David Lu is a Canadian political staffer and political campaigner now based in London. He previously worked for the Progressive Conservative government in Ontario.
After nine years as the Government of Canada, the Progressive Conservatives (PCs) suffered arguably the biggest election loss in Western democratic history. On October 25, 1993, Canadian voters went to the polling stations and reduced the Tories’ 156 seat majority to a mere two seats.
Thirty years later, this spectacular downfall continues to be a significant case study for political scientists, strategists, and campaigners – and given the current political climate in Britain, and our shared electoral system, little wonder commentators are starting to make the comparison as they look for an historic Tory defeat worse than 1997. But what actually happened?
After Brian Mulroney, the long-serving prime minister, announced his retirement from politics in 1993, the top job of the country became available – in an election year.
On June 13 Kim Campbell, the defence minister, defeated Jean Charest, who held the environment brief, at leadership convention. She became not only leader of the now-defunct Progressive Conservatives, and the first and so far only female prime minister of Canada.
The PCs were suffering from a measurable slump in opinion polls, but an election had to be called with just three months of the new leader at the helm. Hope flickered briefly during Campbell’s honeymoon, but it soon became clear she could not turn the party’s fortunes around.
In particular, two issues had fatally undermined the party’s position.
First, Mulroney’s repeated attempts to overhaul the constitution and head off rising separatist sentiment in Quebec (previously discussed in more detail on this site) not only failed, but turned into public-relations disasters.
Worse, the rise of the sovereigntist Bloc Québécois threatened to rout the PCs in what had been in the 1980s their strongest province – a danger mirrored in Western Canada by the Reform Party. Canada’s three-party system was starting to crack, entirely at the PCs’ expense.
Second, the introduction of the Good and Services Tax, which aimed to alleviate the growing budget deficit, did not sit well with Canadians trying to recover from the 1990s recession. Combine these with the country’s high unemployment and the controversial signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Tories’ chances of staying in government seemed bleak.
However, only a few predicted how bad it actually was; the last opinion poll before the writ actually showed the Tories in the lead. Much hinged on the campaign: here’s how each party fought it.
Liberals
After suffering their own big defeat in 1984 (losing 95 out of 135 seats) the Liberal Party of Canada saw 1993 as their chance to return to glory. Selecting Jean Chrétien as leader in 1990, the Liberals positioned themselves as the best choice to replace the Tories.
Although they had abundance of material to run smear campaigns, they focused instead on policy. A well-rounded and detailed platform dubbed the Red Book, took several years to produce. Key policies included C$6bn in Keynesian infrastructure investments, reducing budget deficit to three per cent of GDP, reforming Employment Insurance, privatizing Canada’s largest airport, and repealing the highly unpopular Good and Services Tax.
(Although the last promise was a broken one, it did its job in securing the win.)
Progressive Conservatives
Despite having a new face leading the party, and Campbell having better approval ratings than Chrétien, the PCs just couldn’t come up with anything meaningful to retain votes from the previous election. After a brief honeymoon period, Campbell was not able to establish herself as prime minister material.
Compounding this, the Tory campaign placed such a heavy bet on her as the fresh face of the party that it neglected policy.
With only three months in office, Campbell did not have enough time to make meaningful policy decisions, and the rushed answer to the Red Book, A Taxpayer’s Agenda, failed to offer a compelling alternative to the Liberal platform.
Disorganized ground operations, paired with a very crass attack ad pointing at Chrétien’s facial deformity, solidified this campaign as a lesson on what not to do.
Bloc Québécois
Separatist and nationalist sentiment was high in the French-Canadian province of Québéc. The failure of both the 1987 Meech Lake Accord and the 1992 Charlottetown Accord showed that the country was not on the same page regarding the new terms of federalism,.
In 1991, Conservative and Liberal MPs defected to found a new party, Bloc Québécois, to promote Québéc’s sovereignty, and eventual succession, at the federal level. On the day, it secured 54 out of 75 seats in the French-speaking province, sweeping nearly all Francophone constituencies. This was devastating for the PCs: in 1988, they had won no fewer than 63 constituencies in Quebec.
So great was the Tory rout that the BQ ended up, for the only time in their history, as Canada’s official opposition in the 1993-97 Parliament.
Reform
Another relatively new party, based in the Western provinces, ran a similar play to the Bloc Québécois, capturing votes from Canadians feeling left out from the typical focus of Central/Eastern Canada in federal politics.
Presenting themselves as the better right-wing alternative to the Progressive Conservatives, the Reform Party won 52 seats by heavily concentrating on regional issues in Western Canada.
New Democrats
Established in 1961, the New Democratic Party (NDP) – analogous to the UK’s Liberal Democrats – also had a torrid election, plunging from 44 seats in 1988 to just nine.
Like the PCs, they faced a two-front squeeze. The NDP had, like the Tories, failed to offer an appealing and well-developed policy platform; this made it all the easier for left-leaning voters to defect to the Liberals, which they did in huge numbers.
In the West of Canada, meanwhile, the party’s former heartland was gutted by the Reform Party in much the same way as the Tories’ was by the BQ in Québéc: having won 19 seats in British Colombia in 1988, it now held just two, with Reform sweeping the province and taking 24 seats.
So, what lessons are there in all this for the British Conservatives? The PCs’ electoral apocalypse was the product of two factors: First Past the Post, and the dramatic fragmentation and regionalisation of the Canadian vote.
Despite winning 16 per cent of the popular vote, the Tories only held two out of the 295 seats they were defeating. The BQ won 54 with 14 per cent, Reform 52 with 19 per cent, and the NDP nine with seven per cent. The triumphant Liberals, meanwhile, returned 177 MPs on 41 per cent of the vote.
British commentators might see an obvious parallel in the danger of Reform UK and a split on the right. But a better analogue would be Labour’s near-wipeout in Scotland in 2015, and there’s no sign yet that Richard Tice’s party has sufficiently concentrated appeal to repeat the trick.
Yet Canada ’93 also shows that with a low vote share, and motivated tactical voting, First Past the Post can do terrible things to incumbents who exhaust the public’s patience.