It may not be the smashing victory they won in 2015, but Justin Trudeau and the Liberals should feel very good that they will have a chance to form another government.
After four difficult years they managed to persuade enough voters to keep them in power. Given everything, it’s an impressive achievement that keeps Canada on a positive course for the future.
At the time of writing we don’t have full results. But it’s clear the Liberals will fall short of a majority mandate and have to govern with the support of other parties.
Their opponents will claim that the Liberals have been humbled, and there will be some truth in that.
But it’s also true that it is very difficult to win an outright majority in our multi-party system, in which five parties gathered substantial support. Given their stumbles over the past four years, it’s remarkable that the Liberals managed to win as convincingly as they did.
It’s also true that giving the Liberals a second chance is the best outcome for the country, especially given the alternative.
Last week we made clear our view that, overall, Trudeau and the Liberals were the best choice for voters. Despite their failings over the past four years they got it right on the big issues making sure prosperity is more widely shared, defending Canada’s interests, and fighting climate change.
Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives, in contrast, offered a menu of spending cuts and effectively nothing on the environment at a time when voters in most parts of the country were clearly demanding action on the climate front. A Conservative victory would have been a big step backward.
But the people have now had their say, and in the end that’s all that matters. In their collective wisdom they have decided to give their trust to the Liberals one more time, but yanked on their leash by forcing them to seek support elsewhere.
Now it will be up to all the parties to make a minority Parliament work. It’s been done many times before, and we know well that minority governments can be both productive and relatively stable.
Both Liberal and Conservative prime ministers have demonstrated that they can work. Justin Trudeau’s father, Pierre, famously lost his majority in 1972 and governed successfully for two years with the support of the NDP. More recently, Stephen Harper managed to govern for five years with two minority mandates.
Minorities, in fact, have become common-place. They’re certainly nothing to fear.
It will be up to the Liberals to seek support from other parties, like the New Democrats, to maintain progress on their priorities. Prime Minister Trudeau will have to learn some new political skills of negotiation, deal-making and careful listening. There will be less room for error and less time for personal indulgence.
For the Conservatives, this is a humbling result. Trudeau and the Liberals made more than their share of mistakes over the past four years, especially in the long and messy SNC-Lavalin affair. The prime minister’s personal shortcomings were also on full display in his dress-up tour of India and his brownface/blackface episodes.
Yet Scheer and the Conservatives could not offer a convincing alternative to the Liberals. They didn’t manage to grow beyond their base support and in the end they failed to seal the deal with the growing number of Canadians who had doubts about Trudeau & Co. In short, they blew it.
For the New Democrats and Jagmeet Singh, it’s a very mixed bag. Despite Singh’s much-praised campaign performance, the reality is they lost a substantial number of seats. On the other hand, the NDP may hold the balance of power in the new Commons. …
