PoliCan > Elections: Myth-busting chronicles

And what if this had happened instead of that?

by Maurice Y. Michaud (he/him)

Alternative scenarios One can understand how vote efficiency matters in our electoral system, so what can be the impact of a disagreement within a political family on that all-important variable?

Well, quite simply, it can lead to vote splitting and result in a political family losing a general election, and sometimes even being decimated. The instance many of us remember is the rift among the federal conservatives that began in the 1990s and lasted until 2003, which pitted those from the West against those from the East. It allowed the Liberals to take advantage of that division and sneak in from behind to form three consecutive majority governments.

This subsection of PoliCan examines how the outcome of a few selected elections might have been different had unity prevailed or unusual circumstances not occurred. It also exposes some myths that have been perpetuated by some political pundits who did not dive deeply enough into the data.

Canada
Canada

Schisms on the right: the 1930s versus the early 21st century: When Maxime Bernier formed the People’s Party of Canada after losing his bid for the leadership of the Conservative Party, some analysts wondered if history was repeating itself and we were witnessing a modern-day version of Henry Stevens’s Reconstruction Party of the 1930s. The Liberals won in a landslide in 1935, with Stevens being the only Reconstructionist elected to Parliament that year. As a result, because of this poor performance and the fact Stevens had returned to the Conservatives by 1938, the harm his dissident party caused is largely underestimated today, for the Liberals’ majority would likely have been far slimmer had the conservative family remained united. Similarly, because Bernier’s PPC has fared worse than the Reconstructists, even failing to win a single seat, it has been dismissed as a party that has never had legs. But while that conclusion could be drawn after the 2025 general election, it was premature to do so in 2021.
35th to 37th Parliaments — The Big Schism on the Right: Without a doubt, more than the 1984 Mulroney landslide, the 1993 election marked the beginning of the drifting of Canada’s overall political spectrum to the right compared to where it was positioned since the 1960s. However, while it seems unlikely that the “conservatives” would have won this election after the nine years of Mulroney, how much closer would they have been to forming government had they still been a single united party? And just how much was the decade of disunity on the right profitable for the Liberals?
41st Parliament — 2011 Orange Crush: At the time, some pundits wondered if the remarkable rise of the NDP in 2011 under Jack Layton was a case of history repeating itself, except this time on the left, between the NDP and the Liberals. However, given how the NDP had been contesting elections since 1961 and wasn’t a splinter of the Liberals, combining the votes of both parties as could be done for the right from 1993 to 2000 would be too simplistic. This deep analysis provides a cautionary tale to those who do not understand strategic voting.
45th Parliament — Who ate the NDP’s lunch?: Soft NDPers vote Liberal when they fear that the Conservatives might form government. That’s the received orthodoxy, but that ignores how the NDP lost more seats to the Conservatives than the Liberals in 2025. So what really happened?

Alberta
Alberta

29th Assembly — A left-wing government... in Alberta?!: When the Nötley Crüe was banished from power in 2019 after only one term, many pundits were quick to use superlatives to describe the defeat. The problem with that is that it obscured how the NDP, in fact, held its ground.

British Columbia

16th Assembly — The wrong time to have a fight in the family: If Alberta’s political landscape is known for leaning conservative, British Columbia’s is known for being unlike any other province’s. For many years after joining Confederation, British Columbians viewed the rest of the country with some scepticism, referring to “the Canadians” versus themselves. Their legislature was non-partisan until 1903, or until it became dysfunctional. Once partisanship was accepted, however, it was and remains much more polarized than elsewhere in the country. Futhermore, discord occurs more frequently even within parties, and a century ago, a disagreement within the conservative forces led them to spectacularly miss their chance to form government.

New Brunswick

52nd and 53rd Assemblies — 1990s split over bilingualism: After forming four consecutive majority governments, the Progressive Conservative Party of New Brunswick, which had had a rapprochement with the Acadian community, was banished from the legislature in 1987. Social conservatives tried to steer the right further to the right, with bilingualism being the wedge issue. This brought the ephemeral Confederation of Region Party to form the official opposition in 1991, but it lapsed into obscurity after it failed to win a seat in the 1995 general election, and the PCs returned to occupying exclusively the centre right of the province’s political spectrum.