A Harper dynasty and the end of the Liberals? How the 2011 election didn't change everything

In just a few weeks, Canadian politicschanged forever. Or so everyone thought.

The Liberals, once the country's "natural governing party,"were reduced to a smoking ruin. The Bloc Qubcois'two decades of dominance in Quebec came to an abrupt halt.

Stephen Harper finally won his majority government a "strong, stable, national, majority Conservative government,"as he liked to say and the New Democrats shed their perennial third-party status. The NDP was now in it to win it.

But 10 years later, the federal election held on May 2, 2011 doesn't seem as earth-shattering as it once appeared.

Today, the Liberals are where they usually havebeen throughout their history in government and the Bloc, while far from dominant, is a force again in Quebec. The Conservatives seem about as far away from winning a majority as they've ever been over the past 15 years, while the NDP is nestled once more in the back corner of the House of Commons.

The reverberations of that 2011 campaign can still be felt today, however both in the lessons that still hold true and the falseconclusionsthat weredrawn in the immediate aftermath ofan exceptionalelection.

The story of Harper's majority and 'le bon Jack'

Even as the 2011 election campaign was underway, the players couldn't agree on how it started. For theLiberals and New Democrats,the triggering eventwas the Conservatives being found in contempt of Parliament and losing a confidence vote.

The Conservatives, meanwhile, arguedthe election became necessary becausethe opposition partiescouldn't supportthebudgetandwere hoping to revive their doomed 2008attemptto form a governingcoalition.

The first days of the campaign made it clear which narrative won out. Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieffspent a lot of the early campaignanswering questions(ornot answering them)about whether he would try to teamup with the NDP and the Bloc in a coalition.

It all went downhill from there for Ignatieff, whose public image the Conservatives had spent years successfully undermining with highly effective adsthat portrayed him as an opportunistic intellectual who had spent his professional life outside the country he wanted to lead.

As Harper waged a disciplinedcampaign with limited media access (and limited opportunities to be knocked off-message),the NDP's Jack Layton, leader of the party since 2003, finally began to breakthrough. An appearance on Radio-Canada's much-watched talk-showTout le monde en parleand a strong English-language debate performance helped propel the NDP forward in the polls.

The biggest shift took place in Quebec, where the NDP began to pick up a few percentage points on a daily basis primarily at the expense of a tired Bloc campaign under Gilles Duceppe. By the finaldays of the election, Layton's NDP was solidly in second place, the Liberals and Bloc were in freefall and the Conservatives were knocking on the door of a majority government.

When the votes were counted, the Conservatives had secured the majority they had failed to win in 2006 and 2008, with 40 per cent of the vote and 166 seats in a House of Commons which then sat 308. The NDP formed the Official Opposition for the first time in its history, with 31 per cent of the vote and 103 seats an astonishing 59 of which were won in Quebec.

The Liberals were reduced to 34 seats and 19 per cent of the vote, while the Bloc fell to just four seats. It was the worst result in both party's histories and it cost Ignatieff and Duceppeboththeir leaderships and theirown seats.

A new era in Canadian politics had dawned. Or so it seemed at the time.

A reminder that, yes, campaigns matter

The 2011 election offereda practicaldemonstration ofthe reasons why parties can't take theirpositions inpolls for granted. The New Democrats in particular have been fond ofpointing at the 2011 result to argue thatbad polls or low fundraising numbers shouldn't be taken terribly seriously.

But italso showed that the electoral landscape in Canada can change very quickly and thatif you assumethings will stay the way they've been for a very long time, you can get blindsided by events.

There have been a few other examples of historic and unforeseeable breakthroughs in Canadian politics since 2011. In the 2015 provincial election, the Alberta New Democrats ended the Progressive Conservatives' 44-year run in office, coming from behind in the polls during the campaign to defeat an entrenched PC government.

In 2019, the Prince Edward Island Greens made history when they formed the Official Opposition in that province.

Sights and sounds of the election

13 years ago

Duration 3:01

A montage of highlights from the 2011 federal election campaign.

The 2011 election was also the beginning of a tumultuous time in Quebec politics. After Quebecers handed the Bloc a majority of the province's seats in six consecutive elections going back to 1993, Quebecers went en masse to the New Democrats a party they had never supported in large numbers before.

But then Quebec voters pivoted to the Liberals in 2015. In 2019, many of them swung back to the Bloc. At the provincial level, Quebec went from a minority Parti Qubcois government in 2012 to a majority Liberal government in 2014. In 2018, the Coalition Avenir Qubecbecame the first party other than the Liberals and the PQ to govern the provincesince the 1960s.

Quebec is setting up to be an important battleground again in the next federal campaign.

The GTAisground zero again

Quebec isn't the most important battleground, however. As in 2011, that title goes to the ridings in and around Toronto.

Ten years ago, the Conservatives could not have won their majority government without making significant gains in the Greater Toronto Area. About two-thirds of the seats the party picked up between the 2008 and 2011 elections were in Toronto and the surrounding suburbs. Without them, Harper would have fallen short of the 155 seats he needed.

Since 2011, the GTA has continued to be a kingmaker. Liberal gains in the 2015 federal election in the region handed them their majority. Had his party lost those seats in 2019, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau might not havebeen in a position to form aminority government.

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CBCs Emma Godmere checks in with veterans of the 2011 campaign to find out what lessons might be drawn from that election in advance of a possible contest later this year.

As a fast-growing part of Canada, theGTA is only going to grow inimportance in future federal elections. That trend didn't start in 2011, but that election did prove that the Conservatives could win big in a region that had largely spurned them for 20 years.

The Conservatives were aided, however, by the weakness of their traditional foe. Ignatieff was an unpopular leader heading into the campaign the New Democrats were able to take advantage of that.

The election was a shot across the bow of the Liberals, signalling that if they're weak enough, the NDP can replace them. The 2018 Ontario provincial election ended up making the same point. In Western Canada, the NDP long ago replaced the Liberals as the sparring partner forthe main conservative parties in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and in Alberta more recently.

Unite the left? Not necessary

But there were many aspects of the 2011 federal election that proved to be one-offs, making it look like an outlier anexception, not a newrule.

It's impossible to know how much of an impact Layton's death a few months after the election had on the future of the NDP, or whether he would have avoided his successor Thomas Mulcair's fate in the 2015 election.

But with Layton gone and the Conservatives in office, discussion in some progressive circles turned to the need to unite the left in order to put up a common front against Harper.

A few months after the election, former Liberal prime minister Jean Chrtien predicted that the Liberals and NDP would eventually merge.Nathan Cullen and Joyce Murray mountedbids for the NDP and Liberal leaderships on platforms embracing intra-party co-operation. (Cullen finished third in the 2012 NDP leadership raceand Joyce Murray was the runner-up in the 2013 vote that tapped Trudeau for the Liberal leadership.)

But the desireto unite the left was based on some faulty premises. One of them had to do withturnout. Low voterturnout in2008 and 2011 benefited the Conservatives and their disproportionately older base, soa divided left seemed at the timeto be a huge obstacle for the Liberals and New Democrats.

But turnout spiked in 2015 and 2019 to 68 and 67 per cent, respectively, after registering around 60 per cent in the two previous elections. Much of that increased participation benefited the Liberals.

History doesn't always repeat itselfbut it has been a pretty reliable guide. The Liberals were able to win in 2015 and 2019 despite a divided left. They also managed winsin 1965, 1968, 1972 and 1980when the NDP was putting up above-average results.

On top of that, the notion of an unbeatable Conservative Party ran contrary to Canada's political history. Not since the death of John A. Macdonald have the Conservatives enjoyed more than 10 consecutive years in government.

Reports of a party's deathgreatly exaggerated

Immediately after the2011 election, however, the trend lines appeared to be going in the right direction for the Conservatives and the wrong direction for the Liberals. The Liberals had lost seats and votes in four consecutive elections as the Conservatives gained.

But the sample size offered by a few elections led tosome premature political obituaries, based on the assumption that the Conservatives would remain strong, the NDP had finally arrived and that the Liberals and Bloc would be consigned to the dustbin of history.

There were reasons tobelieve at the timethat 2011marked the moment"when the gods changed" the beginning ofthe end for the Liberal Party.

Ignatieff had become only the third Liberal leader after Edward Blake in the 19th century and Stphane Dion more recently to fail to become prime minister. Western democracies were increasingly being polarized between left and right and in the United Kingdom the "mother of all Parliaments" the Liberals hadbeen replaced by the Labour Party decades earlier.

With support for independence waning, the Bloc also seemed like an anachronism whose time had run out if one ignored the factthat Quebec has a long history of distinct parties at the federal level.

The 2011election hasn't turned out to be the kind of political re-alignment some predicted. The demographic changes that were supposed to make the Conservatives the 21st century's "natural governing party" haven't benefited them because the Liberals adapted to those changes, as all successful parties do.

The potential for Quebec's social democratic traditions to form the foundation of a future NDP government, meanwhile,collided with an inconvenient fact:those Qubecoissocial democrats also tendto be Quebecnationalists, aligning them withan ideology which the 2015 election suggested was incompatible with the NDP's position on issues like identity.

An abnormal electoral map

Many of the conclusions drawn from the 2011 election were based on what was a very unusual electoral map one that upended the normal dynamics of Canadian elections.

For example, the Conservatives were able to win a majority government with very little representation from Quebec. The party elected just five Quebec MPsand would have secured enough seats in the rest of the country for a majority government without a single one of them suggesting that the province need not form an important part of the party's electoral strategy going forward.

But the Conservatives havewon majority governments withoutsignificant delegations from Quebec on just two occasions. The election in1917 whenthe country was fiercely divided between English and French Canada over conscription was the first. The 2011 election was the second. Exceptional circumstances are rarely the foundation of a winning strategy.

The split between the Liberals and the NDP was particularly exceptional. In Quebec, the NDP was benefiting largelyfrom lost Bloc votes, but in the rest of the country the swing was mostly between the Liberals and NDP.

But it wasn't a big enough swing. Outside of Quebec, the NDP still finished nearly 20 points behind the Conservatives and won 44 seats, only one more than Ed Broadbent had won in 1988 on a smaller map the party's best performance prior to 2011.

This meant that in much of the country, the Conservatives were not up against the Liberals in their traditional two-way fights. Increases in support for the NDP at the Liberals' expense boosted the NDP in ridings across the country, but that boost tended to start from a very low floor.

Often, theresult was the Liberals falling farenough to lose seats to the Conservatives, but not far enough to put the NDP in a position to win them instead. In the Greater Toronto Area, this shift in votes won the Conservatives many seats. Without it, they would not have gotten their majority government.

What's left of 2011 in 2021

While the 2011 election didn't produce a lasting political re-alignment, some echoes of that campaign can still be heard today.

Quebec remains a more multi-coloured battleground than it was prior to 2011 and the NDP has secured a toehold there Alexandre Boulerice's seat of RosemontLa Petite-Patrie that survived the receding of the "orange wave".

The GTA is still where the makeupof the federal government isdecided. Former Conservative leaderAndrew Scheer's inability to break back into the region doomed his leadership. With the Conservatives still trailing the Liberals by double-digits in the polls in Ontario, it could very well doom Erin O'Toole's leadership as well.

But the most important takeaway might be the lesson the Liberals learned from their near-death experience. They're not the first political party to suffera series of crushing defeats before realizing they need a fundamental change in their approach.

And they won't be the last. Since that one majority government victory under Harper in 2011, the Conservatives have failed twice to repeat it. Languishing in the polls at or below their historical floor of around 30 per cent, the party could be on track to fail a third time.

If so, the parallels between the 2011 electionand a potential 2021 campaign might not be about what happened 10 years ago, but what happened next.