Mr. Trudeau is returned, diminished

Unnecessary, but hardly inconsequential. Largely as expected, and still filled with surprises. The Election That Should Never Have Been ends with Canada’s two leading parties pondering what might have been, and measuring the distance between reach and grasp.

There’s an old saying that in war, the best laid plans never survive first contact with the enemy – and once hostilities commenced, Liberals and Conservatives alike discovered that the opponent foiling some of their best laid plans was themselves.

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau sent Canadians to the polls early, expecting to be rewarded with a majority. Instead, the Liberals discovered that triggering an election in the midst of a pandemic fourth wave had triggered a lot of voters.

The resentment was widespread, and it never entirely dissipated. It was made worse by the fact that the most obvious question – why did you call this election? – is one the Liberal brain trust was somehow unprepared to answer.

The election thus ended as it began, with the other parties tapping into the frustration felt by so many voters, across the political spectrum. The result was that, as we went to press on Monday night, Mr. Trudeau had been returned as prime minister – but denied the majority that was his only reason for calling this election.

If the Liberal plan did not entirely survive contact with its own miscalculations, neither did Erin O’Toole’s. The Conservative Leader’s daily mantra was “I have a plan/j’ai un plan.” And he would hold that plan up in response to every second question, its 160-plus-page heft brandished as proof that he was serious, substantial and ready to govern.

It’s a good thing for a party to have a platform. And there were a lot of good things about the progressive conservative Conservative platform of 2021. It was an evolution away from 2015 and 2019, and evolution is what the Conservative Party is going to need to win.

The problem was that some parts of Mr. O’Toole’s platform kept right on changing, through the campaign. Presented as a finished edifice, ready for occupancy by a new government, some of its rooms were works in progress.

Take gun control. Mr. O’Toole at first tried to evade and obfuscate on the meaning of the platform; when his answers didn’t square with its words, the platform was reinterpreted, a rewrite was promised and the platform was then rewritten, though somewhat differently than promised. At the end of it all, the Conservative gun-control plan was even less clear than at the start.

The platform was also without costing for the first couple of weeks – a number-free zone. And once the costing was released, just before the official French-language debate, the numbers gave the Tory child-care plans a different hue, with a budget roughly one-10th the size of the Liberal plan, and no long-term funding for provincial programs.

It was around this time that the Conservatives’ rising poll numbers began to settle and reverse. In response, Mr. O’Toole tried to make things less clear cut, writing an open letter to the premier of Quebec, and hinting that additional funding for child care – at least in that province – might still be negotiable.

Liberals always run on the idea that the Conservatives have a hidden agenda. On abortion, Mr. O’Toole’s plan nullified the charge by being crystal clear. It said: “A Conservative government will not support any legislation to regulate abortion.” But some other parts of the platform spent the election operating as witnesses for the prosecution.

When it came to acting as their own worst enemies, nobody could touch the Green Party. Canada’s fifth most popular national party, ostensibly dedicated to the environment, instead spent the year tearing itself apart over Israel. Its electoral reward was to discover that it was now Canada’s sixth most popular party.

Two parties ended the night grateful for the election, and their unearned good fortune: The Bloc Québécois and the People’s Party of Canada.

For the BQ, salvation came in the form of the gift of insult, courtesy of the moderator of the English-language debate. For the PPC, their move from somewhere beyond the fringe to the very centre of an angry fringe was entirely due to the calling of a vote in the midst of a pandemic. Such are the unintended consequences of an election campaign.