This year’s election saw a seven per cent rise in voter turnout. New Democrats, the Green party, heck, even the Bloc could have made a comeback.
Advertisement
However, I’m afraid there should have been a lesson to be learned from 2011, when the NDP won the second most seats in the House of Commons under the leadership of Jack Layton.
“Seen at the beginning of the campaign as the least ready for the election of the three main party leaders”, observed the Toronto Star at the end of the campaign, “Trudeau managed in 11 weeks to shape a compelling political narrative and provide Canadians with a credible alternative…”
By early September, the NDP had dropped into a three-way tie with the Liberals and Conservatives. For good measure, Trudeau was unabashed in offering other proposals to push against growing inequality: a tax plan that would pay for a middle-class tax cut by raising taxes on those earning more than CA$200,000 a year, and a substantial increase in the child benefit for the poorest Canadians.
“Hope & Hard Work” was more than a slogan for the Trudeau campaign – it was a hallmark of the Liberals’ massive, on-and-offline voter contact campaign. “I would argue that 95 per cent of [NDP supporters] said, ‘I’m sorry, I love the NDP, but I’m so scared of Harper that I can’t vote for you this election'”.
Since the Harper Conservative “base” has no natural allies with whom to form a workable coalition in a proportional-representation system, Harper’s abuse has guaranteed that the “base” will never again achieve the level of power and influence that it wielded over the past 10 years. In a long campaign, most of his support was at best lukewarm. Although the Conservative party lost the election, Matthew Gregory, the outgoing president of the UTSC Conservatives, is more optimistic about the Conservative’s result.
“The Conservatives fared fairly well actually”. For most Americans, the response might be: who knew?
Trudeau, whose father Pierre Trudeau held the position from 1968 to 1984, spearheaded the campaign that placed Liberals back in power after almost a decade of Conservative governance.
However, the Liberals have also promised to phase out federal subsidies for oil sands industries and invest in renewable energy sources, rolling out tax incentives to promote technological innovation and job creation, and increase the amount of protected marine and coastal areas to five per cent by 2017 and 10 per cent by 2020. Over the next few days, the NDP lead evaporated, falling into a statistical tie with the other two major parties. Those communities may have responded to the CPC’s financial agenda, but they cared more about keeping their families together. “The careful development and rollout of flashy, progressive policy, the polished delivery of it on the campaign trail, the all-important wedge issue to try to isolate the NDP: Gerald Butts’s fingerprints on the McGuinty campaigns in 2003 and 2007 are as evident on the deficit-spending Trudeau campaign of 2015”.
The general election held in Canada on October 19 was special for many reasons. I don’t think anyone really felt comfortable at a personal level with Stephen Harper. Indeed, you tried to sell them another liberal party – so they elected a Liberal government instead.
Piruzza also attributed the positive response to the large student participation in the campaign itself, a sentiment that Thea Hays-Alberstat, another Liberal student supporter, echoes. “I think that was a big difference”. At the start of the race, Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, ally of George W. Bush, role model for Scott Walker, was locked in serious competition with a cautiously left-leaning New Democratic Party.
In 2012, my friend Evan Hutchison and I wrote in The National Post: “Liberals can be proud of much of their legacy – but not all of it. It’s long past time for the party to recognize this simple fact, admit mistakes and learn from them”.
Natalie Petra, director of communications for the NDP Youth of Canada, discussed the importance of a social media strategy for greater youth electoral involvement. Honestly, I’m the only one to blame here.
“We wanted to empower our youth activists in various provincial wings, regional youth clubs, and campus groups by giving them the resources and training needed to support and volunteer with the local candidates”.
“So many wasted votes don’t elect anyone”, said Kay.
Advertisement
Nelson Wiseman, a political science professor at U of T, said that the high voting turnout is an anomaly and that it will likely decrease in the future.
