Weekly Writ 7/31: How Battle River–Crowfoot will actually make history (for real)
Plus, the NDP sets its leadership rules and we get a look at 2025 election fundraising.
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 Thursday morning.
The upcoming federal byelection in Battle River–Crowfoot has set a record for the most candidates ever on a ballot in Canada. It’s the work of the so-called Longest Ballot Committee, who recruited 201 of their own candidates as part of its ongoing protest against the lack of progress on electoral reform. (A little more on that later.)
It’ll also be a memorable byelection because it will give Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre a seat in the House of Commons — assuming he wins it, of course.
But will it be remembered as the “most important byelection in Canadian history”?
That’s what Poilievre modestly called it in a recent email blast to party supporters.
This wasn’t the first (and it certainly won’t be the last) bit of hyperbole we’ve seen in a partisan fundraising appeal, but it does seem like quite the stretch.
Pierre Poilievre lost his seat in the last general election and one of his caucus members, who happened to occupy the second-safest Conservative riding in the country, stepped aside to provide Poilievre a route back into the House. His victory in Battle River–Crowfoot is virtually a foregone conclusion, so the stakes are rather low, to put it mildly.
Electing a leader of the official opposition is, of course, important. And we’ve seen many instances of seatless party leaders gaining access to the House via an accommodating resignation from one of their caucus members. That was how Tommy Douglas, Stockwell Day, George Drew, Robert Stanfield, Arthur Meighen, Joe Clark, Brian Mulroney, Robert Borden, Jean Chrétien and Mackenzie King (twice) earned tickets to the House of Commons at some point in their storied careers. But I have trouble seeing how any of those byelections were any less historically important than this one in Battle River–Crowfoot.
Then again, history is always in the process of being written. A defeat for Poilievre here would indeed be a historical event, like Meighen’s defeat in the 1942 York South byelection that ended his attempted comeback as Conservative leader. I suspect, however, that Poilievre is not warning us that he is at risk of losing a riding his party won by a margin of 71 percentage points a few months ago.
Tempted as I might be to put together a definitive ranking of every past federal byelection, that might be too nerdy — even for me. But, if I did rank them, I have to believe that this contest in Battle River–Crowfoot wouldn’t crack the Top 10.
There are a few byelections that come to mind as easily ranking higher on the list. In addition to the 1942 byelection in York South, there would be the first-ever victories by the Reform Party and Bloc Québécois in the 1989 and 1990 byelections in Beaver River and Laurier–Sainte-Marie, respectively, that foreshadowed the coming calamity for the Progressive Conservatives in 1993.
There was Thomas Mulcair’s breakthrough win in Outremont in 2007 that put the NDP on the map in Quebec, the first step toward the Orange Wave in 2011.
There was the 2003 byelection in Perth–Middlesex, where a squeaker victory by the PCs and a third-place showing for the Canadian Alliance convinced Stephen Harper that the only way to defeat the Liberals was to merge his Alliance with the PCs.
And I’d even rank last year’s byelections in Toronto–St. Paul’s and LaSalle–Émard–Verdun higher on the list. It’s hard to imagine that Justin Trudeau resigns in January 2025 if he doesn’t suffer those two stinging byelection defeats in 2024.
The Longest Ballot Committee has ensured that this byelection will be in the history books. But it’ll be merely as an oddity, a strange historical anecdote to gawk at the number of candidates who were nominated. It won’t be because of the actual result.
Unless a shocking upset is about to unfold, I’d have to respectfully disagree with the Conservative Party leader that the Battle River–Crowfoot byelection is the most important one in Canadian history. Of course, I might just be expecting too much from a partisan fundraising appeal.
Programming note: The Weekly Writ will take one more break this summer and will return on August 14. If you have it off, enjoy the long weekend!
Now, to what is in this week’s instalment of the Weekly Writ:
News on the rules for the NDP’s leadership race, which will kick off in September. Plus, we get a look at some federal fundraising numbers from the past election, a final count on the number of candidates on the ballot in Battle River–Crowfoot, new manoeuvres in Alberta party politics and news on provincial byelections that have been added to the calendar in Prince Edward Island and Manitoba.
Polls show Mark Carney’s honeymoon is continuing unabated, as is Doug Ford’s post-election popularity.
#EveryElectionProject: Bill Vander Zalm becomes B.C. Social Credit leader in 1986.
Upcoming milestone for New Brunswick Premier Susan Holt.
NEWS AND ANALYSIS
NDP finalizes leadership rules
The New Democrats have settled on the particulars of their leadership contest, setting some high bars for entry, scheduling a few debates and establishing the timeline for ponying up the entry fee instalments.