A slight correction

Lawrence Martin's column on the aftereffects of the 1993 federal election certainly makes for an interesting read. But it's worth noting that he's entirely off base in one of his base assumptions - and the effect is to significantly change at least part of the analysis.

Here's Martin:

To find the reason for their woes, they might look back, strangely enough, at one of their successes – the election of 1993. That campaign, which gutted the Canadian political structure like no other, is known as the one that vanquished the old Progressive Conservative Party. The Tories came away with two seats. But it should also be known as the one that undermined the Liberals, who came away with a majority.

Although they won handily, that campaign effectively reduced the Grits to an Ontario party with a few regional add-ons. Post-1993, the party won successive majorities in 1997 and 2000, but in each it was an all-Ontario show, with the party registering unbelievable sweeps of 100 or so seats in that province.

That represented close to two-thirds of the party’s overall total in those elections. The warning signals were there. These majorities masked the Liberal Party’s geographical isolation.

The tumult of 1993 saw the simultaneous beanstalk ascendancies of the Reform Party in the West and the Bloc Québécois in the East. Quebec had always been a Liberal Party pillar. The arrival of the Bloc, which would take half or more of Quebec’s seats in the following campaigns, removed it. On the Prairies, the Liberals’ misfortune had begun long before. But they were still potentially competitive. Reform’s 1993 rise effectively sealed the door. Like Quebec, the West now had its own political formation.

So what's the problem with that take on the Libs' geographic distribution? Well, the Libs won 27 western seats in 1993 (including 21 on the prairies) - compared to 6 western seats in 1988 and only 2 in 1984 and 1980.

In fact, the Libs' 1993 western haul was tied with the 1968 Trudeau sweep as the party's highest since 1949. So if anything, 1993 looks to have given the Libs as good a chance to build a presence in the West as they've had at any other time in the past 60 years.

Mind you, it's fair enough to say that the Libs squandered that opportunity. And it's not hard to see how the regional politics and seat distribution discussed by Martin might play into that end result.

After all, from a strategic standpoint, why worry about trying to build off a base of a couple of dozen seats when it's possible to win an election outright simply by sweeping Ontario? And in turn, why worry about listening to the few western MPs and their constituents whose interests aren't seen as closely tied to the party's? (Needless to say, the same phenomenon played out to some extent in Atlantic Canada as well - leading to the NDP's gains there beginning in 1997.)

In contrast, Reform had nothing to build on but its western base, and thus had every incentive to scratch and claw for every available seat in the region. And that figures to explain in large part why the Libs' numbers declined again in 1997 to the benefit of Reform.

But then, even if one wants to look at the Libs' subsequent downturn, they've still managed to stay above the levels that prevailed before the election which Martin sees as reflecting a permanent sealed door. Instead, all that's happened is a return to the usual pattern in the West - leaving 1993 as less a turning point in the West than a blip which the Libs failed to use to their advantage. And that makes the rise of the Bloc the lone substantial change arising out of that election in cutting off the Libs' traditional road to government.