Tory strategists caught flat-footed

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/04/2025 (184 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On a winter day more than a decade ago, when Stephen Harper’s Conservatives were in power in Ottawa, I was sitting in a restaurant booth when a pair of Prime Minister’s Office staffers sat down in the booth next to mine. They were talking loudly, so it was impossible to not hear what they were saying.

As they sat there, one of the staffers remarked how the Tories would have never returned to power if the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservative Parties had not merged to form the Conservative Party. By “uniting the right,” he argued, it gave them their only realistic hope of ever winning a federal election again.

They then talked about how lucky the Tories were that the left and centrist segments of the Canadian political spectrum would never merge in a “unite the left” movement, because such a combination would force them to water down their “core conservative principles” on issues such as abortion and gun control in order to have any hope of winning an election.

The way they saw it, as long as the “Libs and Dippers” kept fighting each other and splitting the large base of moderate and left-of-centre voters in roughly equal proportions, Conservatives would always have a decent shot of forming government. One staffer warned, however, that if that split ever disappeared — if Liberal and NDP voters ever joined forces in one way or another — future elections could become unwinnable for Conservatives.

They were right. Fast forward to the just-concluded election campaign, in which a massive shift by erstwhile NDP voters to the Liberals occurred and the Tories struggled to keep pace with the Liberals despite sky-high support and fundraising numbers prior to the election.

They polled at a higher level than normally required in order to win a majority government, but they were consistently behind the Liberals in the polls for the final weeks of the campaign.

The Conservative campaign strategists can only blame themselves. Based on the results of past campaigns, they crafted a platform and campaign strategy that focused on “locking in” the percentage of voters they estimated they would need in order to win the election.

They failed, however, to anticipate and plan for exactly the scenario the staffer had described in that restaurant years ago — a huge wave of former NDP supporters being willing to vote for Liberal candidates in order to prevent a Tory win.

That shift — or at least the possibility of such a shift happening — should have been apparent in properly focused Conservative polling, for several reasons. First, the “confidence and supply agreement” between the Liberals and NDP kept the Trudeau minority government in power for four years, sending a message to voters that the Liberals and NDP weren’t all that different on a range of important policies.

Second, Tory MPs consistently derided the Liberal-NDP agreement as a “Liberal-NDP coalition,” effectively promoting and legitimizing the idea of Liberal and NDP voters working together toward a common objective.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, a de facto merger of Liberal and NDP voters has already taken root in several provinces, making such an effort palatable to voters at the federal level.

In Manitoba and most other provinces, for example, there is a conservative party, a “not conservative” party and a few single-digit bottom-feeders. That creates a binary choice for voters that has determined the outcome of many provincial elections for many years, and it may finally be an electoral reality at the federal level.

Given those factors, it is both fair and necessary to ask why the Tory strategists failed to see the potential for such a shift to occur and, despite their enormous financial and strategic resources, failed to have a “ready to go” plan in place to counter it.

Without that strategy, the Conservative campaign was caught flat-footed and never really adapted to the new reality that was crushing their hopes of what, just months earlier, had seemed like an inevitable landslide victory.

That leads to this obvious question: If Tory staffers were concerned years ago about the possibility of Liberal and NDP voters combining to defeat Conservatives, how was the 2025 Conservative campaign team caught by surprise?

How did they not see this coming?

Deveryn Ross is a political commentator living in Brandon.

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