (PPC) and Team Poilievre as Canada’s “deplorables”. Like Bill Clinton in the early stage of the Trump campaign, they deny how serious and how numerous they are. As many Liberals from this era said about Trudeau’s generation Y and Z support, they question whether these people will even show up to vote. They doubt the Canadian deplorables’ attention span for politics itself. They bemoan their lack of understanding of civics, of Canadian history, of our democratic institutions. It’s not hard to sense their outrage – it’s all there on Twitter, every bloody hour. Similar to that Clintonian sense of self-congratulation, they feel these deplorables can be rightfully vanquished and marginalized as a political force given a forceful articulation of … um … evidence-based policy, or something.

The later phase, alarm-bell ringing Clintonians see a larger pattern to what’s happening: something end-of-days apocalyptic (and frankly, given the front pages on any given day, they might have something). Think of the Hillary Clinton who was desperately calling out Russian interference in her campaign, the one who was seeing a larger, autocratic, anti-democratic world-wide plot emerging, and who had begun to dwell in the abstract realm of these larger currents rather than connecting on affordability issues, the sense of betrayal that many beleaguered middleclass voters felt in the last years of the Obama era. 

The Bidenians are, to a large degree, within or closer to government here in Canada. They have the data and the operations expertise to affirm they have incontrovertible evidence that the progressive narrative has evolved, just as the conservative has arguably devolved. As it was with a movement that could bring together the politics of an Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and old Clinton loyalists – call it the original confidence and supply agreement – they would say this is the only viable path forward for stability and the advancement of liberal goals. There may be no clear path to actual majorities or dominance anymore, given how fragmented, polarized and coarsened our politics has become. 

So, what do you do? You play it in the margins, you figure you’ll lean on the data science, you’ll go riding by riding to save the furniture when you have to, just like you did to scrape by in 2021. It’s not pretty, but when you finally go to an election, maybe some or most of that populist energy Poilievre is amassing will have dissipated, merely from the grind of opposition. 

Yet there is the potential for another Liberal response – one that can still recall, perhaps bitterly, another two-party alliance in the waning days of Liberal government. 

There aren’t many of Trudeau’s current team who were around in 2005. That’s when Stephen Harper’s opposition Conservatives, sensing blood in the water for Paul Martin’s Liberals, found in Jack Layton’s NDP willing partners to bring down Martin’s minority government. Sacrificed at the time was a freshly inked childcare agreement with the provinces, the Kelowna Accord – a 10-year plan to address virtually every significant policy front between Indigenous communities and the federal government – and the government’s commitments to the Kyoto Accord on climate change. Did Layton’s team realize the implications for these achievements if the Conservatives were elected? Of course, they did. However, there was every indication the next election would bring at least a few more NDP seats into the House. So, you know, that’s politics. 

A thought experiment for Liberals might be something like the following. Imagine Poilievre as a Conservative leader polling in the high 30s or low 40s. Imagine, say, Chrystia Freeland wincing at the costs of single-payer pharmacare, and having virtually no support for it from the provinces. So, she tables a bill she feels is fiscally responsible yet not aligned with what the NDP have promised their voters. The proposition a Poilievre can raise to the NDP, an old ally in the battle to wipe the Liberal party from the Canadian political map, is straightforward: you can campaign on the Liberals reneging on their supply agreement, dissolve it now and get more seats in the House. You can argue you stood by your principles and the Liberals caved on theirs. It’s an attractive proposition. The Confidence and Supply Agreement is dissolved, an election is called and surprise! A new Conservative era, not quite so recognizable, has a majority to govern with. 

The one response to the Conservative leadership race that might be wise is for Liberals to look to their left and not to their right, if they truly want to preserve the achievements of the last seven years. For many Canadian families – with childcare at last, or raised out of poverty because of the Canada Child Benefit, or able to believe we might finally be addressing climate change – they might come to hope you remember that politics remains a bloodsport when there are still at least two parties that hope for your demise, no matter what agreements are signed. The Conservative leader-in-waiting seems to understand that, and it is unlikely he’ll want to wait long to hurry its passing.  

Contributing Writer John Delacourt, Vice President and Group Lleader at Hill + Knowlton Public Affairs in Ottawa, is a former director of the Liberal research bureau. He is also the author of three novels.