Lago PARANOIA wrote:Congratulations, Canada and its Liberal Party for completely spanking the opposition.
Anyone know why the NDP and the conservatives did so astoundingly poorly?
For the NDP:
- Mulcair was not particularly charismatic or impressive at all in any way - he performed poorly as a party leader. The previous leader, Jack Layton, was far better, and honestly I think if he was running the NDP we would be having a Liberal-NDP coalition government of some sort (maybe NDP-lead, maybe Liberal-lead) - but his death in 2011 has left the party greatly diminished, and Mulcair was not up to the fight.
- NDP policies and politics mostly agree pretty closely with Liberal politics, so they tend to split the left vote between them. This time round there was a widespread belief that the Liberal party was gaining ground the entire lead-up to the election, and this in turn lead to leftist voters who were voting strategically against the Conservatives to vote Liberal.
For the conservatives:
- Historically, governments in Canada often last 8-10 years before the public gets tired of them and throws them out with vigor (often enough so to create a minority government in other parties. Historically, this election is part of that trend. Harper and the conservatives have been around long enough to attract a lot of negative emotion to their brand..
- Stephen Harper, former Prime Minister and Conservative leader, is extremely hated. He is widely felt by people to be out of touch with voter desires, to be very uncharismatic, and he's been supportive and trying to pass / passing a lot of legislation recently that is extremely unpopular
- Biggest example of unpopular legislation is Bill C-51, which a lot of people feel goes against Canadian values and is very bad overall (not entirely unlike a Canadian Patriot Act). Part of the Liberal platform was to modify and revise this law. Also the TPP thing didn't do him any favours (though the Liberals and NDP were more noncommital towards it, with rhetoric that basically boiled down to 'we will let you know what we think about it when we see it', rather than outright promises to reject it... so I think the odds are probably at least 10:1 in favor of us signing the damned thing.
- Conservatives tried to center debate around some ultimately pretty meaningless social issues which a lot of people disagreed with the conservatives on (e.g. coming out strongly against women wearing niqabs for various government interactions). They probably projected that they'd do better here than they would campaigning on actually important issues? But a lot of people didn't like this at all.
- Conservative attack ads were some weak-ass shit. Probably the least effective attack ads I've seen (this is a matter of taste and opinion, but seriously, they were poorly done even by the standards of typical conservative propaganda. Also, their attack ads mostly seemed to attack Trudeau, ignoring Mulcair - which given results of voting seems justified, but this level of focus probably helped to focus public attention on the narrative of it being a C vs L race rather than splitting the left vote.
- A few minor factors that probably didn't help any for them but almost certainly weren't decisive: Conservatives have been doing a lot of stuff that angers the youth vote, such as it is, and the other parties have been a lot more e.g. in favour of measures that would help university students. Pretty much everyone in their 20's that I talked to at all was strongly in favor of "anyone but Harper" or much rarely "Someone in specific who is not Harper", and a lot of these people probably looked at the field and picked the most likely non-Harper winner, which probably helped get the liberals their slim majority. This is before you even factor in the pro-marijuana-legalization of the Liberals. However, this is still a minor factor because I would be very surprised if more than 40% of us voted in the election nonetheless... disaffection in the youngest voting demographic is very high.
As far as what the Liberals did right:
- Arguably the most charismatic leader of any of the 3 most major parties.
- Name recognition - even now, a lot people have positive affection for Pierre Trudeau, so having his son run got a lot of good public feeling for free.
- Good performance in propaganda and agitprop - felt like fewer attack ads in number but the attack ads were higher quality; more positive self-promotional ads.
- Were running against Harper (right time and right place... it would have taken an astounding level of incompetence to make Harper win again).
