Maxime Bernier: an irritant for the Conservatives

by Maurice Y. Michaud (he/him)

Sometimes jokingly calling himself Mad Max, Maxime Bernier has referred to himself as a fiscal conservative, a conservative who believes in freedom, and a reasonable libertarian. He was briefly minister of Foreign Affairs, but that appointment ended in May 2008, when it was found that he felt too free to leave confidential briefings at the home of his girlfriend. Returned to cabinet as a minister of state from 2011 until the Conservatives' defeat in 2015, he ran for the party's leadership in 2017, coming second to Andrew Scheer.

A year later, when Bernier formed the People's Party of Canada and positioned it to the right of the Conservatives, some analysts wondered if we were witnessing a new schism on the right. And to some extent, so did his former colleagues, although publicly, they tried to dismiss his move as a mere case of sour grapes following his failed leadership bid. The scheduled general election came a year after that, and Bernier's party received a lot of negative press due to what many considered the unsavoury characters his campaign attracted. But the proof is in the pudding and the only poll that matters is the one held on election day — pick your favourite cliché — so how did the PPC do?

Canada

43 → 2019 :: 21 Oct 2019 — 19 Sep 2021 — Minority  LIB  Summary Government Opposition Unproductive votes Party Votes Seats Party Votes Seats Party Votes # % % # # % % # # % Parliament: 43    Minority Majority=170  Ab.Maj.: -13  G.Maj.: -24 Population [2019]: 37,422,946 (est.) Eligible: 27,373,058  Particip.: 67.04% Votes: 18,350,359  Unproductive: 606,627 Seats: 338   1 seat = 0.30% ↳ Elec.Sys.:  FPTP: 338   ↳ By acclamation: 0 (0.00%) Plurality: Votes  CPC  Seats  LIB  Plurality: ↳ +210,765 (+1.16%) Plurality: ↳ Seats: -36 (-10.65%) Position2: Votes  LIB  Seats  CPC  Candidacies: 2,146 (✓ 338)   m: 1,397 (✓ 240)   f: 748 (✓ 98)    x: 1 (✓ 0)  LIB  338   CPC  337   BQ  78   NDP  338   GRN  337   IND  127   PPC  315   OTH  276   LIB 6,018,728 33.12 46.45 157 CPC BQ NDP GRN IND 6,229,493 1,387,030 2,903,722 1,187,494 17,265 34.28 7.63 15.98 6.54 0.10 35.80 9.47 7.10 0.89 0.30 121 32 24 3 1 IND PPC OTH REJ ABS 68,873 294,092 64,183 179,479 9,022,699 0.37 1.62 0.35 0.98 —— The electoral system brought the "wrong winner" at the head of the seat count.  OTH  →  CHP  51   RHIN  39   LBT  24   VCP  25   APPC  17   ML  51   PPIQ  13   COMM  29  OTH  →  PCP  3   MP  4   CFF  7   UPC  4   NCA  4   SCC  2   CNP  3  !!!  193 (57.10%)

Indeed, the PPC did quite miserably. It garnered only 1.62% of the votes nationally and Bernier lost his own seat — badly! — although his was the best finish for the party. No candidate finished third; 14 finished fourth; 217 finished fifth, and the remaining 83 finished sixth or worse.

However, the Liberals were reduced to minority status, while the Conservatives, despite winning the popular vote, did not increase their seat count to anywhere near what they had hoped. But given that the Conservatives got 1.16% more votes than the Liberals, was that meager 1.62% for the PPC enough to cause some vote splitting that prevented them from winning more seats?

To find the answer, let's:

Thus we could conclude that there would have been 7 differences.

Of the seven seats the Conservatives lost due to vote splitting, six went to the Liberals and one to the NDP, and the pluralities were extremely small in all cases. But as annoying as that might have been for them, it still would not have put them significantly closer to the Liberals, and the 1.16% more votes they got over them would still not be visible in the seat count. That's because the Conservatives have a second problem with the first-past-the-post system: to wit, with the overwhelming pluralities they get in ridings in Western Canada, much of their votes go wasted. To illustrate: in the 1935 federal election, with 22.39% of the votes, Québec Conservative Jules Wermenlinger managed to win just as well his seat of Verdun in an 11-candidate race of an election that was far from favourable to the Conservatives, as Alberta Conservative Damien Kurek who, in 2019, won his seat of Battle River—Crowfoot in a 5-candidate race with 85.49% of the votes. Today's Conservatives would need to have their votes more evenly distributed across the country in order to get FPTP to work better for them.

But coming back to the question of vote splitting between them and the PPC... After looking at the results of 2019, many Conservatives (and also some analysts) thought that, although Bernier's PPC did inflict some damage on the CPC, the former's overall poor results were likely a sign that his movement was already at the beginning of its end. It wasn't even clear if the PPC would still exist by the next general election — whenever that would be, since it could happen at any time in a minority government. If history was repeating itself, it didn't feel like 1988, when the Reform Party did poorly but then surged in 1993, causing serious vote splitting that resulted in the decimation of the federal Progressive Conservatives. Rather, it felt more like 1935 when, after inflicting some damage on the Conservatives through vote splitting, the Reconstruction Party had returned to the Conservative fold by 1938. At least that's what the Conservatives were hoping was going to happen.

However, as many of us have found ourselves saying in a variety of contexts, then COVID! Months of lockdowns began in March 2020. While a majority of people supported and followed the measures various levels of government imposed, a smaller minority did not. COVID gave rise to many conspiracy theories among that vocal minority — that the whole thing was a hoax, that it was merely an attempt by governments to exercise control over people, that it's the vaccine that would make them sick or implant a G5 chip in them, and so on. The longer the pandemic continued, the more such sentiments grew, and the PPC tapped into that anger from those vocal opponents.

By late-summer 2021, as the overall number of COVID infections had receded, the Trudeau Liberals likely sensed that the O'Toole Conservatives were still weak, so, in a gamble to regain majority status in the House of Commons, the prime minister called an early election. However, it could also be that the Liberals sensed that a significant portion of the CPC's support had drifted to the PPC, making the former even weaker and the gamble even more worthwhile. But as the results of that flash election show, they were right about the drifting of support but their gamble didn't work out, as the resulting parliament was nearly identical to the previous one.

Canada

44 → 2021 :: 20 Sep 2021 — Present     — Minority  LIB  → Majority  LIB   NDP  Summary Government Opposition Unproductive votes Party Votes Seats Party Votes Seats Party Votes # % % # # % % # # % Parliament: 44    Minority Majority=170  Ab.Maj.: -11  G.Maj.: -20 Population [2021]: 36,991,981 Eligible: 27,509,496  Particip.: 62.56% Votes: 17,209,811  Unproductive: 1,192,177 Seats: 338   1 seat = 0.30% ↳ Elec.Sys.:  FPTP: 338   ↳ By acclamation: 0 (0.00%) Plurality: Votes  CPC  Seats  LIB  Plurality: ↳ +202,436 (+1.19%) Plurality: ↳ Seats: -40 (-11.83%) Position2: Votes  LIB  Seats  CPC  Candidacies: 2,010 (✓ 338)   m: 1,247 (✓ 235)   f: 760 (✓ 103)    x: 3 (✓ 0)  LIB  337   CPC  336   BQ  78   NDP  336   GRN  252   IND  95   PPC  312   OTH  264   LIB 5,537,638 32.51 47.04 159 CPC BQ NDP GRN IND 5,740,074 1,301,615 3,022,328 396,988 18,991 33.70 7.64 17.74 2.33 0.11 35.21 9.47 7.40 0.59 0.30 119 32 25 2 1 IND PPC OTH REJ ABS 53,837 840,993 121,779 175,568 10,299,685 0.32 4.94 1.18 1.02 —— The electoral system brought the "wrong winner" at the head of the seat count.  LIB  Rajinder (Raj) Saini withdrew his candidacy but after closure of nominations, so remained listed as the candidate in Kitchener Centre (ON).  LIB → IND  Kevin Vuong was elected in Spadina—Fort York (ON) but had been dropped from the ticket and sat as an independent MP (votes received recorded as such).  CPC → IND  The candidate in Beaches—East York (ON) had been dropped from the ticket. Votes received recorded as independent.  NDP → IND  The candidates in Cumberland—Colchester (NS) and Toronto—St. Paul's (ON) had been dropped from the ticket. Votes received recorded as independents.  OTH  →  FREE  59   MAV  29   CHP  25   RHIN  27   LBT  13   COMM  26   ML  36   PPIQ  10  OTH  →  APPC  10   MP  9   VCP  7   CENT  4   NCAC  4   PAT  2   CFF  2   CNP  1  !!!  268 (79.29%)

Indeed, by going from 1.62% nationwide in 2019 to 4.94% in 2021, the PPC's support had increased more than 300%. However, Bernier did even more poorly this time in his riding of Beauce, and the CPC won in the seven ridings where the PPC finished second. Other than that, the PPC finished third in 17 ridings; fourth in 196; fifth in 78, and sixth in 14. On the surface, that might suggest that the CPC wasn't affected by vote splitting with the PPC, but was that really the case?

To find the answer, let's:

Thus we could conclude that there would have been 22 differences.

This time, the CPC lost 22 seats due to vote splitting with the PPC, so no, the CPC was not impervious. Fifteen of those seats went to the Liberals, six to the NDP, and one to the Bloc Québécois. Moreover, while the Liberals would likely still have won, only three seats would have separated them from the Conseervatives.

Therefore, despite not winning any seats, the People's Party did hurt the Conservatives in 2021. As long as the CPC doesn't fix its problem of over­winning in the West, it cannot afford any other complicating factor in the form of vote splitting. So that is why Maxime Bernier is an irritant for the Conservatives.