There is a widely shared opinion that Canada is a Left-leaning country, and is becoming more Leftist as time passes. Let us examine if this opinion aligns with one specific series of data. The result will surprise you.
RESPECTFUL DISAGREEMENT
On the night of April 28th, I was on a podcast as a guest for coverage of the federal election. During our discussion, the host made an observation with which many Canadians – if not the majority – would agree. Once it became clear that Liberal Party was most likely going the win at least a minority mandate, he remarked that this was proof that Canada is a Leftist country.
I have a lot of respect for this host, but out of habit as someone who likes to examine if popularly held views are borne out by evidence, I started wondering if this opinion can stand scrutiny. One problem with my approach is that many people describe the suggestion (that a view that is accepted as true by the majority could possibly be untrue) as ‘nonsense’. Sometimes they are right, but the few times when they are not are the fuel that keep me going; it is deeply gratifying to disprove ‘accepted wisdom’, even if it doesn’t happen as often as I would wish.
METHODOLOGY
When I was in my 20’s, I read book titled ‘The Dancing Wu Li Masters’ by Gary Zukav, which contained a quote by Albert Einstein: “Nonsense is nonsense only until you find the point of view from which it makes sense.” In every instance of inquiry as to whether an ‘accepted wisdom’ is actually true or not, the key factor is finding the point of view – or the angle, if you will – from which that ‘accepted wisdom’ can be disproved. In the case of the ‘accepted wisdom’ that ‘Canada is a largely Left-leaning country’, this boiled down to the number of seats that the Leftist or Left-leaning parties hold at the federal level. Before I get into the numbers, however, I owe you an explanation as to why I opted to accept this metric as the basis of my analysis.
After the federal elections in 2019 and 2021, it became popular among the supporters of the Conservative Party that it had won the ‘popular vote’. The (perfectly valid) counter-argument from the Leftists (and those who were neutral in this debate, such as your truly) was that the popular vote is an irrelevant metric when it comes to the legitimacy of an election result; what counts is the number of seats that each of the parties wins – and the Conservatives had failed to win enough seats on each of the two occasions to form government.
However, when it comes to opining on the overall political leaning of Canadian society, these Leftists (and the neutrals) make the same mistake that the Conservative supporters made in relation to the legitimacy of an election win by the Liberals. For many years, I have seen the former cohort hold forth that, since the combined vote-share of the Leftist parties* exceeds 50%, often in the region of 60% and above, it leads to the unavoidable conclusion that Canada is a Left-leaning country. (* some people take exception to the Liberal Party being characterized a Leftist; let me clarify that I am using the appellation here to distinguish it from the Conservatives in terms of their policy stance on economic as well as social issues).
Here is the nub of my criticism of that ‘Leftist majority’ argument: If the number of votes won by the Conservative Party is not relevant in judging the legitimacy of an election, then the number of votes won by the Leftist Parties cannot validly be taken as the basis for judging the political leaning of the society as a whole; in both cases, it is the number of seats won by the two sides, viz, the Right and the Left, that should be used as the yardstick. To elaborate the point, if the number of people voting for the Leftist Parties in the ridings held by Leftist Parties goes up, it would not change the respective seat-count in the House of Commons, and vice versa. I say this because the House of Commons is the reflection of the collective will of Canadian society, therefore, in the interest of consistency, it is the composition of the HoC that adjudicates the validity of not only an election but also the overall political tilt of the country.
THE DATA
With that background explanation (which I hope has satisfied you), let us look at the data. For the purposes of this analysis, I went back to the federal election of 2004, for two reasons. One, this smooths out short-term variations to yield a result that enjoys more validity in the statistical sense, and secondly (and subjectively) because this is the period when I have lived in Canada, so I feel a degree of closeness to these elections.
In the table below, I have tabulated the seats won by the Liberals, the NDP and the Green Party and arrived at the total number of seats for the Leftist Parties. While I have included the number of seats won by Bloc Quebecois in the table, this is merely for the sake of completeness of the table; these numbers are taken neither in the percentages of the Left nor the Conservatives. I believe I am justified in this treatment because the BQ is concerned more with the interests of their province rather than the Left/right divide (to the extent that the dichotomy is useful). I have then compared the percentage of seats won by the Leftist Parties versus those won by the Conservative Party. Lastly, I have arranged the data in the form of a line graph (a picture being worth a thousand words – or in this case, a thousand numbers). So, here we go:
CONCLUSION
As you can see, the main outlier (perhaps the only one, but I leave that judgment to you) is the election of 2015, when the gap between the seats held by the Leftist Parties on one hand and those held by the Conservative Party on the other was close to 40%. This is borne out by the second chart below; the percentage difference in the number of seats held by the two sides has, barring the anomaly of 2015, held between +20% and -10%, where the + sign favours the Leftist Parties and the (-) sign favours the Conservatives.
Based on the above, we can say confidently that Canada is NOT becoming more Leftist as the years pass. We can also say, with some degree of confidence, that the society oscillates between electing more MP’s on the Left and the Right. In fact, there has been a consistent downward movement in the number of Leftist Parties’ MP’s in the last three elections. Moreover, it may seem, from the above chart, as if the Leftist MP’s are more in number compared to the Conservative ones more frequently, however, if we stretch the data series farther back to 1984, then that picture would change.
In sum, my conclusion is that the widespread belief that Canada is becoming more Left-leaning with time is not borne out by data; in fact, the data points to the opposite. The question, then, is why or where this widespread belief originates from.
ALIENATION
The best definition of a democracy that I have come across goes like this: Democracy is defined not by the mechanism through which political power is attained (i.e., free and fair elections), but rather by how that power is exercised. I cannot speak to the period when I was not living in Canada, but I can definitely say that over the past decade, i.e., over Prime Minister Trudeau’s tenure, political power was exercised in a heavy-handed manner; dissent was not only not brooked but was in fact crushed when expedient. Governance is supposed to involve multiple trade-offs between competing demands, concerns and constraints. This cardinal principle of governance was disdainfully abandoned by the Trudeau Liberals (and the last phase, in partnership – or cahoots, for those who feel less charitable about this – with Jagmeet Singh’s NDP). And throughout this decade, this malevolent partnership (because it discarded the aforesaid cardinal principle) was aided and abetted by most of the mainstream media.
This lopsided governance and its endorsements (mainly for financial reasons) by the MSM has caused a palpable sense of alienation among many Canadians – perhaps a critical mass that may be ready to react in a more volatile manner than has been the case thus far. The challenge before the newly elected Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney will be to address this sense of alienation, and to alleviate it – but given his prior predilections, equally if not more authoritative than those of former Prime Minster Trudeau, it will be a veritable miracle if he does that.
This is problematic because, as that data above shows, there will be a time when the pendulum swings back, and when it does, the MP’s representing the Canadians who have seethed with resentment for so long may bring in policies to wreak as much harm on the Left as they believe the Left has inflicted on them. As a friend of mine says often, ‘the retribution will be of Biblical proportions’. Let us hope and pray that sane heads prevail before we reach that point.
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