Byelection a battle of narratives

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/06/2023 (834 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This week saw byelections in four federal seats, including two right here in Manitoba. Two of the seats were strong Liberal constituencies and two were Conservative strongholds. Both parties held on to their seats.

Notwithstanding this seemingly boring outcome, pundits lined up to dissect the results. Conservative Fred DeLorey, for example, argued that his own party had underperformed in the byelections, and that this portends dark times ahead for the party and its leader, Pierre Poilievre. “I think byelections are strong indicators of where things are going,” DeLorey argued.

Suffice it to say: I disagree with this view. Sometimes parties win byelections and go on to lose the general election. Sometimes the opposite.

Every constituency and every individual race has its own character, its own nuances, and its own little quirks. Trying to generalize anything from these byelections is, I think, a mug’s game.

Columnist David Moscrop takes a more nuanced view of byelections. “The races themselves mean little for law, policy or the next general election,” he argued. Instead, “byelection season is narrative season.”

What Moscrop means is that byelections matter to the extent that party leaders and others build up narratives around them. And, boy oh boy, were there ever narratives attached to at least one of these byelections.

In announcing he would run in Portage-Lisgar, Peoples Party of Canada leader Maxime Bernier framed the byelection as an epic struggle for the heart and soul of the right in Canada. He argued that the Conservative candidate in the seat, Branden Leslie, was a “fake conservative,” and that the PPC could supplant the Tories.

“This byelection is the starting of a major turning point in Canadian politics,” he grandly claimed.

Talk about narratives. And setting high expectations.

Bernier campaigned like his life depended on it. He spoke out on hot-button issues such as age-appropriate books in school libraries, abortion and immigration. His focus on these issues appeared to be designed to put the Tories in an uncomfortable position, as the party has avoided taking clear right-wing positions on some issues that are red meat to the base.

Unfortunately for Bernier, Poilievre and the Conservatives seemed to accept the narrative of the Portage-Lisgar byelection as an existential struggle between the CPC and the PPC. The party pulled out all the stops. Conservative volunteers from Winnipeg and beyond pilgrimaged to southern Manitoba to play a part in burying the PPC leader once and for all.

Leslie’s campaign attacked Bernier by linking him to the World Economic Forum, noting that Bernier had attended WEF meetings. This seemed like an odd campaign tactic since, in my experience, walking into coffeeshops in Portage, Morris, Winkler or Morden does not typically reveal groups of chattering WEF obsessives.

But the ads made sense in the context of the race itself: the PPC sympathizers Leslie was trying to win over were more likely to be concerned about the WEF and similarly exotic issues, and the Conservatives made a conscious effort to woo their support.

Ultimately, the outcome of the race was very lopsided. Leslie scored 65 per cent of the vote. In fact, the first-time candidate outperformed longtime Conservative MP Candice Bergen’s result from the 2021 election.

In contrast, Bernier received only 17 per cent of the vote. Strikingly, he received fewer votes than his candidate from the 2021 election, farmer Solomon Wiebe.

Bernier put on a brave face on election night. But the result was devastating to him, for three reasons.

First, small parties generally perform better in byelections than in general elections. Since byelections do not affect who will form government, voters are less likely to cast their ballots strategically and more likely to give small parties like the PPC a shot. But Bernier was unable to leverage this advantage, not to mention the seeming advantage of being the high-profile leader of the party.

Second, we know the PPC benefitted in the 2021 election from anger over COVID restrictions and lockdowns. In places like Portage-Lisgar, the PPC’s Wiebe scored a respectable result in large part due to this anger.

But the fact Bernier underperformed Wiebe in this byelection suggests the PPC has not capitalized on its surprising strength in the 2021 election. To the contrary, the result suggests that PPC support may have crested in 2021 and, with COVID in the rearview mirror, the party will struggle in the future.

Finally, the result is crushing for Bernier because of Bernier himself. The PPC leader built up a narrative about the byelection as a battle of the titans for the soul of Canadian conservatism, and then lost badly. Now, he has to grapple with the consequences of that framing which he foolishly imposed on the race.

Royce Koop is a professor of political studies at the University of Manitoba and academic director of the Centre for Social Science Research and Policy.