Close races, Trump and 2-party support: Political scientists react to federal election results
Political scientist Gabriel Arsenault says lean towards 2-party system could be one-off or larger trend
The close race in Miramichi-Grand Lake suggests why it still wasn't known Tuesday morning whether Mark Carney's Liberals will return to power in Ottawa as a minority or a majority government, a New Brunswick political scientist says.
Liberal Lisa Harris conceded to Conservative Mike Dawson after midnight Monday, after the lead flipped back and forth throughout vote-counting, but there is still one poll to be counted. Polls are still be counted elsewhere in Canada as well.
"On the weekend, I was in Saint John, and I told a number of people, I said, 'if Wayne Long wins, it's a Liberal minority, if Lisa Harris [also] wins, it's a Liberal majority,' and it might come down to that," political scientist Jamie Gillies of St. Thomas University said Tuesday morning.
"You take four or five ridings across the country and shift about 900 to 1,000 votes, and the Liberals probably have a majority," he said. "They may still pull out a majority, but they're that close to it. That riding, I think, probably just slipped away for the Liberals last night."
Long, in Saint John–Kennebecasis, was one of six Liberals who won in New Brunswick. The Conservatives took the other four seats.
Gillies, the head of the communications and public policy program at STU, said he got a total of two hours of sleep throughout the night, as he followed the results closely.
In New Brunswick, he said, the most surprising thing to him was the support for Long, who was the first Liberal MP to call for an increasingly unpopular Justin Trudeau to resign. Long won a fourth mandate, after changing his mind about not running again.
"This is his strongest election win of his four," said Gillies.
He thinks this could be partially attributed to the tariff issue.
"I think Saint John is probably very important to what Carney wants to do in terms of how the new Liberal government might deal with some of the economic challenges coming from the United States."
Another thing Gillies found interesting was the vote share in the Fredericton-Oromocto riding, which was originally expected to be close.
Liberal David Myles captured 61.3 per cent of the vote. Conservative Brian MacDonald got 32.1 per cent.
"David Myles actually had a higher vote share in Fredericton than Dominic LeBlanc had in Beauséjour, which is often considered the safest Liberal riding in the country."
There are still quite a few ridings in Canada to be called as of Tuesday morning, and Alex Marland, the Jarislowsky chair in trust and political leadership at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, said his understanding is that a number of the ballots still left to be counted are mail-ins.
He said mail-in ballots would most likely skew Liberal, so it raises some questions about whether some really tight races could end up flipping and giving the Liberals a majority.
"Regardless of whether they end up with a majority or a minority, it's going to be very, very close, and this is going to be a very divisive parliament," said Marland.
Marland and some other political scientists said throughout the election campaign that one issue that would be top of mind for voters was going to be U.S. President Donald Trump and Canada's relationship with its neighbour.
Marland said this absolutely had an effect on how the results played out last night.
"It really galvanized progressives, people on the political left," he said.
"You can see the collapse of the NDP vote. A big reason for people who would have voted NDP ending up voting Liberal was really because of fear over Donald Trump."
For Gabriel Arsenault, a political science professor at the Université de Moncton, that shift even further toward a two-party system was what impressed him the most.
In December, he said, the Liberals and Conservatives were getting around 65 per cent of intention votes versus 85 per cent at this point.
It will be a tough way forward for the NDP, said Arsenault.
"What happened is structural," he said. "[Pierre] Poilievre sought votes among workers, and usually that would be the main group where the NDP got its votes, so I think it has to transform itself."
The Green Party secured one seat — for its co-leader Elizabeth May — down from two seats in 2021 and three seats in 2019.
It's just another result that proved to Arsenault that the party system in Canada is changing.
"We'll have to see if this is just temporary because of Trump, or [if] this is illustrative of a bigger trend here."
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With files from Information Morning Fredericton, Moncton