The odds are pretty good that if you’re reading this right now, you live in a part of the world that once belonged to mammoths. The woolly mammoth ranged over vast areas of the northern hemisphere, from the Arctic Circle to Spain and from Europe across Asia and into the Americas. A cold-adapted animal, the mammoth nevertheless survived for millions of years despite the coming and going of warming periods between ice ages. When the temperature warmed and the steppe gave way to forests, mammoths would retreat to colder areas and their numbers would shrink. When the ice came back, the sovereigns of the north would reclaim their rightful place.
Until they didn’t. A few tens of millennia ago, as the planet began to warm, mammoths once again began to retreat to colder climates, but this time a new predator — Homo sapiens, who had allied with domesticated dogs to form a formidable hunting team — changed the rules of the game. The old refuges weren’t safe, and mammoths went extinct everywhere an expanding human population arrived.
(Scientists do disagree as to whether mammoth extinction should be ascribed to human predation or to climate change; non-scientists can live with the ambiguity and move on with their lives.)
On the topic of extinction events (and refuges), let’s talk about the Liberal Party of Canada. One of two recent byelections for the federal House of Commons included what was once believed to be a safe Liberal seat in Montreal; it will now be represented by a Bloc Québécois MP. This follows another byelection earlier this year that saw the riding of Toronto–St. Paul’s — held by the Liberals for almost all of the last half-century — fall to the Conservatives, with new MP Don Stewart taking his seat in the Commons last month.
In a year when the news for federal Liberals has gone from bad to worse, the results from Toronto–St. Paul’s are worth dwelling on for a moment, because both Ontario and Toronto have played a role for the Liberal party that cold northern regions used to play for mammoths: even in the hardest of hard times, you could always retreat there and hope to emerge stronger another day.
Until, perhaps, you can’t anymore. The polling for the Liberals has, if anything gotten worse: Abacus Data now finds the Liberals in third place, behind the NDP outside of Quebec, with those two parties roughly tied in Ontario. The last time the Liberals and the NDP tied the vote share in Ontario — in the 2011 disaster that saw Michael Ignatieff lead the party to its worst-ever showing so far — the one-time “natural governing party of Canada” elected just 11 MPs from this province, and the Conservatives romped to Stephen Harper’s only majority in the House of Commons.
Now, if you know how the Parliament from 2011 to 2015 ended (hint: it was succeeded by a massive Liberal majority), then this isn’t really a doomsday event. The Liberal Party of Canada has its ups and downs. It’ll spend an election cycle or two out of power and then form government again sometime in, oh, the 2030s.
But what if the old refuges aren’t safe anymore? One of the facets of the Liberal brand that worked for the party for much of the past political generation was that, even if they were out of power in Ottawa, they were often in power at Queen’s Park — the Mulroney years in Ottawa were, more or less, the Peterson years in Ontario, and the Harper years were the McGuinty and Wynne ones. This was more than just a symbolic point: when Justin Trudeau formed government in 2015, he was able to draw on a substantial political workforce among Queen’s Park staffers who then had to rent a U-Haul and move their belongings up the 401. Holding power in one of those capitals meant that the party could always build its strength elsewhere.
The question the Liberals face now is, to put it bluntly, what happens when they don’t hold power anywhere? While this year hasn’t been as bleak for the Ontario Liberals as it has been for their federal cousins — they did, legitimately, make a strong showing in the recent Bay of Quinte byelection — Bonnie Crombie is still a long way from forming government. Her party’s best showing in recent polling would still leave her in the opposition benches, though perhaps she’d end up leading the official Opposition and a recognized party, which would be nice for her. But if an election were held today, there’s precious little evidence that the Ontario Liberals would be in the government benches when the dust settled.
That would leave Liberals, federal and provincial alike, in a position they really haven’t been in during my lifetime — relegated, at best, to the opposition benches in Ottawa (and potentially the third or fourth party in the Commons), with the Ontario party similarly on the outs. And given the limited resources available to non-government parties at Queen’s Park, there’d be little prospect of developing talent either in the legislative benches or behind the scenes with smart policy minds.
It's certainly possible to overstate the dangers here. But the bare facts are grim enough. That the Ontario Liberals are struggling right now is arguably understandable, as the party is still trying to dig itself out of a hole. That the federal Liberals are looking at a really bad election isn’t itself the end of the world. The fact that they’re looking at the second such wipeout in just over a decade is definitely more concerning — or ought to be. There are only so many times you can gamble on surviving a possible extinction event. Just ask the mammoths.
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