Political scientist discusses federal election at SACPA

By Tim Kalinowski on October 2, 2021.

LETHBRIDGE HERALDtkalinowski@lethbridgeherald.com

The Southern Alberta Council on Public Affairs welcomed political scientist Melanee Thomas of the University of Calgary to its weekly livestream YouTube speaker series on Wednesday to conduct a post-mortem on last month’s federal election.
If it seemed like a campaign about nothing to you, said Thomas, it might be better viewed as a disorganized election with strange implications for the future.
“For this particular election, I think what it is foreshadowing is the features of Canadian politics that helped us manufacture majority governments are waning,” she stated.
“A lot of it has to do with existential questions about Canada’s place in the British Empire. About existential questions with respect to Quebec. About existential questions related to these ‘two, great colonial powers’ in Canada. We don’t talk about Canada like this anymore. Even something like multiculturalism isn’t being presented as this Canadian foundational kind of thing … All of those kind of like big ideas from the mid-20th century to the Nineties in Canadian politics; those are waning. And it is not yet clear to me what we are replacing them with. Which means its possible until those new lines of debate are more settled that we will see elections results that were like this. You have two parties with big pluralities, one is bigger than the other. And you’ve got more than one party with enough seats to bridge the gap between one of those pluralities and a majority.”
Thomas said the campaigns of the two, big tent parties, the Liberals and Conservatives, failed to land, but it might not be there fault given this change in foundational thinking going on. However, she acknowledged, they didn’t help themselves out either with fairly confused campaigns.
“It really wasn’t a cohesive campaign,” she stated. “I think the federal Liberals wanted it to be a referendum on COVID-19 management. I think for some voters it was, but I think it was more of a referendum on provincial governments rather than federal governments. And this is how you can see the Conservatives picking up a lot of seats in Atlantic Canada, they picked up four, but if you look at Conservative vote across Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta there are five to six percentage point drops in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and a 14 percentage point drop in Alberta.”
Some Conservative commentators like Ian Brodie have blamed this drop in Western Canada for the Conservatives on the performance of their leader, Erin O’Toole, who they accuse of not being able to charge up the base. But that is not Thomas’ opinion.
“Some people say the best way for a party to win government is just to expand its base,” Thomas stated. “This is bad advice. There is literally no party that wins a plurality of seats, let alone a majority, without people who do not identify with them, and who are not aligned with them, actually being prepared to support them.”
And partisanship comes in many forms, she said. 
“Someone being partisan doesn’t determine their vote choice,” she explained.
“What it actually is more peoples’ identities, their variety of characteristics, leads into some kind of baseline level orienting. You could have like a Liberal, a Conservative and a New Democrat looking through red, blue and orange glasses. What this means is you are going to discount information that is bad for your side, and you are really going to amplify the information that is good for you and bad for your opponents, and things along those lines. But even people who are dedicated partisans can look at their own party leader, and be like: ‘I don’t know if I like that guy.'”
Or, alternatively, suggested Thomas, someone who normally votes for a party may like a local candidate from another party better instead on a personal level, and thus move away from their usual party-line vote for an election.
“The campaign really only really effects people who don’t know how they are voting at the start of it,” she summarized.
“So campaign effects are a little more muted than folks might think. But even for people who decided before the campaign, I think lots of folks want to assume these are partisans and partisanship is totally deterministic of vote choice. And this is not true academically.”
That being said, Thomas did acknowledge the disjointed nature of the Liberal campaign which gave some voters the impression it was “an election about nothing.”
“They knew they were going to call an election in the fall, and then they did so without actually building the campaign around that, and getting themselves organized in way that would be able to preserve that (summer polling) lead,” she said. “I was a bit taken aback at the superficiality, and sometimes disorganization of the Liberal campaign as the incumbent government.” 

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