More ominous still: Like Democrats in the urban United States, westerners now confront a voting system that appears to systematically discount their votes. Despite winning more votes than the Liberals, they won 36 fewer seats in the House of Commons.
Such outcomes are always theoretically possible in Westminster-style systems. But they have not occurred often in Canadian federal politics. The democratic intuition that more votes should yield more power has usually been honored by the Canadian federal electoral system. But as Canada has evolved from a three-party system into the present five-party system (Liberals, Conservatives, New Democrats, Bloc Quebecois, and Greens), the voting system has failed to keep pace. The west may want in, but it has been locked out. The federally appointed Canadian Senate, unlike its counterpoints in Australia and the United States, does not effectively protect regional interests. (I’ll note here that my sister Linda Frum serves as a Conservative senator from Ontario.)
David A. Graham: Canada’s surprising history of blackface
Finally, the 2019 outcome has also destabilized one of the most dangerous fault lines in Canada: the divide between the indigenous communities and everybody else. The Trudeau government made a priority of what it termed “reconciliation.” In practice, that has meant granting indigenous communities even larger veto rights over natural-resource development, while proffering symbolic concessions and recognitions of native claims. Public meetings in Canada now almost invariably open with a statement of acknowledgment, verbal recognition that the meeting is occurring on land formerly held by indigenous people. Trudeau convened a national inquiry into unsolved killings of indigenous women that formally accused the Canadian government of “genocide.”
These moves were dramatic. They offended many in the non-indigenous world, particular the “genocide” accusation. (As the Royal Canadian Mounted Police reported in 2015, in almost all cases, indigenous women are killed by an intimate or someone else known to them.) At the same time, Trudeau’s government failed, in fact, to reconcile anybody to anybody. Support for the Trudeau government among indigenous Canadians plunged from 40 percent in 2015 to 20 percent in 2019, a recent poll suggested. Trudeau started a revolution of rising expectations and then fell victim to it, opening the way to more radical politics among native people.
Almost alone among the advanced democracies, Canada has been bypassed by reactionary populism. That exemption was the product of both sound policy and good luck. Justin Trudeau’s government gambled with the policy—and counted on Canada’s luck. Trudeau’s personal future will be decided as Liberals quietly apportion the blame for the big vote drop from 2015 to 2019. His country’s fate will depend on whether Trudeau can resist being dragged to extremes by coalition partners eager to score whichever political victories they can get, while they can get it.
* An earlier version of this article misstated the number of seats that the Liberal Party won in Alberta in Canada’s 2015 election.
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is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic. In 2001 and 2002, he was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush.
