Liberals Haunted by the Ghosts of Elections Past

How the 1993 and 2005 campaigns continue to hamper the Grits' chances of forming a government.

It’s been five years since the Conservatives took power, recalls Sun Media’s Warren Kinsella, and if to know Stephen Harper isn’t exactly to love him, it is at least to no longer be terrified of him. “For a decade, the Liberals kept Harper and his conservative colleagues from power with frightening tales about what the right-wingers would do to social programs, health care, and race relations,” he writes. “But after five years, our social network is mainly what it was.” That Harper hasn’t destroyed the country has robbed the Liberals of their main electoral message, and Kinsella rightly notes that on major issues like the economy and Afghanistan, the Grits and Tories have become virtually indistinguishable. “So what will the coming election be about?” Kinsella wonders. “No one knows, exactly.” Kinsella’s right to wonder, but if Harper’s statements over the years are any indication, the Conservatives will take a page out of the Liberals’ old play book and tell some frightening tales about a Liberal-NDP-Bloc coalition.

It’s clear that the 2005 election set the Liberals back (they lost, after all), but in an excellent column in the Globe and Mail, Lawrence Martin says trouble has been brewing ever since the 1993 vote. “Although they won handily, that campaign effectively reduced the Grits to an Ontario party with a few regional add-ons. Post-1993, the party won successive majorities in 1997 and 2000, but in each it was an all-Ontario show,” he says, as the party won few seats outside the province. The 1993 election destroyed the Progressive Conservatives, and to fill the resulting political vacuum the Reform Party took hold of the West and the Bloc Québécois arose in the East, shutting the Liberals out. Although the Liberal cause in Québec didn’t completely die until the sponsorship scandal, Martin’s point that 1993 was a game-changer is undeniable. “The reasons why we’ve had almost seven straight years of minority governments can be traced back to that campaign,” he writes. “It dramatically reduced the throw weight of both major parties while creating, with the two new potent formations, a pizza Parliament.” Which sounds delicious, but isn’t.