Liberals’ fate seems sealed in the west

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/10/2023 (680 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Manitoba Liberal Party, which has been limping along in provincial politics for years, was almost entirely wiped out in our recent election.

In the last two elections, the party scored roughly 14 per cent of the vote. In the 2023 election, that dipped down to just over 10 per cent.

Under the rules of our electoral system, such a small vote share could easily be spread out across the province and produce no seats whatsoever. That the party won seats in recent elections seemed to have less to do with the appeal of the provincial campaign and more to do with voter loyalty to particular Liberal incumbents who had built little local fiefdoms for themselves, especially Jon Gerrard in River Heights and Cindy Lamoureux in Tyndall Park.

In 2023, only Lamoureux was left standing, owing in large part to the remarkable grassroots political machine she and her father, Liberal MP Kevin Lamoureux, have built in that part of the city.

It is undeniable that the NDP aggressively courted Liberal voters to avoid the sort of vote-splitting that helps elect PC candidates. The party plastered a letter of support for Kinew from former Liberal cabinet minister Lloyd Axworthy on the front page of the Free Press. NDP organizers recruited a strong local candidate who defeated Liberal leader Dougald Lamont in his own seat of St. Boniface. And Kinew used his closing statement in the leader’s debate to speak directly to Liberal supporters.

Is there any wider significance to Liberal decline in Manitoba? I think so.

In giving the Liberals two thumbs down, Manitoba joined every other western Canadian province, which is now characterized by two-party competition including the NDP and one of a variety of locally grown centre-right alternatives: the PCs in Manitoba, the Saskatchewan Party next door, the United Conservative Party in Alberta, and the recently revamped BC United party in British Columbia.

What is missing from all these systems is a viable Liberal party. Indeed, the Liberal Party has effectively ceased to exist in provincial politics at the Manitoba-Ontario border. Cindy Lamoureux is now the only elected Liberal provincial representative in Canada west of Ontario.

I don’t think we’ve fully grasped the significance of this development for the federal Liberal Party.

In the past, the Liberal organization was, in most provinces, shared between the federal and provincial levels. The national and provincial parties swapped both resources and personnel. Provincial Liberal parties were the building blocks of federal Liberal success, and the federal party won elections on the basis of this model for much of the 20^th century.

Over time, tensions developed between federal and provincial Liberals. When Prime Minister Mackenzie King and Ontario premier Mitch Hepburn feuded in the 1930s and 1940s, for example, Hepburn exercised his control over the Ontario Liberal machine to withhold support from the federal party. Federal reliance on provincial political machinery could be a liability.

So too could federal actions. The leader of the Alberta Liberal Party in this period, for example, argued for organizational separation between the federal and provincial levels so that he could be freed from “the albatross of having to explain every asinine move Ottawa makes.”

The result was a period of gradual disentanglement of federal and provincial organizations.

This was a process that never fully culminated in most of the country. Federal and provincial Liberals, even when formally separate parties, often shared resources. It was common to see the same people working on both federal and provincial election campaigns. This is still typically the case east of the Manitoba-Ontario border.

But the disappearance of provincial Liberal parties in some provinces makes this impossible. Each of the four western provinces followed their own path in establishing left-right politics that eventually squeezed out the Liberals.

Does this matter for the federal Liberal Party? I think so.

In half the country, the Liberals no longer have any competitive provincial affiliates. It is a single-level federal party, standing above and largely extricated from western Canadian society. The Liberals now lack the kinds of resilient connections to western Canadian society that ground them in Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada.

Can the federal Liberal Party ever truly understand the complexities, nuances and concerns of western Canada when it has no presence in the politics of our regions? If no, how can it ever hope to win here again?

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.