Weekly Writ 11/6: Does floor-crossing help or hurt an MP's chances?
Chris d'Entremont crosses over to the Liberals. Will it improve his re-election odds?
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It’s been a big week in Ottawa. Not only did the Liberals present their long-awaited budget, they also managed to lure Nova Scotia MP Chris d’Entremont across the aisle from the Conservatives.
He’s cited Pierre Poilievre’s leadership and the needs of his own constituents as what motivated his move. But could it also help his chances of re-election?
D’Entremont was the sole Conservative elected in Nova Scotia in the April election — and just barely. He won with 47.7% of the vote in Acadie–Annapolis, just beating out the Liberal candidate, Ronnie LeBlanc, who took 46.6%. On the list of ridings the Liberals lost by the narrowest of margins, it ranks seventh. Acadie–Annapolis would be one of the Liberals’ target seats in any quest for a majority government.
It was also a rare riding outside of Quebec where the Conservatives lost vote share. Compared to the 2021 election, the Conservatives dropped 3.6 percentage points. Outside of Quebec the Conservatives only suffered a steeper drop of support in Carleton, where Poilievre went down to defeat.
So, d’Entremont would have grounds to worry about his re-election chances as Acadie–Annapolis was one of the few ridings to move against the Conservatives to such a significant degree. It’s fair to speculate that d’Entremont was not the only resident of the riding to have some discomfort with Poilievre’s style of leadership.
Nevertheless, he won as a Conservative. Can he win as a Liberal?
We don’t have many precedents to fall back on when it comes to floor-crossers. They are relatively rare, especially those that didn’t make a pitstop as an Independent first. And many floor-crossers don’t bother running again under their new party banner.
But the precedents that do exist suggest d’Entremont has a good shot of re-election. The chart below shows how floor-crossers have performed over the last 25 years.
Of the nine in this list (I excluded floor-crossers who sat as an Independent at some point or those who didn’t run again), seven of them helped boost their new party’s vote share in the subsequent election. In eight of nine cases, their old party lost vote share. The one big exception on this list is Robert Lanctôt, who crossed from the Bloc to the Liberals — an ideological shift from sovereignist to federalist that many voters might not have been able to follow.
Considering that the Liberals only lost Acadie–Annapolis by 1.1 points, precedent suggests that d’Entremont should have decent odds at retaining the seat as a Liberal. He only needs to bring over a few votes to pull it off.
When he’ll be put to the test, though, is anyone’s guess. Rumours have been flying that the Liberals could lure more Conservative MPs over to the red team, thereby securing the majority that voters did not give Mark Carney in April. The Conservatives and Bloc appear set to vote the budget down and the NDP is on the fence, but if two or more Conservatives follow d’Entremont’s lead then it might not matter what the other parties do.
What it could mean for Pierre Poilievre’s leadership is a discussion for another day. For now, let’s get into what.s in this week’s (jam-packed) instalment of the Weekly Writ:
Lots of news to get to, including the third quarter fundraising figures for the federal parties as well as for provincial parties in Alberta and British Columbia. We also get our first glimpse of the state of the fundraising race in the NDP leadership contest. Plus, we have election results to go through in Quebec’s mayoral races and in Yukon, as well as a few other bits and pieces of election news from across the country.
Where the polls put things before this week’s budget and what seat outcomes the numbers would have produced. Plus, some new polls out of B.C., Ontario and Alberta.
Book Review: Ballots and Brawls: The 1867 Canadian General Election by Patrice Dutil.
#EveryElectionProject: The 1919 Manitoba Conservative leadership contest.
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NEWS AND ANALYSIS
Fundraising dries up post-election
In the first full quarter after the April election, fundraising dried up as donors had already given to the limit or simply kept their wallets shut over the summer months. The amount of money taken in by the four major parties in the months of July, August and September was the lowest combined haul in any quarter since the pandemic.
Despite the drop, the Conservatives still led the way in fundraising with $4,234,000 raised from about 54,000 contributions. The total represents the worst quarter for the Conservatives since Q3 2022, when donors were directing their dollars to the ongoing leadership contest won by Pierre Poilievre. Nevertheless, the party has raised $41.7 million in the first nine months of this year, nearly matching its fundraising for 2024 as a whole.
The Liberals raised $2,958,000 from about 77,000 contributions. This is the third quarter in a row in which the Liberals have had more individual contributions than the Conservatives. It’s the first time the party has enjoyed such a streak since 2021. The Liberals have certainly done something to increase the number of contributions they receive as they had more than double as many contributions in Q3 2025 as they did in the third quarters of 2022, 2023 or 2024, when the amount of dollars raised was roughly at the same level.
The Liberals’ fundraising for 2025 is at $23.7 million. This sets a new record, beating the $21.7 million that was raised in 2015. With another three months of fundraising left in the year, the Liberals will push that record even further before the end of 2025.
While the Conservatives and Liberals had their worst quarter since 2022, you have to go back to Q3 2018 to find a worse quarter for the New Democrats. The party took in just $879,000 from 31,000 contributions, bringing its 2025 fundraising up to $4.6 million. Another $182,000 was raised by leadership contestants, but the combined fundraising for the party and the leadership contestants in the third quarter still ranks as the worst fundraising period for the NDP since the first quarter of 2020 — when donations for all parties dried up in the early days of the pandemic.
The Bloc Québécois also had its worst quarter since Q3 2018, raising just $104,000. The party stands at $1.5 million for the year.
The Greens and PPC are no longer required to file quarterly as they did not surpass the threshold of 2% of the vote in the last election. We’ll have to wait until the annual filings (which are usually posted around July) to get any sniff at the fundraising status of these two parties.
Two things from the filings caught my eye. The Conservatives report that the Carleton electoral district association transferred $100,000 to the central HQ. Perhaps now that Poilievre is no longer the riding’s MP, the EDA no longer deems that money needed locally.
Also, Mark Carney’s leadership campaign transferred $1,000,000 to central party coffers, an indication of the size of the surplus his campaign ran in the Liberal leadership contest held earlier this year.
McPherson has early lead in NDP fundraising race
It’s early days, but Alberta MP Heather McPherson appears to be the favourite in the NDP leadership contest.
The NDP’s quarterly filing included data on fundraising for the leadership candidates. The data is incomplete since it only runs to September 30, shortly after the race had begun, and is also partially dependent on how the contestants themselves report their donations. Nevertheless, the numbers are the first glimpse of some real data from this contest.
McPherson reported $99,717 in fundraising, representing 55% of the $182,000 that were donated to all leadership contestants. Avi Lewis placed second with $55,439 (or 30%), followed by Rob Ashton with $25,319 (14%) and Tanille Johnston with $1,710. No fundraising for Tony McQuail was reported (he was approved as candidate after September 30).
Lewis reported the most individual donors with 353, followed by McPherson at 231 and Ashton with 45.
The fundraising numbers are worth keeping an eye on. They have proven to be one of the most predictive indictors of leadership contests in Canada — and usually the dollar figure is far more predictive than the number of individual donors. This means that McPherson should be considered the favourite at this stage, though Lewis is not far behind.
According to the filings, McPherson’s fundraising came almost entirely from Alberta. Fully 81% of her fundraising came from her home province. Ashton, too, raised most of his money from his home base of B.C.
Lewis, on the other hand, is showing a broader fundraising base. About 45% of his fundraising came from Ontario, with B.C. chipping in another 38%. However, this does not mean much in terms of the leadership contest as no consideration is giving to where the votes are coming from — the NDP uses a simple one-member, one-vote system and does not weight each riding equally. It wouldn’t matter if every single vote for McPherson came from Edmonton, for example. All that does matter is that the winner gets more votes than everyone else.
Our next glimpse of the race will come at the end of January, when the fourth quarter numbers will be published. We’ll then get some interim reports from the leadership campaigns themselves in early March and in the days before the results are announced. Circle these dates as they will likely be the best estimates we’ll have on where the race stands.
Ex-MPs among winners in Quebec’s mayoral votes
On Sunday, voters in all of Quebec’s municipalities were called to the polls (at least where there were contested races) to choose their new mayors and councillors. Two of the takeaways? Firstly, the list of newly-elected mayors includes a number of former MPs. And, secondly, the polls did pretty good.
Let’s take a brief look at some of the results in Quebec’s largest cities.
Montréal - Former Liberal MP and cabinet minister Soraya Martinez Ferrada won with 43.2%, defeating Luc Rabouin, who finished with 35.1%. Rabouin hailed from the same party as outgoing mayor Valérie Plante, who was not running again. Rabouin did 17 points worse than Plante did in 2021.
Quebec City - Incumbent Bruno Marchand was re-elected with 49.4%, a gain of 17 points over his performance in 2021. Stéphane Lachance finished second with 23%, followed by former Quebec Liberal MNA Sam Hamad at just 13.8%.
Laval - Stéphane Boyer was re-elected with 58.9%, a jump of 17 points from the last election. Apparently, 17 is the magic number in Quebec municipal politics.
Gatineau - It was a nail-biter throughout the night, but at the end of the count Maude Marquis-Bissonnette was re-elected with 51.1%. Close behind was Mario Aubé at 47%.
Longueuil - Former PQ MNA Catherine Fournier was re-elected in a landslide with 88.8% of the vote.
Sherbrooke - Former Liberal MP and cabinet minister Marie-Claude Bibeau successfully kept her political career going with 47.1% of the vote, beating Vincent Boutin’s 30%.
Lévis - Former Conservative MP Steven Blaney, who ran for the party leadership in 2017, made the jump to municipal politics with 43.5% of the vote.
Saguenay - Not all former legislators were victorious last night. Among the defeated was Andrée Laforest, who resigned as a CAQ MNA and cabinet minister to run for the mayor’s office. She took 44.6%, falling just short of Luc Boivin’s 45%. The incumbent, Julie Dufour, finished fourth with just 2.5%.
Trois-Rivières - The third time was the charm in Three Rivers for Jean-François Aubin, who beat Pascale Alberne-Lahaie with 39.2% to 25.1% in his third run at the post.
A few other notable results included the re-election of former MPs Guy Caron in Rimouski and Nicolas Dufour in Repentigny, while former PQ MNA Mathieu Traversy was re-elected in Terrebonne. And, oddly enough, Yves Lévesque was elected in Shawinigan. Lévesque is a former mayor of Trois-Rivières and ran as the Conservative candidate in Trois-Rivières in each of the last three federal elections, coming close to winning in both 2019 and 2021. I’ll have to double-check this, but apparently Shawinigan is not Trois-Rivières. Yet, he pulled off the switcheroo handily!
There’s not much use in trying to draw broad conclusions from provincewide municipal results, but being a familiar face doesn’t seem to have hurt. The usual fights between the urban centres and the suburbs weren’t universally won by either side, with city-centre, transit-friendly candidates winning in Quebec City and Gatineau but the more suburban-focused Ensemble Montréal, Martinez Ferrada’s party, prevailing in Montreal.
Many of the municipal races were polled during the campaign, but it was primarily Segma Recherche that was in the field in the late stages of the municipal elections. Generally speaking, Segma did very well and identified the correct winners in all the major cities. The races were somewhat closer than expected in Gatineau and Saguenay and was more lopsided in Trois-Rivières, but the margins were nailed in Montréal, Quebec City, Lévis and Sherbrooke. It was a good overall performance from Segma.
Yukon Party wins majority government
The Yukon Party prevailed in Monday’s territorial election as support for the incumbent Yukon Liberals collapsed.
First elected in 2016, the Yukon Liberals were reduced to a minority government in the 2021 election and were kept in power thanks to a confidence and supply agreement with the Yukon NDP. The Liberals have had three leaders since that election (Sandy Silver, Ranj Pillai and Mike Pemberton) and were in a state of disarray heading into this election, exemplified by their inability to run a full slate of candidates.
The Liberals lost all but the most northern seat in the province (and that will go to a recount), with the NDP winning five of its six seats in Whitehorse. The Yukon Party swept the rest of the territory.
While a stinging defeat for the Liberals, this was a long time coming. The Liberals lost the popular vote to the Yukon Party by seven points in 2021 and only one incumbent stood for re-election in 2025. The result is the worst for the party since 1985, while this marks the first time the Yukon Party (or its PC predecessor) has captured more than 50% of the vote.
Coinciding with the election was a (non-binding) plebiscite on electoral reform, which resulted in 56.2% of voters supporting a switch to a ranked ballot. Yukon Party leader Currie Dixon had previously said he wouldn’t change the electoral system, so this appears to be another dead end for electoral reform.
The results in Yukon seem to be de-coupled from the federal scene. Léger polls (commissioned by the Yukon Party) published in January and August showed support for the Liberals unchanged in the mid-20s, suggesting that the unpopularity of the Trudeau Liberals at the beginning of the year and the popularity of the Carney Liberals during the summer did not have any impact on support for the Yukon Liberals. Plus, the Carney Liberals took 53% of the vote in Yukon just six months ago — more than double where the Yukon Liberals were sitting in the polls earlier this year. Nevertheless, after the elections in Yukon and Newfoundland and Labrador, the prime minister has two fewer Liberal premiers sitting around the first ministers’ table than when he first came to office.
Two polls were published in the final days of the campaign. Both Pollara and Forum Research performed well (in the most unlikely of places), with Pollara being slightly closer to the mark than Forum with its final poll that put the Yukon Party at 52%, the NDP at 34% and the Liberals at 11%.
ELECTION NEWS BRIEFS
NUNAVUT ELECTION - Turnout was down to just 37% in Nunavut’s territorial election, in which 22 MLAs were chosen for the territory’s legislature. There are no political parties in Nunavut and instead the MLAs will choose the premier and cabinet from among their number. Three ridings need to go to a judicial recount because of the close results, including one in which an incumbent has a three-vote lead. In the remaining 13 ridings where incumbents were on the ballot, only seven were re-elected.
TERREBONNE TO THE SUPREMES - A judge has ruled that a re-run of the federal election in Terrebonne should not go ahead. An error by Elections Canada misdirected some vote-by-mail ballots, which could have been decisive considering that the riding was decided by a single vote, but the court ruled that the error did not prevent voters from ensuring their ballots were cast. The defeated Bloc MP, Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné, will appeal the case to the Supreme Court but the Bloc Québécois does not appear to be ponying up the cash to challenge the ruling of a Quebec court in Ottawa.
UNFIXED ELECTION DATES - Doug Ford’s PC government is doing away with the fixed election date law in Ontario, instead reverting back to where things were before the law was brought in. Fixed date election laws throughout Canada are not binding and have been flouted on a number of occasions — including earlier this year by Doug Ford himself. The date of the election will once again be the premier’s prerogative, with the only limitation being the constitutionally-mandated five-year governing term. The PCs are also increasing the donation limit from $3,400 to $5,000.
CAQ CAUCUS CRACKS - François Legault’s government continues its meltdown in Quebec after the passing of Bill 2 that will enact significant reforms to the healthcare system. Physicians in the province are up in arms over the changes. Cracks are widening within the CAQ caucus, as the bill has cost Legault one of his earliest allies in Lionel Carmant, who quit cabinet and will sit as an Independent. Isabelle Poulet, another CAQ MNA, has been booted from caucus after she reportedly tried to cross the floor to the Liberals, an offer that was rebuffed.
NS PCs LOSE MLA - Becky Druhan, MLA for Lunenburg West, has left the Nova Scotia PC caucus to sit as an Independent following her shuffling out of Tim Houston’s cabinet.
B.C. NDP LEADS FUNDRAISING - The B.C. New Democrats led the way in third quarter fundraising in British Columbia, taking in $794,000 in July, August and September. The Conservatives raised $516,000, while the Greens were in third with $341,000.
UCP LEADS ALBERTA FUNDRAISING - Danielle Smith’s United Conservatives raised $1,628,000 in the third quarter, putting them well ahead of the NDP’s $1,191,000. So far in 2025, the UCP has raised $6.4 million to the NDP’s $3.8 million. The UCP changed the rules this year to allow corporate and union donations, a move that has so far benefited the UCP by a significant margin. Meanwhile, after raising $67,000 in the second quarter, fundraising for the Alberta Republicans dried up in the third quarter with less than $2,000 raised, putting the Republicans behind other fringe parties like the Pro-Life Association or the Wildrose Loyalty Coalition.
POLLING HIGHLIGHTS
Where the race stood pre-budget
Since it’s been two weeks since the last Weekly Writ, there were a number of polls published since then. And as this newsletter is already a long one, let’s briefly dive right into these polls by Abacus Data, EKOS Research, Innovative Research Group, Liaison Strategies, Nanos Research and Pallas Data.
Five of these six pollsters put the Liberals ahead of the Conservatives by margins stretching from as small as one point (Innovative) to as wide as 12 points (EKOS). Only Abacus has the Conservatives narrowly ahead. With the exception of the EKOS result for the Conservatives, we see a pretty tight range of 39% to 44% for the Liberals, 37% to 42% for the Conservatives and 8% to 13% for the New Democrats. There’s not much new in that.
That really is the hallmark of these and other polls over the last few weeks — stability. Movement has largely been insignificant and has not followed a consistent trend. This sets this week’s budget (and the floor-crossing) as a potential inflection point. Will the dial move from here after it hadn’t moved for the last few months?
The electoral implications of these different numbers can be significant, a reminder that even small changes in the vote can cause big seat swings. These polls would produce everything from a Liberal landslide (EKOS) to a small Liberal majority (Pallas and Liaison) to a narrow Conservative minority (Abacus and Innovative).
The risk of a new election is pretty obvious here. The Liberals could make seat gains and win their majority, or they could fall into opposition status. The Conservatives could eke out a win, or they could wind up with fewer seats (potentially many fewer seats). The NDP could achieve recognized party status, or they could lose any influence they now have in a minority parliament. The Bloc also risks losing that influence with only a handful of gains as the reward.
We’ll see where things go from here. Assuming an election is not in the offing, then it’ll be worth watching to see how Canadians react to this budget — and whether or not the loss of at least one Conservative MP to the Liberals has any impact on Pierre Poilievre’s own ratings.
POLLING NEWS BRIEFS
RUSTAD STRUGGLING IN BC - Polls by the Angus Reid Institute and Léger suggest that B.C. Conservative leader John Rustad does not have much support within his own party’s base. The two polls have mixed views on voting intentions, with the ARI putting the Conservatives at 41%, the NDP at 40% and the Greens at 11%. Léger has the NDP ahead by 10 points, 48% to 38%, with the Greens at 8%. But both show awful numbers for Rustad. Léger shows that 46% of B.C. Conservative voters think Rustad should resign while ARI puts the number at 41%. Barely a majority think he should stay on according to Léger, while ARI puts the number at only 25%. And these are Conservative voters!
UCP LEADS IN ALBERTA - A new survey from Léger suggests the United Conservatives hold a five-point lead over the NDP in Alberta, 44% to 39%. An asterisk should be put on the poll, however, as it awards 9% support to the hardly-existing Alberta Liberal Party. The poll finds that NDP leader Naheed Nenshi has a higher approval rating than Premier Danielle Smith and that there is broad support for the teachers in their ongoing dispute with the Alberta government.
STATUS QUO ONTARIO - Léger was also in the field in Ontario, where it found Doug Ford’s PCs holding a 12-point lead over the Liberals, 44% to 32%, with the NDP in third with 13%. Despite the PC lead and Ford’s respectable approval rating in this poll, the PC government gets poor marks on a number of key issues, with majorities of Ontarians saying the government has done a bad job on the economy, education, crime, health care and housing affordability, among other things.
BOOK REVIEW
Ballots and Brawls: The 1867 Canadian General Election
Patrice Dutil (Published in 2025 by UBC Press)
Despite being the first election held in this country following Confederation, the 1867 election has gotten little attention from historians. It’s often treated as little more than a formality in many biographies and works of history. But it was an important election that ensured that Canada’s first years unfolded relatively smoothly — because it wasn’t a given that Confederation would be a success.
Patrice Dutil, a professor at the Toronto Metropolitan University and the author of a number of books on Canadian political history, has written the first in-depth account of the 1867 election in Ballots and Brawls: The 1867 Canadian General Election. It’s part of the ‘Turning Point Elections’ series being published by UBC Press. I’ve read four of the five installments of the series and this one is, by far, my favourite.
The book is enjoyable to read with the narrative thrust that some of the other titles in the series have lacked, with plenty of colour drawn from newspaper reports from the campaign trail. Dutil sets the stage with the story of the (somewhat slapdash) way that the Dominion of Canada was formed out of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and the United Province of Canada (now Ontario and Quebec), as well as the pre-Confederation elections that were instrumental in putting into place the players that would set things in motion.
Campaigning in 1867 was enormously different than it is today. Out of the four new provinces, only New Brunswick had a secret ballot. The few who were eligible to vote in the other three provinces had to do so publicly. Those votes took place over two days in each riding, with different ridings voting on different dates — the whole thing was stretched out over a number of weeks. Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia also held simultaneous provincial elections, with candidates putting their names forward for both provincial and federal seats. The newly-installed premiers of Ontario and Quebec, for instance, also won seats in the House of Commons.
Dutil wisely splits up the narrative by province, as the 1867 campaign was a series of regional contests rather than one national campaign. John A. Macdonald, leader of the Conservatives (and Liberal-Conservatives, a moniker that dated back to a pre-Confederation coalition), only campaigned in Ontario. Others, such as George-Étienne Cartier in Quebec or Charles Tupper in Nova Scotia, had to take the lead in their own provinces, where views on Confederation were different. It was broadly supported in Ontario, but there was indifference in Quebec and outright opposition in Nova Scotia. The Conservatives, however, had a unified policy: support for Confederation.
The Liberals (or Reformers, as they were also called) were far more divided, as Dutil lays out, because they lacked a single message. George Brown, leader of the Liberals in Ontario, was hardly a figure to garner support in Quebec as he was viewed as both anti-French and anti-Catholic. The Rouges in Quebec under Antoine-Aimé Dorion had to reconcile themselves with a project they were lukewarm about at best, while the Liberals in Nova Scotia were entirely supplanted by Joseph Howe’s anti-Confederation Nova Scotia Party (or Anti-Confederates). It was perhaps inevitable that the Liberals wouldn’t win a majority across the country.
I highly recommend this book. It’s a good read with just enough colour to give you a sense of the times without being overly laden with anecdotes from the campaign trail or dry recitations of names and dates.
If I have one criticism, it has more to do with the available sources than with the book. The results of the 1867 election are marred by the fact that the political affiliations of many defeated candidates are unknown. Dutil admits that a micro-study of each riding would be necessary to identify the affiliations of all candidates (don’t tempt me!), which was outside of the scope of his work. But I don’t think it should be assumed that the bulk of those unknowns were Independent candidates who were unaffiliated with either the Conservatives or the Liberals. Many of them might have been true Independents (especially those who received dozens of votes, rather than hundreds or thousands), but it seems likely that the political affiliations of a lot of defeated Liberals and Conservatives were simply ignored by later record-keepers. It is surely not a coincidence that no Independent or ‘unknown’ candidates were elected.
This is not Dutil’s fault, but I would’ve preferred more of an acknowledgement of that limitation rather than arguing that upwards of a third of Canadians rejected the visions put forward by both the Conservatives and Liberals.
But that’s a small quibble from someone who is overly-obsessed with election results. Ballots and Brawls is an informative, entertaining and welcome addition to the growing list of books focusing on individual elections in Canada. Thank you to Patrice Dutil for writing it, and for UBC Press for publishing this series.
You can order the book directly from UBC Press here. It’s also available at Amazon. Or, better yet, ask your local book shop to order a copy! Full disclosure: I purchased this book myself and I get no benefit if you order a copy — but I recommend you do anyway!
(From time to time, I might include some book reviews in future editions of the Weekly Writ. Let me know if you think this is a worthwhile addition to the newsletter.)
12-MONTH ELECTORAL CALENDAR
November 9: Québec Solidaire co-leadership
Candidates: Yv Bonnier-Viger, Étienne Grandmont, Sol Zanetti
March 29: Federal NDP leadership
Candidates: Rob Ashton, Tanille Johnston, Avi Lewis, Heather McPherson, Tony McQuail
May 11: Municipal elections in New Brunswick
October 5: Quebec provincial election
October 17: New Brunswick Progressive Conservative leadership
Candidates: Daniel Allain
October 17: Municipal elections in British Columbia
October 26: Municipal elections in Ontario
Byelections yet to be scheduled
QC - Chicoutimi (to be called by March)
PEI - Georgetown–Pownal (to be called by April)
Party leadership dates yet to be set
P.E.I. PCs (Dennis King resigned on February 20, 2025)
Federal Greens (Elizabeth May announced on August 19, 2025)
Ontario Liberals (Bonnie Crombie resigned on September 14, 2025)
Future party leadership dates
November 21, 2026: Nova Scotia Liberals
ON THIS DAY in the #EveryElectionProject
R.G. Willis becomes Manitoba Conservative leader
November 6, 1919
This was originally published on November 6, 2024.
Politics were in flux after the dislocations caused by the First World War. In Manitoba, the Conservatives had been ousted from office in 1915 despite the presence of Robert Borden’s Union (read: Conservative) government in Ottawa. The Manitoba Tories had been taken down by scandal and corruption, and were being supplanted by organized farmers’ movements.
When the party called a convention to name a new leader in 1919, the Liberals were solidly ensconced in power and the direction the Conservatives would take was still in question. Though a handful of candidates were nominated at the convention held in the Royal Alexandra Hotel in Winnipeg, including Albert Préfontaine, who was leading the Conservative caucus in the legislature, and Agnes Munro (called “Mrs. James Munro” in the newspapers), only two let their names stand for the party’s leadership.
The favourite seemed to be Fawcett Taylor. Born in Manitoba and a former mayor of Portage la Prairie, Taylor had served in the trenches in France and returned home intact and with the rank of major.
His opponent was Richard Gardiner Willis. Born in Ontario, like many others he had made his way to Manitoba in search of better opportunities. By 1919, he had served as mayor of the small town of Boissevain in Manitoba’s southwest, and was dubbed a “well-known farmer” in the Canadian Annual Review of Public Affairs.
The “well-attended” convention included five delegates for each of Manitoba’s 49 ridings, along with other non-voting participants. When the votes were counted, Willis emerged as the winner — though by how much was not announced.
His win was seen as a demonstration of the growing strength of organized farmers’ movements in the Prairies. Willis himself seemed to recognize this, saying he had “no doubt that Manitoba’s next Legislature will comprise a great many more farmers than it does at present. There are only seven at present, and I confidently expect that this number will be more than doubled.”
“They may be Conservative, Liberal or Independent Farmers, but they will be farmers first of all.”
According to the Canadian Press, “much enthusiasm was shown and victory at the next election was confidently predicted.”
Those predictions proved optimistic. Not only would Willis lose his own bid to win a seat in the provincial election in 1920, the Conservatives would finish fourth in the legislature — behind the Liberals, Farmers and Labour.
But Willis was on to something. Tobias Norris’s short last term would end in 1922 and the United Farmers of Manitoba, soon to be styled the Progressives, would form a majority government that year. The Conservatives would finish third but, this time, Willis (now just a candidate as the leadership had passed to Taylor) would win himself a seat on the opposition benches — in a legislature full of farmers.
That’s it for the Weekly Writ this week. The next episode of The Numbers will be dropping on Tuesday. The episode will land in your inbox but you can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting apps. If you want to get access to bonus and ad-free episodes, become a Patron here!