Canada 1993: the benchmark for NSW?

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With the NSW Labor government on track for a massive defeat, I thought I’d look into the history of massive landslide defeats in Westminster system countries. Most of the examples I found came from Canada, mainly from provincial elections, along with a few other notable examples. The Queensland elections of 1974 and 1983, the South Australian election of 1993, the 2002 New Zealand election, and elections in the Canadian provinces of Quebec, Alberta, British Columbia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland.

There is one example, that stands out from all others, which was the 1993 Canadian federal election, which saw the quick and painful death of a political party with over a hundred years of history.

Brian Mulroney had led the Progressive Conservative (PC) federal government from 1984 until early 1993. He had won a landslide victory in 1984, and was re-elected with a smaller majority in 1988. The government’s popularity collapsed in its second term, and its position worsened in the recession of the early 1990s. Mulroney retired in June 1993 and was succeeded by Canada’s first female Prime Minister, Kim Campbell. She led the government into the federal election in October 1993.

The election was an extreme result, with a majority of Canadian voters changing their vote compared to 1988. The PCs were assaulted on all sides, losing ground to the separatist Bloc Québécois, the opposition Liberals, and the right-wing Reform party. Reform had been formed as a conservative party with its base in the western provinces, promoting decentralisation and attacking the PC government from the right. The Bloc Québécois was formed in 1991 with the defection of a number of Liberal and Progressive Conservative federal MPs from Quebec, committed to sovereignty for Quebec.

At the 1993 election, the Progressive Conservatives collapsed, falling from 169 seats in 1988 to only two. Only one cabinet minister survived the election. While the party had been polling in the mid-30s six weeks out from the election, by election day this had plummeted to 16%.

The Liberal opposition increased its seats from 83 to 177, giving them a solid majority. Both the Bloc Québécois and Reform won their first seats at a general election, with the Bloc winning 54 seats and Reform winning 52. The Bloc became the official opposition, despite only running in one province. The left-wing New Democratic Party also collapsed, falling from 43 to 9. The 1988 election had been their best, but 1993 turned into their worst. They still won more seats than the PCs, despite polling substantially less.

The Progressive Conservatives never recovered from this devastating loss. They won 20 seats in 1997, but again fell to 12 in 2000.

The PCs merged with the Canadian Alliance, the successor to Reform, in 2003 to form the Conservative Party of Canada. The party is dominated by those aligned with Reform.

Meanwhile the New Democrats recovered their strength, and the Bloc today continue to hold a large majority of federal seats in Quebec. With the continued strength of these two parties, it has become incredibly difficult for either major party to form a stable majority government, despite Canada’s majoritarian electoral system.

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13 COMMENTS

  1. My favourite is New Brunswick in 1987:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Brunswick_general_election,_1987

    The Liberals won every. single. bloody. seat. Victories don’t get bigger than that. They got 60%, compared to 29% for the tories and 10% for the NDP. (Under a proportional system, that would’ve still been a big win but not a wipeout.) It would’ve made any kind of political opposition pretty interesting for the next few years… apparently they had to pick a bunch of random backbenchers to be the parliamentary opposition.

  2. I recall that election. It was my first foray into politics as a Tory, so it’s all up from there.

    It really was a perfect storm of things going wrong. They even wound up running an ad that made fun of the Liberal leader’s face. (Jean Chretien had Bell’s Palsy as a child and had a moderate facial deformity on account of it.)

    I do think NSW is a bit different from 1993. I think the Tories then ended up worse than Labor will in March. 1993 eventually led to the formation of a new party and I’m not sure that will be needed in NSW. There is no hint of a regional party cleaving off part of Labor’s support base in the same way that Reform and the Bloc did to the Tories.

    As an aside, the new Conservative Party assumed the debts and assets of the old PCs, so technically the Canadian Alliance merged into it. Also, the new party has had to take care to move away from many of the stances taken by the old Reform/Alliance party.

    As for the provinces, they are more inclined to elect one sided Governments. There has never been a non Tory government in Alberta in my lifetime.

  3. @bird of paradox,

    I was originally planning a post going through a whole bunch of lopsided elections, including two in Queensland (1974 and 1983), one in SA (1993) and a whole bunch in Canadian provinces. Alberta is the most extreme case I’ve found in the Western world, but lots of Canadian provinces seem to have a tendency to produce extremely lopsided results.

    @Bill Lockley,

    I completely agree that NSW is very different circumstances to Canada 1993. I don’t think for a second that Labor can’t recover from this defeat, although they may never reach the levels they did in 1999 and 2003. It’s just a very interesting historical election.

  4. Yep, when governments get deeply unpopular over the course of a term, any sensible prediction of election result can be thrown out the window.

    I think landslide results that cause a change of government tend to be a catharsis for the public and a well-needed purge of the party that lost power. Landslide wins by a government in power tend to reinforce their vote for the next few terms. This is illustrated in the Queensland landslides versus the South Australia landslide. One could argue that DPJ will face the same situation in the next Japanese general election.

    The notable exception is the Canada 1993 general election, where the landslide was so vast that a third party (Reform) could rise and take over. If the landslide is that deep, and the Greens in NSW win more than the expected two seats, that could be a real danger for NSW Labor.

  5. Canadian parties have much less of a solid social regional base there are fewer safe seats. Richard Johnston studied the 1983 UK election and found that if voting patterns had been uniform across country Labour would have won less than 10 seats. 1997 might have been similar for the Tories.

  6. Essential Research suggests Labor losing everything in Sydney apart from the ethnic core + Heffron so many safe seats going, but outside Sydney Labor holding most of its safe seats, independent vote is high outside Sydney which is probabaly a help to Labor

  7. Another factor helping the ALP at this election is compulsory voting that means that no seriously significant proportion of ALP voters, who would not vote for anybody else, will stay away from the polls so the ALP can count on them to turn up and vote for them.

  8. Completely off-topic, but why is the front page only giving comments up till 3 weeks ago and there are no more recent stuff?

    Also, why does Canadia produce some strange results?

  9. @bird of paradox. Best story of the 1987 New Brunswick election was the non-concession speech of former Premier Richard Hatfield. Press camped out for a concession speech and Hatfield locked himself in his cottage for five days until every member of the press had vacated the area.

  10. Canada 1984 is a better comparison than Canada 1993. Liberals had been in for 21 years( minus a 9 month Tory Gov’t in 1979) and voters wanted a change. Liberals were reduced to 40 seats out of 282. However within 2 terms and 9 years, the PC’s had fractured into three parties and the Liberals were back in government. NSW Labor likely needs its time in the wilderness but it will probably be shorter than one might think right now.

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