New leader, or new system? The Conservatives ponder life under two-party politics

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The NDP, it is well known, is in deep trouble. With seven seats and 6.3 per cent of the popular vote in the recent election, the party posted its worst showing, not only since its founding, but since the founding of its predecessor, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, in 1935.

Leaderless, deprived of official party status in the House of Commons and the perqs that go with it (money, staff, committee seats, recognition, credibility), the party has launched a months-long “review and renewal process.” Only after that is completed will the leadership race get under way. It could be next spring before the party has a leader.

It may not have that much time. The Conservative strategist Fred DeLorey points out that, with fewer than one in seven NDP candidates pulling even 10 per cent of the vote – the level needed to qualify for reimbursement of campaign expenses – the party may not have the funds to pay off its bank loan within the three years allowed under the Canada Elections Act.

Any unpaid balance after that is deemed a campaign contribution, and since banks aren’t allowed to contribute to political parties, an illegal one. To avert the fines and legal costs that would entail, the party may have to sell assets, like its headquarters. As if that were not enough, an activist group within the party is urging members to divert their contributions to the party’s riding associations, as a protest.

The party is consumed with infighting over everything from the appointment of an interim leader to the rules of the upcoming leadership race – in which the party’s Socialist Caucus has already nominated a candidate, Yves Engler: his platform calls, inter alia, for nationalizing the banks and auto companies. This is the sort of thing parties do in their death throes.

All of which may be bad news for the NDP, but it’s also bad news for the Conservatives. For the Conservatives to do well, it is essential for the New Democrats to do well – extremely well, in fact – the better to split the centre-left vote with the Liberals.

Indeed, it is virtually impossible for them to form a government otherwise, at least of the majority kind. The Conservatives have won just one majority government in nearly four decades. That was in 2011, the year of Jack Layton and the Orange Wave, when the NDP won over 30 per cent of the vote, and 103 seats. The previous Conservative majority was in 1988, the year Ed Broadbent led the NDP to 43 seats and 20 per cent of the vote – its best result to that point.

For their part, the Liberal plan in every election is the same: frighten NDP-leaning voters into voting “strategically” – that is to say, voting Liberal – in order to stop the Conservatives. It doesn’t always work – John Turner’s campaign in 1988, for instance – but it sometimes works spectacularly, as in 2025. And it works best when the Conservatives give those voters something to be frightened of.

It wasn’t just Donald Trump who frightened voters in the last election. It was the prospect of putting Pierre Poilievre up against him, a leader who, if he wasn’t himself an admirer of Mr. Trump’s, seemed altogether too beholden to the part of his base that was – to the point of presenting himself as something of a Trump-lite. (World Economic Forum, fire the Bank of Canada governor, Freedom Convoy: the images are seared in the brain.)

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The Conservatives boast of making inroads with a certain kind of NDP voter under Mr. Poilievre – blue collar, private sector, skilled trades – and that may be true. But for every NDP voter they attracted, they drove two to the Liberals. To stymie the Liberals’ attempts to round up the left, the Conservatives need to avoid scaring them. Leaders like Mr. Poilievre scare the pants off them.

All of which is giving some Conservatives pause. If the NDP’s present state is merely temporary (it is always rash to count any Canadian political party out, so often are they pronounced dead only to rise again) then the question is how to induce those NDP-Liberal switchers to return to the New Democratic fold – and whether they are ever likely to do so while Mr. Poilievre remains Conservative Leader.

If, on the other hand, the NDP’s condition is terminal – if we have entered, as some claim, a new age of “two-party politics” (leaving all those who voted for the Bloc, the Greens and the People’s Party to one side) – then the Conservative predicament is even more stark. Not only would there be little likelihood of winning a majority, without the NDP to split the vote, but it’s hard to see how they could even form a minority government.

To have any chance of governing they would need, not merely to avoid frightening New Democrats into the Liberal camp, but to expand their own base: to lure back those centre-right voters who in recent elections have abandoned them for the Liberals. Again, it’s hard to see the party doing that under its current leadership. Indeed, it’s hard to see them even trying.

The strategy under Mr. Poilievre has been to gin up the base with all the horrors the Liberals have inflicted upon them, or will, or might – a turnout-based strategy, in other words – while counting on voter fatigue with the Liberals to deliver them the additional votes they need to win. In fairness, it was working pretty well so long as Justin Trudeau was Liberal leader. Under Mark Carney, not so much.

Indeed, with the direction he is taking the Liberals, Mr. Carney presents a new threat to the Conservatives. Under Justin Trudeau, the Liberals were able to hang on to just enough centre-right voters to win – not because they held any enthusiasm for Mr. Trudeau or the Liberals, but because they were so wary of the Conservatives.

But Mr. Carney is governing in a way that seems designed to give Conservative voters a positive reason to vote for him. Indeed, much of his agenda is, or was, the Conservative agenda. Tax cuts, spending cuts, deregulation, beefing up the military, cracking down on the border, even building pipelines: the Liberal Leader is taking dead aim at the soft Conservative vote.

Of course, at some point this rightward tilt risks giving new life to the NDP. But not for some time, presumably. In the interim, Mr. Carney will have calculated that he has fewer votes to lose to his left than he stands to gain to his right. The polls would seem to be bearing this out.

In the first weeks after the election, the polls looked very much like the results on election night: Liberals and Conservatives both in the low 40s, with the Liberals a couple of points ahead. Since Parliament has returned, however, there has been a marked shift. Taking the average of the most recent polls from each of the pollsters currently in the field shows the Liberals now ahead by nine points, 45 to 36.

That’s not a huge gain for the Liberals, but it’s quite a drop for the Conservatives. Moreover, it coincides with a noticeable gain for the NDP, now up to 9 points. What might be happening? It seems plausible that most of that NDP gain is made up of voters returning from the Liberals, whether because the immediate crisis that caused them to lend the Liberals their votes has passed, or because they are displeased with the course Mr. Carney is pursuing.

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But the Liberals have plainly more than made up for this with the voters they have poached from the Conservatives. Particularly dismaying for the Conservatives must be the leadership approval numbers, which often presage movements in party identification. According to the latest Abacus poll, Mr. Carney enjoys a net approval rating of 21 per cent. Mr. Poilievre? Minus four. Nanos has him 30 points behind Mr. Carney on the question of preferred prime minister.

What this suggests is that election night was not, as many Conservatives hoped, the pause before the final heave over the top. It may prove to have been their peak. Mr. Poilievre can take credit for getting them to 41 per cent. But he may not be the leader who can get them to the 45 per cent they would need to govern, in a two-party scenario, or cut the Liberals back to the mid-30s, should the NDP stage a comeback.

There are reports of rumblings within the Conservative movement that Mr. Poilievre’s survival at the January leadership review is not assured – that he may not even make it until then. Much will depend on the polls, of course. But in the meantime some Conservatives are taking an even broader view.

Perhaps the party’s dilemma, they are saying, is more serious than supposed – serious enough as to require more than a mere change of leadership to put right. Perhaps Conservatives need to consider whether it is systemic – whether, that is, they are likely to win again under the current electoral system.

Suppose, that is, that it is not Mr. Poilievre’s fault that the party could not get beyond 41 per cent. Suppose that’s the party’s natural ceiling, such that it cannot get above it under any leader or strategy, either by mobilizing the base or by expanding it. If it is true that we are returning to two-party politics – on which Duverger’s Law predicts first-past-the-post systems will eventually converge – it may simply be that the Conservatives do not have the votes to win.

Under proportional representation, on the other hand, the party could turn to its advantage what, under first past the post, it has most feared: a split of the conservative vote among multiple parties. “In a proportional system,” write Paige Saunders and Sean Speer, “conservatives would no longer need to house libertarians, social conservatives, Western populists, Quebec nationalists, and others under a single partisan tent. Each group or tendency could organize around its own priorities, campaign for support, and – if successful – participate in building coalitions and influencing government policy.”

Separately, they might win more votes than they have together. Under a system that rewards rather than penalizes this, they might have a better chance of forming a government.

Of course, you really ought to have a more principled basis for supporting this or that electoral system than just “my party would do better under this one.” But if self-interest is at long last causing some Conservatives to give proportional representation a look – if the prospect of an eternity on the opposition benches induces them to lose their historic disdain for electoral reform – that’s progress.

After all, it’s not like they’ve been cleaning up under the current system.