Weekly Writ 4/16: Why Conservatives should be worried about the byelections
Dismiss byelection results at your peril.
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Byelection results are easy to dismiss when they don’t go your way. They’re referendums on the government! They’re safe seats for the incumbent! Turnout is low! Local dynamics are at play!
There are some kernels of truth there. But that doesn’t mean the Conservatives shouldn’t be worried about the results of the byelections in Terrebonne, University—Rosedale and Scarborough Southwest, in which they put up their worst byelection performances in over a decade.
By now, you’ve probably already pored over the results in these three seats. (And if you didn’t, you can check out the hot takes from early Tuesday morning that Philippe and I shared on The Numbers).
The Liberals won a close fight in Terrebonne, taking 48.4% of the vote to the Bloc’s 46.8%. The Liberals haven’t had this much support in this part of Quebec since the 1980 federal election, when Pierre Trudeau won 74 of 75 seats in the province.
University—Rosedale and Scarborough Southwest were landslide Liberal wins, with the party increasing its vote share in both. In Scarborough Southwest, the Liberals’ 69.9% of the vote was their best result since at least the 1960s when a riding somewhat resembling today’s Scarborough Southwest was first created. The NDP managed to work its way to second place in University—Rosedale, though its respectable nine-point gain represented only half of the support the party lost here between 2021 and 2025.
The Conservatives, however, tanked. They dropped 11 points in University—Rosedale and 12 points in Scarborough Southwest, taking their smallest share of the vote in these seats ever. And in Terrebonne, the Conservatives absolutely collapsed by 15 points to just 3.3%. The only time the Conservatives have ever done worse than this in the area that is now Terrebonne was when the Liberals won by acclamation in 1917 and 1953 and there wasn’t a Conservative on the ballot.
In the context of these three ridings, these were worst-ever results for the Conservatives. But even more remarkable is that the losses the Conservatives suffered in these three byelections were the largest they’ve suffered in any byelection in over a decade.
Inspired by a social media post by Dan Arnold (credit where credit is due), I’ve compiled below the Conservatives’ performances in byelections since the 2015 election. Ranked from greatest losses to biggest gains, you can see that the top three worst performances for the Conservatives out of the 35 byelections held over the last 10 years all occurred on Monday night.
It’s not even that close. Before Monday, the Conservatives hadn’t lost more than 8.3 points in any byelection since 2015.
In fact, you have to go back to 2014 to find a byelection where the Conservatives lost more support. In the last years of Stephen Harper’s government, the Conservatives were routinely losing huge chunks of their vote share in byelections. It’s no coincidence that these big byelection losses were followed by Harper’s defeat in 2015.
If you look at the bottom of this list, you can see that five of the seven best performances took place in 2023 and 2024, when the Conservatives were riding high in the polls. Those byelections presaged what was supposed to happen in 2025 — the defeat of Justin Trudeau’s Liberals by Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives. Those byelections were a reflection of the big swing that was taking place in public opinion.
This week’s byelections, then, might also be a reflection of what is happening in public opinion now. And they act as a corroboration of the Conservatives’ worst polling numbers, rather than of their best ones. Simply put, the Conservatives should not be dropping 11 to 15 points in these ridings if they are truly running only a few points behind the Liberals. Instead, these byelections suggest the double-digit leads we’ve seen in most polls just might be on to something.
One could counter-argue that, since the Conservatives were not in contention in any three of these ridings, it is natural that their voters didn’t bother to show up. Turnout was only around 33% in the Toronto ridings and was 51% in Terrebonne. But we’ve seen them show up in other ridings where Conservative chances were equally dim and where turnout was equally down.
In LaSalle—Émard—Verdun, the Conservatives had just 7.5% of the vote in the 2021 election. The byelection in 2024 was known to be a three-way race between the Liberals, Bloc and NDP (the Bloc won). But that didn’t stop Conservatives from going out to the polls. The party increased its vote share in this Montreal riding by four points to 11.5%. Similarly (and also in Montreal), the Conservative vote slid only marginally from 14.1% to 13.6% in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount in 2023.
One could then argue that these byelections occurred when Justin Trudeau’s government was unpopular and in a minority context, where an election could be around the corner and voters were engaged and motivated to send a message. But in the 2017 byelection in Ottawa—Vanier, when the Liberals were safely ensconced in majority territory and were still quite popular, the Conservatives only lost four points. On the same night in Saint-Laurent, where the Conservatives had zero chance of winning, their vote held unchanged at 19.5%.
If the Conservatives could manage to get their voters out and supporting them in these past byelections, why were they unable to do so on Monday?
Yes, the byelection in Terrebonne was polarized between the Liberals and the Bloc. The one-vote margin in 2025 might have hammered the point home to voters that they couldn’t waste their vote on a party that wasn’t contending to win. But that was not the case in either University—Rosedale or Scarborough Southwest. The polarization in Terrebonne might have further depressed the Conservative vote, but the results in the two Toronto ridings suggest that polarization was not the only factor at play. The Conservatives simply lost support, and to an extent that we last saw when the party was on its way out of power.
Of course, none of these ridings were particularly good ones for the Conservatives in the last election and would not be expected to be among those the Conservatives would win when forming government. The share of the vote the Conservatives received in the last election in Scarborough Southwest ranked the riding 246th out of the 342 ridings where the Conservatives ran candidates. University—Rosedale ranked 279th and Terrebonne ranked 311th. Even had Pierre Poilievre become prime minister last year, these three seats would have almost certainly been represented by opposition MPs.
But these byelection results, if they had occurred in the general election, would have ranked these ridings 311th, 337th and 342nd — dead last. The 3.3% the Conservatives obtained in Terrebonne would be the worst result the party had anywhere in Canada in April 2025. Their actual worst result, in Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, was a towering 6.9% by comparison.
These byelection results should set off alarm bells within Conservative Party HQ. The circumstances of the byelections might have exaggerated the negative trend for the party, but they strongly suggest that the Conservatives are not competitive at the moment and that the polls that indicate the Liberals could win 200+ seats today are indeed an accurate reflection of where things stand.
Dismissing these results would be like denying the reality the Conservatives find themselves in. You can’t fix a problem if you don’t recognize there is a problem to fix.
Now, to what else is in this week’s instalment of the Weekly Writ:
Brief news out of the CAQ and B.C. Conservative leadership races.
Polls show the status quo at the federal level, though a new trend might be developing in Atlantic Canada. Plus, we have new provincial polling numbers out of Quebec, British Columbia and Alberta.
#EveryElectionProject: An unexpected result in the 2000 Yukon election.
Upcoming milestone for Tony Wakeham.