A relatively inconsequential set of by-elections in Toronto turned out to be more interesting than the 2019 General Election..With two Liberal resignations – former Finance Minister Bill Moreau among them – voters in both York-Centre and Toronto-Centre had a rare mid-game opportunity to pass judgement on the Liberal government; and while the Liberals managed to hold onto both seats, the final vote tallies tell far from the whole story..Toronto-Centre is about as far from a Conservative stronghold as a riding can get. It is to the Liberals what Medicine Hat is to the Tories. In 2019, the Liberal carried it with a thumping 57.4 per cent of the vote, with the NDP at 22 per cent and the Tories at 12. It is a riding for which the Conservative nomination is about being the tackling dummy on the team..On October 26, 2020, the Liberal vote shrank to 42 per cent, while the also-ran Tories collapsed to 5.7 per cent, and the NDP to 17 per cent. The big story was the Greens, surging from a paltry 7 per cent in 2019, to almost 38 per cent last night..In tight multi-party races, 38 per cent can win a seat. The Greens walk away from Toronto-Centre as the real winner, able to point to the local result as their party making real gains, and edging out the NDP as the real party of the non-Liberal left..Much tighter was the race in York-Centre however. There, the gap between the incumbent Liberals and the challenger Conservatives was on a knife’s edge all night, at one point separated by just a single vote. In the end, the final polls pushed Liberal candidate Ya’ara Saks over the top by 701 votes, or 3.9 per cent..It was a disappointing night for Conservative Julius Tiangson and his leader Erin O’Toole, but it was a remarkably strong showing in the riding. Only once in the recent history of Canada has the Conservative Party won York-Centre: 2011. This is in large part fueled by growing Conservative support in the Jewish community, which has a strong presence in the riding..In 2019, the Liberals crushed York-Centre with a 22.9 per cent margin of victory. Last night, that had shrunk to a narrow 3.9 per cent..For much of the night, Conservative partisans could be found moaning on social media that Maxime Bernier was robbing them of their big win. And, for most of the night, the People’s Party Leader was in fact harvesting more votes than the margin between the Liberals and Tories..In the end however, Bernier won 3.6 per cent and 642 votes, 59 votes shy of the Liberal’s margin of victory..Mad Max’s decision to run in the wildly un-winnable York-Centre was a curious decision. Perhaps even mad. With no realistic hope of victory, Bernier said that it was an opportunity to showcase his party’s platform and air his ideas. But even if that was the case, it was setting the PPC leader up for a guaranteed failure, and thus hurting the ability of Bernier to recruit quality candidates in the future. For good reason, party leaders with no seat tend to run only where their own party has a very strong chance of success. York-Centre doesn’t fit that bill..But did Bernier cost the Tories the by-election? Even if we take it as a given (which it is not) that every single PPC vote came at the direct expense of the Conservative candidate, it was still 59 votes shy of the difference. And while Bernier’s candidacy could possibly have been intended to be a spoiler, no party is entitled to anyone’s vote..The CPC and PPC may both be on the centre-right and right respectively, but they offer substantively different policies on a long list of issues..The same finger pointing was not to be found (in any significant number) on the left. While the Liberals trailed the Tories at times, one would have to search pretty hard to find their partisans blaming the NDP (5.8 per cent), or the Greens (2.6 per cent) for “splitting the vote’..Folks in my neck of the woods might have a hard time telling what the differences are between the NDP, Greens and Liberals, but voters for the smaller of those three parties enjoy their diversity of options. It’s a political buffet, and they don’t want to order the daily Liberal special..The Conservatives did well, but not well enough. It is nobody else’s fault. They should be proud of their strong showing relative to 2019, and learn whatever lessons they can from it..If the Conservatives had only held onto in a suburban Calgary by-election by a few hundred votes, they would rightfully press the panic button. The equivalent has happened to the Liberals..October 26th may have seen two Liberal victories on paper, but the ones who should walk away from it with their heads high are the Conservatives and Greens..Derek Fildebrandt is Publisher of the Western Standard and President of Wildrose Media Corp. dfildebrandt@westernstandardonline.com
