Unfriendly electoral maps

What actually happened in the apocalyptic Canadian general election of 1993? And what does it mean for Britain’s Tories? Also this week: some thoughts on US electoral college history.

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.  

Kim Campbell. Image: Simon Fraser University/Wikimedia/CC BY 2.0.

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”.