Can the Liberals win a fourth election?

Trudeau is gunning for a long-shot four-peat. History is against him.

Justin Trudeau at the 2017 Invictus Games. Fun fact: that was 17 years ago. Or maybe it just feels like it. Source: Public domain. Author: EJ Hersom, Defence.Gov.

Last week Prime Minister Justin Trudeau shuffled his Cabinet. Polls and projections have the Liberals showing their age as the Conservative Party leads the governing side. The “Sunny Ways” of 2015 have long since given way to darker days. Within two years, there will be a federal election. Trudeau says he will stay on to contest it, reaching for a rare feat for a first minister: four election wins in a row. (Note the difference between parties winning four in a row, like the Liberals under Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, and PMs winning four in a row on their own without passing the torch.)

I spend most of my time writing about policy and broader political phenomena. I try to leave access journalism, Cabinet and election speculation, and on-the-Hill reports to others who are better equipped for it and more interested in it than me. A lot of political watchers care about that stuff, but it’s not my main thing. Historical comparisons with contemporary politics, however, is very much my thing. And I’m going to do a bit of that right here. Summer fun, baby!

In the fall of 2023, Justin Trudeau will reach the eight-year mark as prime minister. He’s the 10th longest serving PM and, as of August, he’s roughly two years behind Stephen Harper, the man he beat in 2015. If Trudeau’s government lasts until the fixed election date in October 2025, he’ll move ahead of Harper and into 6th place, behind Jean Chrétien, who governed for just over a decade.

Of the top five longest-serving Canadian PMs, four are Liberals, including record-holder Mackenzie King, who was in office over 21 years. Which is bonkers. The only Conservative to track the top five is second-place John A. Macdonald, Canada’ first PM, who held the office for nearly 19 years. Justin Trudeau’s father, Pierre Trudeau, is third at 15 years and change, close to 4th-place Wilfrid Laurier who manged 15 years and a few months.

The list of prime ministers by time in office tells us long-serving heads of government aren’t unprecedented in Canada. Of the country’s twenty-three PMs, over half have made it beyond five years, as Liberal Lester B. Pearson was just two days shy of the mark. Each of the top 10 has made it past seven. But winning four elections in a row is another thing. It’s been done only twice. But more on that later.

To understand what’s coming in the next federal election, you must understand that the Liberal Party of Canada views itself as “the natural governing party” of Canada. It is constitutionally built to win and there is a fundamental belief embedded into party faithful that it deserves to win. The party fixes power in prime place in its firmament. To the extent that there is a “there” in the party’s core, the drive to power precedes it.

The Liberals are masters of reinvention and cross-national brokerage, and those capacities have served the party well, making them one of the democratic world’s most successful governing parties. They’ve been in power in Canada more often than not, and rarely away from it for long. From roughly 2004 until 2015, the party faced a period of decline and rebuilding which featured, in many ways, its worst-ever slump and some weak election showings. The party roared back in 2015 with a majority government, but it hasn’t managed one since. As some, including professor R. Kenneth Carty, have argued, the party’s dominance has waned over time and their vote share has faced structural decline and concentration.

In both 2019 and 2021, the Liberals managed to hold on to government despite winning fewer votes than the second-place Conservatives. This has happened before, more often than you might think, though never twice in a row, or twice under the same PM. But it’s happened. Four times, in fact: in 1896, when Laurier beat Charles Tupper; in 1926, when Mackenzie King beat Arthur Meighen; in 1957 when John Diefenbaker beat Louis St. Laurent; and in 1979, when Joe Clark beat Pierre Trudeau. That’s 6 elections out of 44 — or 13.6 percent of the time. Quite the system. But that’s a post for another day.

In recent years, the Liberals have boasted about having an “efficient vote.” That means their votes are distributed in a way that is more likely to win them seats compared to their competitors. Since Canada’s federal election is 338 small elections instead of one big election, the distribution of votes is more important than the aggregate national vote count. And 10 out of 10 times a party will prefer a smaller number of votes in the right place to a larger number in the wrong place.

With a sophisticated data operation, plenty of data to feed it, and a strong get out the vote machine, the Liberals are experts at targeting scarce resources in particular areas and converting that energy into votes. They’re good at targeting key ridings, too. You might see this as cynical — perhaps thinking the party cares less about what’s best for democracy than winning, perhaps thinking they care less about voters than they do likely Liberal voters. I think those things are true when it comes to elections and thinking about elections. I also think they are true about every party who has or could have the capacities or advantages the Liberal Party does. The party stalwarts would probably say that’s the price of doing business, since you can't govern if you don’t win.

Party and electoral politics are fundamentally about power and they are fundamentally cynical undertakings. Show me otherwise. If you’ve maintained an idealist, or god-forbid Panglossian, political worldview in the last decade, you might find such conclusions bewildering or even offensive. That’s fine, but I do hope you have a comfortable fainting chair handy for the years to come.

Justin Trudeau will try to mobilize and maximize his party’s advantages heading into the next federal election. Why him? Why is he staying? Who knows. There’s lots of speculation, but I leave the chase work on that to others. It doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s ego. A kind of Greek tragedy in the making. Trudeau agonistes. Maybe he wants to be Laurier. Or beat Harper’s tenure. Or secure another majority government. Maybe he thinks, or his party stalwarts think, that he’s the best chance they’ve got to win. Maybe it’s a big messy stir-fry of those reasons and others. But he’s staying and he’s going to try to accomplish something no prime minister has in over a century — and none in the modern era. Four wins in a row.

The last prime minister to win four elections in a row, incidentally, was Wilfrid Laurier. He did it between 1896 and 1908. Before him, John A. Macdonald did it between 1878 and 1891. A keen eye will notice Macdonald and Laurier managed their four-peats back to back, when the country was effectively a two-party system. No one has managed it since. Pierre Trudeau came close, winning in 1968, ‘72, and ‘74 before losing to Progressive Conservative Joe Clark in 1979 despite winning over 400,000 more votes than Clark. A fickle pickle, that electoral system of ours.

The first principle of Canadian federal elections is governments defeat themselves. They get old, tired, extra arrogant and out of touch. People burn out or leave. Backbenchers get fed up of being left out of Cabinet. Scandals pile up. They piss ouff the public service. Policy failures grow. The public gets tired of their bullshit. The press, too.

Every government is a house of cards that eventually topples. The Liberals will lose sooner or later. Given the Trudeau government’s last few years, and the trends in the polls, it looks like sooner is a better bet. Later we might come back and ask the question we ask of imperial Rome: not “Why did it fall?” but rather “Why did it stand so long?”