When a governing party loses all but two seats
What actually happened in the apocalyptic Canadian general election of 1993?
This originally went to paying subscribers back in January. But since, here in Britain, the balloon has finally gone up, and Rishi Sunak’s Tories will face their Waterloo on 4 July, it seemed like a good moment to revisit the question of exactly what it takes to completely destroy a governing party...
Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before. A long serving Conservative government – mired in scandal, rocked by ongoing constitutional crisis, struggling to deliver economic growth – rolls the dice on a change of leadership. The ruling party’s constitution allows its members to pick its leader, and thus the new Prime Minister: they opt for a relatively unknown former justice minister who is, as it happens, a blonde woman in her 40s. She’s gone before the year is out, one of her country’s shortest serving heads of government, and her party faces a wipe out.
This is obviously Britain in the early 2020s, but it was also, as it happens, Canada in 1993. Kim Campbell, unlike Liz Truss, was allowed to lead her Progressive Conservative party – the Tories – into the next general election, a few months into her term. The result was one of the worst defeats ever suffered by a governing party in the West: the Tories, who’d won 169 seats and a 42 seat majority back in 1988, retained just two, and fell to fifth place.
All this, of course, is extremely funny. But it’s also become emblematic of the worst possible fate that can befall a governing party, and given the parallels with what the British Tories have been through recently, “Canada 1993” has sometimes been raised as a sort of doomsday scenario, the kind of result that’d make the 1997 general election look like a vote of confidence. I’ve been wondering about this election, and how plausible a threat/opportunity it is in Britain, for some time. And since one of the purposes of this newsletter has always quite openly been to give me an excuse to read up on things I’m interested in and call them work, let’s have at it.
The Progressive Conservatives had come to power in 1984, when Brian Mulroney had led the party to the largest landslide in Canadian history: 211 seats out of 282, proportionally equivalent to winning a faintly insane 486 seats in the UK House of Commons. After nine years in office, though, the shine had long since come off. Canada had been hit hard by the early 1990s recession; the government had hurt voters’ wallets farther by introducing a new form of VAT, the Goods & Services Tax, in 1991.
And then there was the rumbling constitutional crisis to contend with. Canada had cut its last ties with Britain at an implausibly late date, and assumed full sovereignty by means of the Constitution Act of 1982. That law, though, had never been formally adopted – still hasn’t to this day – by the government of Quebec, and after a while this had started to become embarrassing.
And so the Mulroney government proposed two further constitutional amendments – the Meech Lake Accord of 1987 and the Charlottetown Accord of 1992 – in an attempt to win the Francophone province over. Neither passed (the former failed to win ratification by the deadline; the latter was rejected in a referendum), which alienated Québécois opinion yet further, and led to the rise of the secessionist party, Bloc Québécois.
The really fun part, though, was the impact all this had elsewhere in the country. The phenomenon of “Western alienation” – in which residents of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba felt they were ignored and hard done-by compared to the bigger eastern provinces of Ontario and Quebec – had been a frankly baffling feature of Canadian politics for decades. But the sense that the government in Ottawa was bending over backwards to placate the Québécois turbo-charged it. And so, the years leading up to 1993 also saw the launch of another regional party: Reform, which campaigned on the slogan, “The West Wants In”. Significantly, it did so from the Tories’ right.
By early 1993, then, Brian Mulroney was looking increasingly beleaguered,1 so decided to step down. At a special party convention held on 13 June, the Tories chose the 46 year old Avril Phaedra Douglas Campbell – known, slightly confusingly, as “Kim” – to be their new leader, and Canada’s first female Prime Minister. Less than three months later, with the parliamentary term nearly over, she called an election, to be held on 25 October.
Because of everything that followed, Campbell is sometimes described as though she were as inherently ridiculous a figure as, well, Liz Truss. Actually, though, she’d had an impressive career to that point, and despite only having been in parliament one term had served in several big ministerial posts: a stint as Canada’s first female justice minister; another as the first female defence minister from any NATO country. She had faced criticism for her “acerbic personal style” – what less charitable observers might describe as a tendency to run, face first, into gaffes – after using an interview with Vancouver magazine to describe apathetic voters as “condescending SOBs” and claim she’d adopted Anglicanism to “ward off the evil demons of the papacy”. Even so, she was so popular within her party that there had been some trouble finding anyone to run against her, and so popular beyond it that the summer of 1993 saw a burst of something called (I’m so sorry) “Campbellmania”.
It didn’t last. As the campaign got going, all the problems that had beset the Mulroney government reasserted themselves. More than that, Campbell faced a stream of coverage – of her appearance, her romantic history, her childlessness, her “hysteria” – that’s been keeping political scientists seeking evidence of sexism in politics busy ever since. It all feels a lot like an example of the “glass cliff” in action.
Late in the campaign, with it looking increasingly certain that Jean Chrétien’s Liberals were going to win, and the Progressive Conservatives in open panic about the need to prevent them winning a majority, Tory strategists pressed the button on a series of attack ads. One leant into the fact that Campbell remained more personally popular than Chrétien by showing a series of pictures of the Liberal leader’s face, accompanied by a voiceover in which an actor asked a series of questions about his suitability for the role. The first was, “Is this a prime minister?”
Thanks to a childhood illness, though, Chrétien was partially paralysed, on one side of his face. Campbell, out on the campaign trail, may not even have seen the ad before it aired, but it didn’t matter: it looked a lot like she’d decided to mock her opponent for his disability.
For the Liberals, it was a gift. “God gave me a physical defect... It’s true, that I speak on one side of my mouth,” Chrétien told an event in Nova Scotia. “I’m not a Tory: I don’t speak on both sides of my mouth.”
When the results came in, the Liberals more than doubled their number of seats, winning a clear majority in the House of Commons. It wasn’t just the Liberals that benefited from the Tories’ implosion, however. Bloc Québécois came from nowhere to win 54 of Quebec’s 75 seats: a big enough haul to make a brand new party operating in only one province the official opposition. In a similar manner, Reform managed to come in third, winning 52 seats in total, even though only one of them was east of Manitoba.
And the Progressive Conservatives collapsed, dropping from 43% of the vote in 1988 to just 16% five years later. In terms of vote share, it ranked third, after the Liberals and Reform. In terms of seats, though, thanks to the unhelpful combination of a geographically dispersed vote and a First Past the Post electoral system, it came fifth.
The number of seats it actually held was, to be precise, two. Neither of them was Kim Campbell’s. Her premiership had lasted just 132 days – enough to make her, remarkably, only the third shortest serving Prime Minister in Canadian history. The Progressive Conservatives fared slightly better four years later, winning 20 seats – they still came fifth – but, even so, they never really recovered. A party that had been going, under a variety of names, ever since Sir John McDonald became the first Prime Minister of Canada back in 1867 was effectively finished. In 2003, it officially ceased to exist.
All in all, you can see why this scenario might be haunting some of the more panicky parts of the Tory party, and causing much of the liberal-left to be salivating in response. And there are an unnerving number of parallels with the situation in Britain today: a weak economy; a government that’s spent much of its time obsessing about constitutional issues; the superficial resemblances between Kim Campbell and Liz Truss. Throw in the existence of a right-wing challenger party named Reform, and the potentially ruinous effect of First Past The Post when a party starts to decline, and, well…
Well... nothing, probably. Because most of those resemblances are superficial. Liz Truss was ejected before she could take the Tories into an election campaign, and even if the party has never really recovered at least it’s no longer 30 points behind. Tory underperformance in parts of the country prone to regionalism is hardly new; the SNP arguably already had their Bloc Québécois moment in 2015, it’s now receding, and it wasn’t the Tories that took the brunt of it anyway. Anyway, with 84% of the UK population, England is vastly more populous than any Canadian province (the largest, Ontario, has just 38%), making it entirely plausible to be a primarily English party and remain electorally successful.
As for Reform, while it may well hurt the Tories this time – its predecessor, the Brexit party, choose not to stand against them in 2019 – it shows absolutely no sign of the momentum that allowed its Canadian namesake to supplant the Progressive Conservatives. There are plausible paths that leave Britain’s Tories with 100-150 seats. There are none I can see that leave them on single figures.
This, though, should be little comfort, because those plausible paths would still mean the worst result in the party’s history – worse than 1997, when the Tory seat count fell only as far as 165. It’s striking that both that election, and the Canadian one of four years earlier, saw the rise of a liberal-left Prime Minister who served for 10 years, before handing over to his finance minister (who lost an election after just three). In 1995, there was even a report from the Independent, warning of the lessons that events across the Atlantic might hold for the Major government. The fear of the Canada 1993 scenario, it turns out, is nothing new.
But of course, the British Tories still bounced back. And even though the Progressive Conservatives were officially wound up in 2003, they still, kind of, live on: in 2003 they merged with Reform, by then calling itself the Canadian Alliance, to form the new Conservative Party of Canada, whose Stephen Harper led the country from 2006 until 2014. You can no more destroy Tory-ism than the right can destroy the left.
Perhaps the real lesson of Canada 1993 isn’t about existential threats to governing parties. Perhaps it’s actually about how hard it is to really kill one.
This episode of the podcast The Hated and the Dead, and this blog from UK In A Changing Europe, both of which feature the work of Professor Daniel Béland of McGill University, Montreal, were invaluable in researching this piece.
Also I really enjoyed doing that, so a) I hope you did, too, and b) please feel free to suggest other elections it might be fun to do a deep dive on.
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