The Canadian Federal Election of 2015

By Jon H. Pammett and Christopher Dornan

The Hill Times: Best Books of 2016

Written by the foremost authorities, The Canadian Federal Election of 2015 provides a complete investigation of the election.

A comprehensive analysis of the campaigns and the election outcome, this collection of essays examines the strategies, successes, and failures of the major political parties: the Conservatives, the Liberals, the New Democrats, the Bloc Québécois, and the Green Party.

Also featured are chapters on the changes in electoral rules, the experience of local campaigning, the play of the polls, the campaign in the new media, the role of the debates, and the experience of women in the campaign. The book concludes with a detailed analysis of voting behaviour in 2015 and an assessment of the Stephen Harper dynasty. Appendices contain all of the election results.

The Canadian Federal Election of 2015 is the tenth volume in a series that has chronicled every national election campaign since 1984.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: Jun 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9781459733367

Jon H. Pammett

Jon H. Pammett is a political science professor at Ottawa’s Carleton University and co-editor of several studies of Canadian elections, including, most recently, Dynasties and Interludes: Past and Present in Canadian Electoral Politics. .

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Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

APPENDIX A

APPENDIX B

CONTRIBUTORS

CHAPTER 1

The Long Goodbye: The Contours of the Election

Christopher Dornan

For a party and a government whose modus operandi had been incrementalism, it all came to a shuddering and definitive end. The project of remaking Canada according to an image of conservatism, step by step, was over. The new government, anathema to everything the previous government stood for, would deliberately run deficits, legalize marijuana, expedite entry to the country of tens of thousands of refugees from war-scarred Islamic nations, and award citizenship to people who hid their faces in public on grounds of religious belief and cultural practice.

The Conservative Party of Canada under Stephen Harper — or, more properly, Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party, since he was its founding leader and executive authority — had taken four elections to inch its way to majority government. In 2004, the party lost the general election but brought the Liberals to minority status, the first toehold in the Conservative climb to office. In 2006, the Liberal minority was defeated and replaced with a Conservative minority, and the Liberal leader resigned. In 2008, the Conservatives were returned with a greater number of seats — still not quite enough to command a majority but sufficient to ensure that the Liberal leader resigned. In 2011, the Conservatives at last won the majority they had so assiduously sought. The Liberals were reduced to third-party status, with only thirty-four seats, while the Conservatives won 166. For the third time in a row, the Liberal leader resigned following the election.

Some governments are content to manage the affairs of the nation. Others take power with revolutionary intent. Harper’s Conservatives made no secret of their missionary zeal to demolish what they saw as an intrusive, arrogant, condescending, and economically irresponsible state apparatus, entrenched after decades of Liberal rule. But the revolution would be carried out by accretion, via the accumulation of myriad government decisions and policy implementations. Canadian priorities and imperatives would change by increments.

The goal was not to impose a new hegemony on a resistant population, as though an occupying force had seized control. The social engineering the Conservatives had in mind was altogether more ambitious. It was to transform the default thinking of the country, to shift what counted as common sense. The goal was to manufacture consent for the axioms of Conservative rule, the most prominent of which was that the role of government was to empower individual enterprise, not to command-plan how people should live through costly, unwieldy, and obnoxious bureaucratic measures funded by taxes that throttled prosperity.

This, the Conservatives calculated, was the long route to staying in power into the twenty-first century the way the Liberals had all but owned the government of the twentieth. After all, elections are so much easier to win when the electorate already consents, when the majority of voters share the values and perspective of one party, preferring those over the values and perspectives of the other parties. An agreeable electorate is pre-convinced; they do not have to be persuaded at great effort and expense of something they are not inclined to believe. Over almost a decade, the Conservative government did all it could to make its core precepts the launching pad for its perpetual re-election.

And yet it did so with ham fists. It was extremely effective in targeting, bludgeoning, and belittling its political opponents. And it used the instruments of power to promote its structure of values, from renaming a national museum to opening an Office of Religious Freedom, from killing the long-gun registry to doing away with the long-form census. But it conducted itself throughout as though either ignorant or dismissive of the first part of Dale Carnegie’s famous maxim: in order to influence people, one must win friends.

All political parties are fiercely partisan — and necessarily so. They all have designs on power and they are all committed to frustrating one another’s ambitions. But the Harper Conservatives behaved more like a cult than a traditional party. They did not treat their opponents as honourable adversaries; they saw them as enemies, and they saw enemies everywhere. They made no effort to understand the positions of other parties or interest groups in order to effect negotiations and arrive at accommodations. The Conservatives would no more negotiate with the NDP or the Liberals than they would negotiate with terrorists. And since they perceived the political structures and institutions of the country as creations of their ideological antagonists, rigged against them, they felt no obligation to honour past practices. Oddly, for conservatives, they had little respect for tradition — except when it served their political ends. And for a party in which Christian faith was so important to so many, they were curiously uncharitable toward anyone not a member of their political sect.

It was a government of resentment from the outset, a government as devoted to settling scores as to implementing a policy program. There were times when it seemed as though the Conservatives had no policy program beyond vilifying their enemies, that the true mission of the Conservative government and the best safeguard of the interests of the country, as they understood it, was to prevent anyone else from ever forming a government. And because the Conservative grievances attached to anyone outside their ranks, they often extended to sectors of the electorate. The Harperites not only chafed at the other parties and the strictures of Parliament, at the public service, the courts, the media, the scientific community, unions, and universities — all of which they saw as arrayed against them — they too often comported themselves as angry at the very people they represented.

The Conservative government did not pretend to engage in political dialogue. Whether in Question Period, in parliamentary committees, or in rare media appearances, ministers and MPs simply refused to answer questions, instead parroting prepared speaking points and attack lines. Legislation was packaged in enormous omnibus bills while debate in the House was curtailed, so that the laws of the land were enacted without traditional review by the Commons. When one judges Parliament a theatre of intransigent animosity, what profit is there in arguing for one’s position? The Conservatives simply dispensed with what they saw as a charade. The naked exercise of power is, one supposes, a form of transparency.

But if a party expends almost no effort to persuade the public of the virtues of its policies, it is next to impossible to effect a political paradigm shift of national values. Hence the grandiose attempt to re-engineer Canadian groupthink to align with Conservative principles was doomed. One cannot win friends by alienating people.

Not only did the Conservatives fail to rewrite basic Canadian values, in all likelihood it was those values that proved their undoing. Canadians differ on whether tax credits offered to families for child care are preferable to a national daycare system, whether punitive jail sentences for criminal offenders are a deserved deterrent or simply vindictive, whether deficit spending on infrastructure is an economic stimulus or an invitation to fiscal recklessness — and they do so heatedly. But in the main, they react badly to power exercised spitefully, to a political arena drained of respectful disagreement, to a politics in which denigration is not just a means but the goal.

The Harper Conservatives were constitutionally, even insistently, inconsiderate of others. Pollsters identified a desire for change as the salient feature of the 2015 campaign, but this was really a euphemism. On election night there was nothing remotely incremental about the outcome. It was a repudiation, pure and simple. It took the Conservatives four elections to win a majority. It took one term of majority government for them to lose office and terminate the reign of Stephen Harper. In his victory speech that night, the newly elected Prime Minister Justin Trudeau caught the fundamental mistake — the character flaw — of the defeated government. Conservatives are not our enemies, he told his supporters and the country, they are our neighbours.

Given the Conservative failure to effect a sea change in the country’s attitudes and perspectives, the party’s prospects for re-election in 2015 turned on the arithmetic of how the vote would split between the three major parties — with the Bloc Québécois and the Greens perhaps eating away at Liberal and NDP vote share — and how that vote would translate into seat returns. With some 70 percent of the country opposed to the Conservatives, in retrospect the government’s defeat seems inevitable, but at the time the outcome came as a surprise to almost everyone. Going into the election, it seemed perfectly possible that the Conservatives could be returned to power. Even in the last days before the vote, the talk among the punditry was of the role of the governor general should no single party carry sufficient seats to command the confidence of the House. By the eve of the election, it seemed altogether likely the Liberals could win the most seats, but no one was talking openly about a Liberal majority.

The 30 Percent Solution

Stephen Harper was not just prime minister. He was by any standard an imposing political figure. Uncharismatic, certainly, but firm, assured, calm, guided by and unshakeable in his convictions, and steeled by experience both in the domestic political arena and on the world stage. The most popular kids win election as president of the student council. Stephen Harper was the school principal. After almost a decade in power, he was the embodiment of the strong man: an emotionally cool father figure who knew what was best for his charges and would protect them against their own worst instincts, whether they appreciated it or not.

Perversely, his strategists counted his unpopularity as a political strength. Voters who disliked him did so not because he was corrupt or weak or venal or stupid — he was none of those things. He was, in fact, the opposite of those things. He was disliked for the same reason teen-agers invariably dislike the principal — because he was in charge, because he was authoritarian. The Conservatives assumed that in perilous times of extremist threats and economic fragility, authority trumps likeability. What matters is the person one wants making the decisions that matter. Sometimes the best credential for being in charge is actually being in charge.

The Conservatives called the election with all the advantages of a majority government and the unshakeable support of 30 percent of the electorate. On that alone their strategists calculated they could bully their way back into office. Yes, more than two-thirds of the country was set against them, but a federal election is a choice between options, and who were Harper’s opponents? An irascible socialist who had won the leadership of a party that was only the Official Opposition on a fluke (the appeal of a charismatic and now dead leader, the collapse of Bloc support, and the fickleness of Quebec voters) and a vacuous, we-generation motivational speaker, who on the strength of his dead father’s name had inherited leadership of a diminished party, a rump of what it once was.

All the Conservatives had to do was put a stark choice before the voters, project an aura of unperturbable competence, maintain ultra-disciplined message control, outspend their opponents on advertising and cross-country appearances, and wait for Angry Tom or Just-Not-Ready Justin to self-destruct. In the heat of the campaign, one or both of them would eventually pick the wrong side of a volatile issue or say the wrong thing. If the Conservatives could maintain the split in the opposition, neither the NDP nor the Liberals would be able to marshal the returns to unseat the government outright. If the Liberals eroded support for the NDP, so much the better. If one of the two opposition options collapsed — likely the Liberals — the Conservatives could round on Mulcair’s socialists with their full arsenal. Meanwhile, any international incident, the kind of thing that showed a world in jeopardy, surely played to the strengths of the prime minister and the government.

At eleven weeks, the campaign was more than twice as long as most recent campaigns. In a 2007 amendment to the Canada Fair Elections Act, the Conservatives had set a fixed date for voting day. A seventy-eight-day campaign — almost a quarter of a year — was intended to deplete the cash reserves of the opposition parties while giving them plenty of opportunity to cause trouble for themselves. If the two major rival parties undermined each other over the course of the campaign, that was the luck the Conservatives were trying to conjure. Misfortune for their squabbling opponents might grow the Conservatives’ share just a little beyond their base, and that was the roadmap to staying in power.

Even if they were returned with only a minority, the Conservatives and Stephen Harper had experience wielding authority under two previous minority governments. They had manhandled Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff in turn; presumably they could do the same to Tom Mulcair and Justin Trudeau.

Event Management

The Conservatives no doubt liked the way things began. Harper conveyed the very image of prime ministerial bearing as he made the visit to Rideau Hall on the morning of August 2 to ask the governor general to dissolve Parliament, and then as he spoke to reporters from behind a podium bearing the Royal Coat of Arms of Canada before heading off on the campaign trail.

Mulcair, meanwhile, opened his campaign standing in front of a Canadian flag at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, with the Houses of Parliament in the background across the river. Alone at a podium, no members of his party around him, he delivered a statement and declined to entertain questions from reporters. He was presenting himself as the prime minister-in-waiting. By aping the style and manner of Stephen Harper, he had chosen to fight an image war on terrain already claimed by his opponent.

And Trudeau? As Harper and Mulcair were speaking, Trudeau was on an aircraft heading to Vancouver where he was scheduled to march in the city’s Pride Parade. He had made a commitment to appear and chose to honour it despite the election call. Among the commentariat, the news media, and Conservative and NDP party operatives, this was seen as a risible blunder, a telltale sign that the Liberal campaign team were amateurs who did not understand how a federal election campaign should be run. Mulcair had cancelled his attendance at the parade in order to stay in Ottawa for the call of the election.

So, on the very first day of the campaign, Harper and Mulcair stood behind lecterns, two solitary older men in suits and ties, rooted in place, clutching for gravitas, both using the architecture of the nation’s capital as the inert backdrop to their campaign launches. The images Canadians saw of Trudeau that day showed him in full motion at the other end of the country, as far away as he could get from Harper’s corridors of power, central to an event celebrating diverse sexuality when Conservative Party policy was opposed to same-sex marriage. There he was beaming in shirtsleeves on the streets of Vancouver, being enthusiastically embraced by cheering, happy crowds and embracing them in turn. Almost all of these images were captured and uploaded for circulation on social media by people who were at the parade, not by the parliamentary press corps. The parliamentary media were all back in Ottawa. There were no crowds of people in a jubilant mood snapping selfies and streaming them on Periscope at the Harper or Mulcair launch events, because crowds of people had not been invited.

To the bewilderment of the Conservative and NDP electoral machines, what was supposed to be a Trudeau campaign gaffe proved to be a triumph of retail politics.

This sort of freewheeling among the electorate was unthinkable to the Conservatives, who were ever wary of the unscripted moment and on guard against protestors hijacking campaign events in order to ruin things. Harper’s appearances were meticulously staged and seriously policed. In addition to the prime minister’s RCMP protection detail, the Conservatives hired former members of the Canadian military to provide security. A campaign run on the persona of the prime minister as the country’s principal-in-chief demanded events that were disciplined, dignified, and upbeat, like school-spirit rallies — there would be no outbursts from troublemakers at the back of the classroom. Only vetted party faithful were invited and admitted. And while it seemed as though Trudeau had made it a campaign goal to take a selfie with every living Canadian from coast to coast, at first Conservative organizers tried to prevent attendees at Harper’s appearances from recording or publicizing the events in any way — including posting photographs on social media.

Reporters were limited to asking five questions a day, one allocated to a member of the local media and the other four to journalists paying to travel with the Harper tour. As Justin Ling of Vice pointed out, for the privilege of posing the occasional question to the country’s leader during an election campaign, national journalists were required to pay the Conservative Party some $78,000. The prime minister’s campaign appearances were so well orchestrated that the only disruption was the booing and heckling directed at the media from party supporters.

By the end, of course, there was nothing dignified about Harper’s campaign events, as the party enlisted the disgraced former mayor of Toronto Rob Ford, and resorted to gimmicky game show sound effects to count off the cost to taxpayers of Trudeau’s election promises.

What’s the Number, Justin?

The first of the leaders’ debates, organized by Maclean’s magazine, came only four days into the campaign. Here, the smart thinking went, was where Trudeau — inexperienced, an intellectual lightweight, prone to dinner-theatre emoting — was most at risk. The question that was supposed to demolish Trudeau, to expose him as nothing more than addle-brained charisma, came from Mulcair, not Harper. Once Trudeau had embarrassed himself nationally — once he had been revealed to be truly not up to the job — that would clear the way for the two grown-ups to get down to the brass knuckle fight Mulcair wanted and Harper was confident he could win: a contest between two strong, unyielding, and uncharismatic personalities; a sharp choice on spending, taxation, and social policy. The climactic battle between Right and Left.

The question Mulcair put to him was intended to leave Trudeau floundering, because the question is a trap. Trudeau had chided Mulcair for his promise to repeal the Clarity Act, which requires a clear majority for any vote in favour of Quebec separation to be valid. Mulcair saw his opportunity. What, he demanded to know, was the precise majority Trudeau would require in order to accept a vote in favour of separation? Mulcair goaded Trudeau: What’s his number? What’s your number, Mr. Trudeau? ... What’s the number, Justin?

The question is a trap because there is no correct number. But instead of equivocating, Trudeau supplied what Mulcair least expected: an actual figure. You want a number, Mr. Mulcair? … I’ll give you a number. Nine. My number is nine. Nine Supreme Court justices said one vote is not enough to break up this country, and yet that is Mr. Mulcair’s position.

We should not read too much into a single truncated moment of election theatrics, but Trudeau’s answer was triply effective. First, it was Mulcair, the former lawyer, who ended up looking flustered, caught by his own trap. The Conservatives had invited Canadians to grill Trudeau as though in a job interview, but he had just fielded an especially bel-ligerent question in a way that outsmarted the older guy. Second, it invoked the Supreme Court. It amounted to a declaration of confidence in the position and wisdom of that body — an allusion to Harper’s petulant public spat in 2013 with Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin. Third, and most telling, it was clever.

Trudeau’s detractors, and the Conservative propaganda engine in particular, had portrayed him as just a walking hairdo, a glamour boy. With one word — Nine — he showed that there was a brain at work too. He may have possessed a different type of intelligence from Mulcair and Harper — disparaged by some as mere emotional intelligence — but it was a dangerous mind nonetheless, not least because Mulcair and Harper did not understand how it worked and were baffled by its appeal. It was as though Trudeau were broadcasting on a frequency that neither Mulcair nor Harper could pick up.

Tax and Spend

The Conservative platform offered no grand architectural vision for the nation. Conservatives by definition abhor collectivist schemes. Instead, the platform rested on four main planks. The first was ensuring prosperity through the trade deals the government had negotiated: CETA (the Comprehensive European Trade Agreement) with the European Union; and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, concluded and announced late in the campaign. The second was the reduction of the tax burden through income splitting and a series of boutique incentives for everything from home renovation to children’s education savings plans. The third consisted of measures intended to keep Canada safe from threats from abroad and terrorists and criminals at home. The fourth was the demonstration of responsible fiscal management through balancing the budget.

Though the Harper government had run six straight annual deficits, by the 2014–15 fiscal year there was a budget surplus of $1.9 billion, which the Conservatives trumpeted as proof of their astute financial stewardship. More than that, they had elevated the promise of a balanced budget to a sacrosanct ethic. They had made it all but unthinkable for a party to propose deficit spending as part of its electoral appeal.

The NDP deplored Conservative policies as favouring corporate interests and the wealthiest Canadians over the disadvantaged and the middle class, and they promised measures that would redress these injustices. But they concluded that it would be political suicide if they did not loudly insist that they, too, were committed to balanced budgets. Otherwise, the Conservatives would fear-monger about an NDP government wrecking the economy by printing money to pay for its socialist agenda. The effect was to suggest that on the question of spending and taxation, the NDP would hold to Conservative principles.

On August 27, the Liberals announced that they would almost double federal infrastructure spending over the next decade, from $65 billion to $125 billion, both as an economic stimulus and to upgrade for the twenty-first century the country’s crumbling central nervous system of roads, bridges, and transit systems: the very stuff essential to moving goods and people around. In order to pay for this, a Liberal government would run modest deficits of some $10 billion a year before balancing the budget in its fourth year in office.

Both the Conservatives and NDP derided the plan as folly, but the Liberals had political cover. No less a figure than David Dodge, a former governor of the Bank of Canada, had co-written a paper in 2014 for the law firm Bennett Jones that may well have been the inspiration for the Liberal gambit. Dodge argued that in the current environment making a fetish of balancing the budget was myopic and actually worked against the country’s economic interests. He advocated taking advantage of historically low interest rates to invest in infrastructure in order to improve productivity. Rather than garroting public spending in order to meet an artificial target in balancing the budget, Dodge argued that the sensible government priority should be to gradually reduce the public debt-to-GDP ratio. This, he said, could be done while still spending on much-needed infrastructure.

In one bold move, the Liberals managed to not only vividly distinguish themselves from the NDP but to outflank them too, positioning themselves to the left of the traditionally leftist New Democrats, whom the Liberals could now paint as Conservative quislings. At the same time, they suggested that the Conservative mantra of balanced budgets was a canard, and that the truly responsible fiscal manager would find more creative solutions to the country’s economic doldrums. Attacking what had been established as an economic truism was a risky proposition, but it would prove to be less risky than the NDP’s supposed caution in promising to balance the budget.

Citizenship

A month into the campaign, in the small hours of September 2, sixteen people fleeing the civil war in Syria piled into an inflatable boat designed to hold eight and pushed off from Bodrum, Turkey, heading for the Greek island of Kos. Five minutes later the dinghy capsized and three members of a single family drowned. One of them was three-year-old Alan Kurdi. Photographs of the child’s lifeless body lying face down on the beach gripped the attention of the world. As soon as it was revealed that the Kurdi family had been trying to join relatives in Vancouver, the Syrian refugee crisis became a Canadian election issue. In short order this would become entwined with whether Muslim women should be permitted to wear the niqab during Canadian citizenship ceremonies, whether dual citizens convicted of terrorism or treason should be stripped of their Canadian citizenship, and whether Canadian citizens should be invited to inform on one another to the national police force.

Both Mulcair and Trudeau called for Canada to open its borders to refugees trying to escape the conflicts in the Middle East. While visibly moved by the images of Alan Kurdi’s body, Harper remained steadfast. This was not a government to be panicked into precipitous action just because others — the opposition, the media, members of the public — had worked themselves into a state of over-excitement. It was not a government to be buffeted by the chattering classes. Harper framed the matter as a public safety priority, not a humanitarian concern. The NDP and Liberals wanted thousands of additional refugees admitted as soon as possible. Harper decried this as a security risk. He vowed to attack ISIS as the root cause. Bombs were the answer, not entry visas.

To those who viewed what was happening in Syria and southern Europe as a humanitarian crisis, the Conservative response was compassionless, isolationist, and paranoid, in that it saw the hordes of refugees as a mass of potential terrorists. But the public as a whole rewarded the Conservatives with an uptick in the polls.

Then, on September 15, the niqab issue seized the campaign. In 2011 the Conservative government had instituted a policy that required Muslim women taking the oath of citizenship to remove their face coverings at the public ceremony, even though the women would have revealed themselves to court officials in private in order to establish their identities. A woman named Zunera Ishaq, a devout Sunni, launched a court challenge and in February 2015 a Federal Court judge struck down the policy. The government appealed. With a month to go in the election campaign, the Federal Court of Appeal upheld the previous court’s ruling and the Conservative government announced that it would appeal to the Supreme Court.

The issue reverberated across the country. Harper had made himself clear on the question six months previously when the court first ruled against the government policy. It is offensive, he said, that someone would hide their identity at the very moment where they are committing to join the Canadian family. The implication was that people unwilling to abandon specific cultural practices on government edict — practices that just happen to be specific to a particular culture — should not be welcome in the Canadian family, no matter the opinion of the courts.

Trade deals and boutique tax credits aside, here was a stark choice the Conservatives could put to the electorate: what sort of Canada do you want? They were certain the Canadian public was on their side. They certainly knew how voters in Quebec would react. Anyone foolish enough — or principled enough — to defend the niqab would forfeit Quebec.

Tactically, the Conservatives were right. For NDP and Liberal candidates canvassing for votes, defending the right of a woman to take the oath of citizenship in a veil was a doorstep liability. (Allan Thompson in this volume offers a first-hand account of how the niqab issue was received in his rural, southwestern Ontario riding.) It was difficult enough to dispel the misconceptions — to explain patiently that these Muslim women would indeed have already revealed themselves in private, just as they are required to do in banks, airport security lines, and passport control, where everyone must confirm their identity. Explaining the principle at stake was even more challenging. For the Liberals and NDP, anyone about to be confirmed as a Canadian citizen should be free to present themselves at the ceremony just as they present themselves in public in their daily lives. It is not against the law to wear a niqab in Canada, either as a tourist, an international student, a business visitor, a permanent resident, or a citizen. Why should it be prohibited just at the moment that citizenship is being publicly conferred? But this is not a persuasive argument to someone who sees the niqab as an alien cultural practice that should have no place in Canada. In an interview with CBC, Harper suggested the Conservatives would consider preventing any federal public servant from wearing the niqab.

Although both the NDP and the Liberals applauded the court ruling and opposed the government policy, the Conservatives released a French-language advertisement that accused Trudeau of being disconnected from the values and priorities of Québécois but made no mention of Mulcair. It was the NDP, however, that would feel the effects of the controversy most keenly. Quebec had rewarded the NDP with fifty-nine seats in the 2011 election and vaulted them into Stornoway as the Official Opposition. Though the party knew all too well that its position on the issue was playing badly in Quebec, in the first French-language leaders’ debate, on September 24, Mulcair took a principled stand. Support for the NDP in Quebec never recovered.

At almost the same time, the government announced that under the provisions of Bill C-24 — the Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act that had become law in May — it had revoked the citizenship of Zakaria Amara, who was serving a life sentence having pled guilty to planning to bomb downtown Toronto. Both the NDP and the Liberals vowed to repeal the legislation, but again the principle at stake was hard to explain and defend on the doorstep: that Canadian citizens are governed by Canadian laws; that if a citizen breaks these laws, mechanisms are in place to bring them to justice; that citizenship is not something that any government should be allowed to revoke; and that the provisions of this law created two classes of citizens, one with more rights than the other. But Trudeau had found a way to state plainly why he believed C-24 was objectionable and dangerous, and he deployed it on September 28 during the Munk leaders’ debate. Borrowing the cadence of Gertrude Stein, he insisted that: A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian.

But perhaps some Canadians, the Conservatives insinuated, were behaving in ways that were not Canadian. In November 2014 the Conservatives had passed the Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act. On October 2, in one last overt reference to alien others residing in Canada, Minister of Immigration Chris Alexander called a press conference to promise an RCMP snitch line to which Canadians could report barbaric practices on the part of their neighbours.

Tactically, each of these Conservative measures had its utility. Cumulatively, they were a strategic fiasco. They were an insistent reminder of the divisive, abrasive, and authoritarian personality of the Conservative regime. They may have stoked the party’s base, but they galvanized those who desperately wanted rid of the Harperites. In the final days of the campaign, as the NDP’s prospects faded, voters committed to ousting the Conservatives gravitated toward the sunny ways of the Liberal alternative.

Clearly, for the Conservatives, the long campaign was a mistake. They expected that over the course of gruelling weeks Trudeau would embarrass himself. In fact, the campaign gave him ample opportunity to present himself to the electorate, and the more voters saw of him the more he grew on them. Meanwhile, the Conservative effort to belittle him as a Gen-X slacker with presumptions started to unravel. Retired parents in their sixties and seventies think well of their children coming of age in their late thirties or early forties and want the best for them. Trudeau emerged as the very image of that generation. The Just Not Ready ad, which the Conservatives had released in May and kept in heavy rotation, became the 2015 equivalent of the Kim Campbell Progressive Conservatives’ attack on Jean Chrétien back in 1993. In an ad that played on Chrétien’s partial facial paralysis, the Conservatives had asked: Is this the face of a prime minister? It only worked to make Chrétien sympathetic. Similarly, the Just Not Ready ad invited voters to size up Justin Trudeau. As they did, more and more began to think he might be the best of the candidates. The ad managed to make him prime ministerial.

And while the Conservative campaign bet heavily on Harper’s stature as a father figure, it neglected to strategically consider that Trudeau was also a father — a young, energetic, cheerful father, against whom Harper, by the end, looked like a sour, sullen old man.

The chapters that follow parse the election with scholarly attention, examining each of the party campaigns in turn, the impact of the debates, the role of the pollsters, gender issues in the election, voting behaviour, political coverage in an utterly changed media environment, and the experience of a first-time candidate.

They are a time capsule of analysis.

CHAPTER 2

Stephen Harper and the 2015 Conservative Campaign: Defeated but Not Devastated

Faron Ellis

"N o regrets" is what Stephen Harper said as he conceded defeat in the 2015 election. Harper was undoubtedly reflecting on his nearly ten years in power and the quarter-century he participated in one of the great transformations in Canadian party politics, at least as much as he was commenting on the previous eleven-week campaign and the election night results. By the measure of seats won and standing in the House of Commons, the 2015 election results were the worst for Harper during his tenure as leader of the united Conservative Party of Canada. [1] Although the party won ninety-nine seats, identical to what it garnered in its first contest as a reunited party in 2004, that total represented a lower proportion of Commons seats (29.3 percent) than it did in 2004 (32.1 percent). Further, in 2004 it held the Liberals to a minority government and soon claimed its own victories in 2006, 2008, and 2011. In each election it increased its share of votes and seats. Until this time.

When viewed through the prism of party competitiveness, Harper did achieve something in 2015. He left the party in a relatively competitive position, especially when compared to 1993, the last time a conservative party completed nearly a decade in power. The base of support that was built on the foundations of the old Reform-Alliance and Progressive Conservative parties held strong throughout Harper’s tenure and remained especially strong through a difficult 2015 campaign. In terms of raw numbers, the Conservative Party earned only slightly fewer total votes in 2015 than in 2011, its most successful campaign, and over one and a half million more votes than in its inaugural 2004 contest. Post-election analysis will likely reveal that it lost ground because it failed to mobilize as many new voters as did its competitors during an election that saw turnout increase. It also lost support among recently hard-earned additions to its coalition, particularly among new Canadians. And it was decimated in many of Canada’s major metropolitan centres. But the base held. Rock solid, according to members of the Conservative campaign team.

Table 2.1 : Conservative Party of Canada Election Results (2004–2015)[2]

Source: Elections Canada

The Conservative Party entered the 2015 campaign confident that its base was solidly behind it, but aware that it would face a time for change ballot question that clearly favoured its competitors. With upward of two-thirds of the electorate telling pollsters they wanted a change, and with the Harper Conservatives’ style, tone, and temperament in government reinforcing their opponents’ narrative, campaign strategists knew the magnitude of the hill they had to climb. Add the natural fatigue voters tend to develop for any leader after ten years in power, the accumulated baggage of several relatively small but symbolically significant scandals, and a growing list of organized anti-Harper special interest groups, and the task of re-election seemed monumental.

Monumental but not unachievable. After all, much had been accomplished over the party’s years in power. The Conservatives had rebalanced the government books, brought Canada’s debt-to-GDP level down to what they inherited in 2006, and they could claim other enviable economic policy successes associated with their free trade agenda, tax reductions, and an overall stemming of the growth in government. The party’s outreach strategy had recruited voters from formerly unsupportive segments of the electorate, both regionally and demographically, and the party continued to be a fundraising behemoth. Harper’s leadership poll numbers were typically strong and all evidence indicated that the base continued to remain loyal, at between 25 to 30 percent of voters throughout the majority government period between 2011 and 2015.[3] The Conservatives believed they could limit the impact of the time for change narrative by promoting another, one that played to their strengths: leadership, security, and the economy. These themes would be presented in the context of Harper’s experience and would be juxtaposed against Liberal leader Justin Trudeau’s lack thereof in an effort at framing their preferred ballot question: Who is most capable of keeping the economy strong and Canadians safe? Answer: Stephen Harper, even if you don’t like him and his style very much.

Conservatives were certain that the young Liberal leader would falter at some point during the exceptionally long campaign. When that occurred, they believed, adding another 5 to 7 percent of the electorate to the stable Conservative base seemed achievable, if they could execute an effective campaign. That level of success would also be conditional on the NDP maintaining its support, particularly in Ontario, something that would allow the Conservatives to eke out marginal wins based on advantageous vote splits. All of this seemed feasible, and so at the outset of the campaign a strong minority win was considered a distinct possibility. If absolutely everything broke right, a majority was not unthinkable. However, Conservatives knew that even a modest minority victory would see them surrender power; whether that occurred in days or months would be determined only by how strong or weak that minority was.

What resulted, however, was an unfocused, at times disorganized, campaign effort. The Conservatives offered a platform that promised moderate, conservative governance and only a small selection of targeted policies as incentives to vote for them. They offered no galvanizing signature policy element similar to the 2006 GST-cut promise, or a powerfully motivating agenda such as the 2011 mantra of keeping the Bloc Québécois from controlling an unorthodox coalition of power-grabbing carpetbaggers. Their 2015 campaign narrative was unfocused, more similar to their unsuccessful 2004 effort than to any of their victorious campaigns. Their much vaunted organizational superiority failed to materialize, in as much as the Liberals were at least as prepared to target, track, and deliver their vote as were Conservatives. The Conservatives definitely had more money to spend than did their opponents, but they were unprepared when the Liberals staked out what Conservative strategists believed to be untenable policy positions, Trudeau failed to stumble, and the NDP refused to co-operate by maintaining its vote share. When the change vote galvanized around the Liberals late in the contest, the Conservative campaign tried to preserve as many of the long-term gains the party had achieved over the previous decade, and live to fight