Weekly Writ 2/12: Are more Liberals opting out of the next election than normal?
Plus, new federal polls show the landscape is shifting dramatically.
Welcome to the Weekly Writ, a round-up of the latest federal and provincial polls, election news and political history that lands in your inbox every Wednesday morning.
Three Liberal cabinet ministers announced this past week that they will not be running for re-election: Soraya Martinez Ferrada, Mary Ng and Arif Virani. It’s starting to look like an exodus.
Martinez Ferrada, who was to be the Liberal’s campaign co-chair for the upcoming election, is instead mounting a bid for the mayor’s office in Montreal by running to become the new leader of Ensemble Montréal, a municipal party in the city. Ng and Virani did not announce any plans for the future.
Martin Shields, an Alberta Conservative MP, also announced he will not re-offer.
The count is now 50 MPs who are not running for re-election, including 33 from the governing Liberal caucus. That sounds like a lot.
But is it a lot?
In elections since 1968, an average of 12% of MPs have opted not to run for re-election, according to data compiled by the Library of Parliament. On average, 13% of the governing caucus has not run for re-election. If we exclude Parliaments that lasted less than four years, the averages increases to 16% and 17%, respectively.
As it stands, about 15% of the House of Commons is not running for re-election. The 33 Liberals not running for re-election represent about 21% of the number of Liberal MPs elected in 2021. So, we’re currently on track for a typical number of MP retirements for a four or five-year Parliament, but the number of governing MPs not running for re-election is higher than usual.
That is probably a reflection of the Liberals’ perceived chances of winning the next election (even if those prospects are looking better today than they did a few weeks ago, as we’ll see in a bit). The other recent examples where at least 20% of the governing caucus did not run for re-election were in 2015 and 1993. In both of those elections, the governing party went down to defeat.
We will probably see these numbers tick up over the coming weeks as more MPs announce they are not running for re-election. The number we have seen so far, however, is not abnormally high — but it is high enough on the governing side that it has the whiff of a fin de régime.
Now, to what is in this week’s instalment of the Weekly Writ:
News on the latest developments in the Liberal leadership race, as well as byelection news in Prince Edward Island and Quebec.
Polls show the Liberals closing the gap to single digits, and that Mark Carney could wipe out that gap entirely. Plus, new provincial numbers out of Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia.
Re-elected majorities for David Eby and Danielle Smith if the elections were held today.
Bill Davis’s rise to the premier’s office in the #EveryElectionProject.
Upcoming milestones for Pierre Poilievre and Tim Houston.