Federal Election 2019: Final Result - Liberal Minority Government

Election 2019 is in the books and the Liberals won the most seats.  They did not win as many seats as they would have liked but they still won the most.  Now they will govern until they decide to engineer their own defeat or until all of the Opposition Parties believe they have an opportunity.

The three historical voting patterns that I outlined in previous posts came to pass.  A first term government was re-elected as they have been for the last century.  Ontario voters decided to vote for opposite party to the one governing Ontario.  There is a Conservative government in Ontario so Ontario voters chose a Liberal federal government.  The NDP did poorly so the Conservatives did poorly as well.  I have been saying since 2015 that the Liberals were the prohibitive favourate to win this election and they won.  My assessment also included the idea that they would be elected to a majority government and I was wrong about that but like many others I did not expect the Bloc Quebecois to double its popular vote and triple its seat count over the course of a 6 week campaign.  

After the 2015 election the Liberals knew that they would be hard pressed to achieve the same success in the West that they did during that election.  They knew that they could lose more than 10 seats and maybe more, putting a future shot at a majority government in danger.  However, they also saw a fading NDP in Quebec holding over 20 seats that they could target to make up for the lost seats out west.

So the Liberals undertook an effort the begin identifying every Liberals they could find in those ridings and worked very hard to get them to the polling stations on Monday night.  They poured resources, effort and time into those ridings and although it may not look like it that effort paid off to a certain extent.  If you look at the vote count for all of those ridings the Liberals came in second in each of them and the vote count for the Liberals in each was higher than in 2015.  If the Bloc would not have taken off like it did the Liberals would have swept all of those ridings handing them a comfortable majority government.  

The Liberal campaign was a success.  They won the election.  It obviously could have been better.  It was focused and disciplined and it never made a major misstep.  After the brownface incident was passed the Liberal campaign became rather boring.  I found the campaign to be rather unconventional.  They had the ability to spend to the limit in this election but I did not see as many TV advertizements as I would have expected.  Not that I watch alot of TV but when I did I tended to see three different Conservative ads to one Liberal ad and the Liberals ad did not change often.  It is probably reasonable to assume that they decided to focus on the ground game.  The media was not very friendly to the Liberals during the election so not counting on the air war was probably a wise choice.

The Conservative campaign was a mess.  Canadians' opinions of Mr. Scheer actually become more negative over the course of the campaign.  The campaign was designed to energize the base and count on a split in the progressive vote but very little effort was made to appeal to voters beyond the base.  The results speak for themselves.  I would note that some are saying that the Conservative campaign was somewhat successful because it increased their seat count.  The problems with that argument is the increase came in places where the Conservatives are traditionally strong.  Alberta, Saskatchewan, rural Manitoba, rural Ontario and rural Maritimes.  They did not make any inroads in areas and regions where Conservatives are not traditionally strong.  Indeed, they actually lost seats in Quebec and in Urban Ontario.  Plus more importantly they DID NOT PREVENT THE LIBERALS FROM WINNING A MAJORITY GOVERNMENT.  It was the Bloc Quebecois that achieved that feat.  If the Bloc support would have been a little softer then the Conservatives would just be a larger Opposition Party facing a majority government across the aisle of the House.

The NDP achieved the objective they set out to achieve at the beginning of the election.  Namely, to maintain official party status.  The NDP campaign was essentially to do very little for the first four weeks and hope that Mr. Singh could perform well enough in the debates to convince enough Canadians to save the NDP.  It worked but before the NDP get too excited they should remember that in 2011 the NDP won over 30% of the popular vote and over 100 seats.  In 2015, they won around 19% of the vote and around 40 seats and this time they won 15% of the vote and around 20 seats.  That is a trend that should make the leadership of the NDP very nervous.  A piece of trivial knowledge for you.  If pollsters would have been correct about their level of support in the election their residual strength in Quebec would probably have lead to a split in the non-Liberal vote in many of the NDP ridings that were targeted by the Liberals.  So it was the sudden strength of the Bloc and the weakness of the NDP that denied the Liberals a majority government.

The Green Party conducted the same campaign as they have been conducting since Ms. May took over the leadership of that Party.  They achieved the same result.  It reminded me of that old definition of insanity.

Mr. Bernier blew it.  If you are going to be a party leader act like one.  He did not and he paid the price.

The Bloc proved once again that the Quebec electorate is the most fickle and unpredictable in the country.  You can never count on them to do what conventional wisdom expects.  Some claim it is Bill 21 was the problem and there could be something to that but I believe it was just Quebec voters being Quebec voters.  The Bloc campaign was not that stellar.  A good performance by their leader during the debates gave them a boost as would be expected.  However, it happens a great deal that a boost as a result of a good debate performance does not translate into votes when the election occurs.  This time it did.  

So now the Liberals will govern and implement their agenda in a minority government situation.  Fortunately for them it is a strong minority government where they only need the support of one other party to maintain the confidence of the House so they should not have an unreasonable amount of trouble pushing their agenda.  Indeed, the place they may have the most trouble could be the Senate.  In the House the other parties may have a whole host of reasons, at any one time, not to force an election.  But the Senate, which does not have to worry about the government falling is they reject or amend a Commons Bill, could make a minority government work much harder than they may normally work to get their bills through the Senate.

It is going to be a interesting few years.