The Thursday Question 2:38: Two-ish Party Competition?
Is the old order reasserting itself?
Election Day looms. I don’t know how it will end. I am a bit skeptical of polling. Online panels are a poor substitute for quasi-random sampling, and weighting is more art than science. Some of polling firms I respect show the race tightening significantly. Others show a slower drift. Yet, I am also skeptical of the skepticism about polling. A properly conducted poll tracks public sentiment better than, say, crowd sizes at rallies. I have a paid subscription to data from one of the established firms, but I also enjoyed Mr. Poilievre’s Calgary rally on Friday.
At this stage, the Liberals appear poised to secure another majority government, unless the sampling is off or unless the weighting is off or unless something else has gone haywire. Based on conversations earlier this month at the CSFN Conference, many Conservatives in English Canada blame the Liberal recovery on the drop in NDP support under Mr. Singh, while Conservatives in Quebec blame the decline of the Bloc.
Caution is warranted here. If the NDP ends up with 8%, which is where they are in the April 27 Nanos numbers (the graph below relies on those Nanos numbers in place of 2025 results), that will not be historically strange. The BQ is polling below the numbers it had twenty years ago, but on its trend for the post-Harper era.
But set aside the horse race numbers and focus on the dominant position of the top two parties when taken together. According to today’s Nanos release, the Liberals and Conservatives have the combined support of almost 82% of all decided votes (43% Liberal, 38.9% Conservative). Abacus has the two-party total at 80%, Innovative has it at 78% and Angus Reid has 84%.
If these numbers hold up tomorrow night, you have to go a long way back – to the 1950s – to find an era when the two majors combined for more than 80% of the vote. (Again, the graph below uses the Nanos numbers in place of the 2025 results.)
CBC Poll Tracker projects the Bloc, NDP and Greens together winning just 29 of the 343 seats up for grabs, just 8.5% of the seats available. Leaving aside the 1958 Dief Sweep, if that’s right we haven’t seen such a weak set of minor-parties since 1930 (see Andy Heard’s SFU archive).
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Since 1921, Canadian general elections have generally featured important minor parties. The two Confederation parties were pulled apart and reformed in the closing months of World War I. By 1925, the Conservatives and Liberals were back in business, but have had to share seats in the House of Commons with a succession of what political scientists refer to as “third parties” – Progressive, Independent Labour and UFA, then Social Credit, CCF, NDP, the various Blocs and so on.
Competition among many parties is different from competition between only two.