Weekly Writ 2/12: What history says about early elections
Amid speculation that Mark Carney might call a snap election, history suggests things don't always go as planned.
My thoughts are with those who lost loved ones, as well as with the entire community of Tumbler Ridge, B.C., after this week’s horrible tragedy.
Early election speculation has been in over-drive over the last few weeks in Ottawa — which is how things usually are during a minority government.
The latest bout has been supercharged by a series of polls that have put the Liberals solidly in majority territory (though not every poll, as we’ll get into in a little bit). Prime Minister Mark’s Carney bump in the polls after his Davos speech hasn’t yet abated and no floor-crossers appear to be in sight. Why not call an election in the short term when the Liberals’ chances of securing a majority are probably as good as they’re going to get?
The chatter was energized when The Globe and Mail reported that Ontario Premier Doug Ford — who himself called an early snap election last year — had suggested to Carney that he might want to go to the polls sooner rather than later.
It’s certainly possible the Liberals are considering a snap call (it would be political malpractice to not have it as an option) but they’ve done a little over the last few days to tamp down the speculation. Carney has said he isn’t thinking about an early election and he has some important international travel scheduled for the coming weeks and months that would be pre-empted by a dissolution. The Liberals and the Conservatives have also been discussing greater co-operation in the House of Commons. In the end, the threat of an election might be as useful for Carney as an actual writ drop.
Because a writ drop is serious business. It would kick-off an election campaign that would last at least five weeks. That’s a long time in politics. The Liberals were only leading the Conservatives by a point or two, on average, five weeks ago. That lead is now somewhere around seven points. There’s no guarantee what the polls will show in another five weeks.
That’s been the challenge for past governments that have considered going early. Not all have been successful. In fact, over the last century more than one-in-five governments that pulled their own plug early have gone down to defeat.
The chart below shows every early federal or provincial election call over the last 100 years. For the purposes of this analysis, I’ve looked at any election called within three calendar years of the previous election. This would exclude, for example, Carney’s snap call last April. But prior to the institution of fixed election date laws some 20 years or so ago, there’s no exact measure of when an election was “early” or not. Generally, elections were expected every four years, but could legally be pushed off to five years. Any election called within three years of the last one was usually considered an early call. (Though, in some provinces, it became the norm. W.A.C. Bennett, for example, liked calling elections in B.C. roughly every three years.)
The chart shows whether the election was called by the governing party on its own (“snap”) or if it was defeated in the legislature on either a money bill or a motion of non-confidence (“defeat”). The chart also shows what the status of the governing party was at dissolution, what it was after the election and how many seats it gained or lost.
History suggests that a snap election can be a 50/50 call — especially when it comes to seat gains. That would be the goal of Carney’s Liberals, as they only need a handful of seats to gain their majority. But in the 83 cases I’ve identified since 1926, only 41 times did the governing party gain seats. In the other 42 cases, the governing party either won the same number of seats or lost some.
The record is slightly better when the governing party called the election on its own, but there are actually very few cases of governments falling on budget bills or non-confidence motions.
In the case of minority governments, 15 times an early call upgraded the party to a majority, five times another minority was returned and nine times the government was defeated. That’s roughly a 2:1 margin in favour of re-election vs. defeat, but minority governments have been just about as likely to be defeated or returned with another minority as they have been to use an early call to win a majority.
Nevertheless, there does seem to be something to taking matters into your own hands. The win rate of governments that called an early election of their own accord is 78%, compared to a win rate of 67% in elections held at the four-to-five year mark. Governments defeated in the legislature have only won re-election 36% of the time.
In the end, surviving to fight another day can be enough of a win. On last week’s episode of The Writ Podcast, Dan Arnold (who was Justin Trudeau’s pollster) argued that the 2021 snap call was the right decision because the Liberals would have struggled to win re-election if the vote had taken place as scheduled in 2023. The party didn’t get its majority, but its tenure in office was prolonged long enough to get Mark Carney in at the right time.
The problem for Carney is that the future is hard to predict. John Diefenbaker in 1958 knew he could win his majority when he called a snap vote. Pierre Trudeau manoeuvred the New Democrats into defeating his government in 1974 because he liked his chances, too. Going to the polls was the right call for David Peterson in Ontario in 1987.
But then it was the disastrously wrong call for Peterson to go back to the polls in 1990. It was another big miscalculation for Jim Prentice to chase his own mandate a year early in Alberta in 2015. Elections have a funny way of not always going according to plan.
Maybe that’s why we love speculating about the next one so much.
Now, to what is in this week’s instalment of the Weekly Writ:
News on the Ontario Liberals’ leadership race, plus the PCs in PEI have a new leader and premier, while the race for the PC leadership in New Brunswick finally gets a second candidate.
Polls show the Liberal lead is holding but that the post-Davos surge might have stabilized. Plus, new numbers on Albertans’ views on independence.
#EveryElectionProject: The time when Peter MacKay almost became the premier of Nova Scotia.
NEWS AND ANALYSIS
Ontario Liberals set rules for leadership race
The Ontario Liberals are in no great rush to name their replacement for Bonnie Crombie, who announced she’d be stepping down as leader last September. Instead, her successor will be announced more than a year after her leadership review vote, kicking off a leadership campaign that will conclude in more than nine months.