Vikanias wrote:The one thing O’toole did wrong was trying to appeal to left wing voters. He should’ve focused more on stomping out on the PPC which had the highest chance of splitting the Tory vote (well since they are the only right wing party that can oppose the conservatives) and to mention the fact that left wingers have low chances of voting for you instead of conservatives who will vote for you, I admit that O’toole did win a lot of the right leaning Greens though,
I don't think there was any one universal pattern or process we can definitively point to for why O'Toole lost, because we don't have Canada-wide patterns anymore, if we really ever did. If anything this election seems to be heralding the birth of a new regional alignment of parties. The majority of the NDP caucus now, for example, is in British Columbia, where they're also in government and represent the only major anti-pipeline, pro-indigenous sovereignty party. The Tory party is really two separate parties: the PPC-lite Prairie wing west of Ontario and the suburban 'red' or 'purple Tories of Ontario and Atlantic Canada. The Liberals are the holdouts from the old system, spread out across urban centres and attracting votes from progressives and red Tories who dislike the new alignments or who are not sufficiently motivated to vote for change yet, preferring the stability of the old federalist status quo.
It's equally true that O'Toole both failed to appeal enough to moderate red/purple Tories (costing him seats in places like Vancouver) and to appeal to his 'base' (costing him margins in the Prairies and places like rural Ontario). That's because O'Toole is probably more than any party being torn between the new regional alignments. Singh has more or less squared that circle by, de facto, becoming the party of the BC left. The Greens were annihilated because like the Liberals they don't really stand for anything, but unlike the Liberals they don't have the benefit of incumbency or of being intimately tied with the idea of 'Canada' as a country and a federal idea that people can vote for as an aesthetic choice. In the face of other parties like the PPC or even the NDP that offered positions more in line with the political moment and reflecting new regional realites, for better or for worse, they have more or less evaporated. It turns out the Bloc wasn't just a fossil of a previous dead sovereigntism, kept limping along to keep the supply of treats and constitutional favours flowing to Quebec, but a harbinger of an atomizing pressure on previously-federal parties.
The big question of the next few years I think is how this process of regional alignment is going to evolve. Is the centrifugal force of the two Tory parties going to be enough to undo Harper's work? Is Trudeau going to be able to capture enough momentum and good vibes to rekindle the Liberal brand of soft federalism or will regional centrifugal forces continue to leach voters from them too?
There's probably more to say about how this is the lingering long death of Canadian federalism caused by our failure to generate a working constitutional order in the 80s and 90s too - what is this perma-minority and the total collapse of ambition if not the end result of a political class too traumatized by those failures to ever try to fix anything or justify the federal project's existence, after all - but I'm too tired to get into it right now
