The federal Liberals were in high spirits at their caucus holiday party last Wednesday as they celebrated their victory in the Mississauga-Lakeshore by-election two days earlier. The opinion polls haven’t done Liberals many favours of late, but they had just stopped Pierre Poilievre cold in his first electoral outing as Conservative leader – and in the process expanded their margin of victory to 14 percentage points from six in Mississauga-Lakeshore in the 2021 general election.
They cheered Justin Trudeau as he ripped into Poilievre, calling him, “reckless … a career politician … [who is] ready to say anything to anyone if he thinks that could help him win.”
At the risk of sounding like a doubting Thomas, might I suggest that the prime minister and his flock cool their jets? Mississauga-Lakeshore was too easy. The riding has been voting Liberal for 30 years, minus the 2011-2015 Stephen Harper majority interregnum.
Tougher tests await. Three other by-elections will have to be called in the next six months or so – the dates being at the prime minister’s discretion – in seats that are vacant or about to be vacated.
The toughest will be Calgary Heritage, Harper’s old seat. His successor, Bob Benzen, is resigning at the end of the year. Benzen is no Harper as a vote-catcher, but he won 58 per cent of the ballots in 2021. Trudeau will face the same question as Poilievre faced in Mississauga-Lakeshore: how hard does he want to campaign, how much of his political capital invest, in a by-election he cannot expect to win?
Oxford, which will become vacant and by-election ready after January, is as safe a Conservative seat as any in southern Ontario, reliably delivering 50 per cent of its votes to the Tories. The proverbial little yellow dog could win Oxford as a Conservative candidate. Nothing here for the Liberals.
The most competitive contest shapes up to be in Winnipeg South Centre, which had been held by former Liberal cabinet minister Jim Carr, who died last week. With the New Democrats very much in the mix, it promises to be a tight three-way race. All three parties have something to prove – and, in the Liberals’ case, to lose in WSC, for years the fief of their foreign minister, Lloyd Axworthy. Jim Carr won handily with the 46 per cent of the vote in 2021. The Liberals won’t find it so easy in the by-election.
I’ve often found by-elections more interesting than general elections because of the surprise candidates and unexpected results they can produce. A 2007 by-election in Outremont, a Liberal redoubt in Montreal, was a stunner. It elected a New Democrat, Thomas Mulcair, who went on to become leader of the opposition in Ottawa.
A 1989 by-election in Beaver River in northeastern Alberta planted the seed that would grow into today’s Conservative Party of Canada. It sent Deborah Grey to Ottawa as Canada’s first Reform party MP. Reform rebranded itself as the Canadian Alliance, which swallowed the Progressive Conservative party to become the CPC, with Grey as one of its leading MPs until her retirement in 2004.
Back in 1943, a by-election turned the Quebec riding of Cartier from Liberal to Communist, as it elected Fred Rose, a Polish-Canadian union organizer and member of the Communist Party of Canada running under the banner of the Labour-Progressive Party. Rose’s Ottawa career ended abruptly after four years when he was convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and booted from Parliament.
In 1990, a young Maoist, a member of the Workers’ Communist Party of Canada, shocked the political establishment by scoring an upset victory in a by-election in Liberal-held Laurier-Sainte-Marie. His name was Gilles Duceppe, running for the newly formed Bloc Québécois, the sovereigntist party he leads today. Duceppe is the longest-serving MP, the dean of the Commons.
The strangest by-election may have been one in Liberal-held Kamouraska in 1949, when the official Liberal candidate was defeated by an upstart, an Independent Liberal. Two Liberals? Buried somewhere in the party’s dusty files, there’s a story waiting to be told.
Cambridge resident Geoffrey Stevens is an author and former Ottawa columnist and managing editor of the Globe and Mail. He welcomes comments at geoffstevens40@gmail.com