FIRST READING: Some numbers on just how badly the Liberals did in Monday’s byelections

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Monday night saw another round of byelections whose results have been widely interpreted as a signal to the Trudeau government that voters are done with them. The former Liberal riding of LaSalle-Émard-Verdun was lost to the Bloc Québécois. And the Liberal showing in the Winnipeg riding of Elmwood-Transcona was low enough to break records.

While byelections are not always an accurate barometer of public sentiment towards a federal incumbent, Monday night’s results yielded a whole host of things that have never happened before — or, at the very least, haven’t happened in a generation.

Below, a look at some electoral history to show just how bad the Liberals fared in Monday’s byelections.

First time the Liberals have ever lost a byelection to the Bloc Québécois

Quebec has any number of federal ridings that are regularly traded between the Liberal Party and the Bloc Québécois. In fact, recent polls are projecting that the Bloc will be able to seize so many Liberal ridings in the next general election that they may well end up forming the Official Opposition.

But one thing the Bloc has never done is seize a previously Liberal riding outside of a general election. Louis-Philippe Sauvé’s Monday night win in LaSalle-Émard-Verdun represents the first time since the separatist party’s 1991 founding that they have been able to successfully paint a Liberal riding light blue in a byelection.

First time the Liberals have ever scored below 5 per cent in Winnipeg

Monday night’s result in the Winnipeg riding of Elmwood-Transcona was less surprising. It’s a safe NDP seat that was won by an NDPer (albeit against a much stronger Conservative contender than in the 2021 election).

But where the Winnipeg result makes history is that it’s the first time that a Liberal candidate has ever scored less than five per cent of the vote in the Manitoba capital. Liberal candidate Ian MacIntyre received just 1,360 votes on Monday night; 4.81 per cent of the total.

This is the worst a Liberal has ever done in Winnipeg. It’s worse even than the federal election of 1917, when the ruling Unionists granted the franchise to pro-conscription demographics such as soldiers’ wives and stripped it from anti-conscription demographics such as conscientious objectors in an election against the Liberals over the issue of First World War conscription. Even with those odds, the Liberal candidate for Winnipeg Centre still managed to get 15.4 per cent of the vote.

Densest string of consecutive Liberal byelection losses since 1955

Despite recent events, it’s not actually all that common for the Liberal Party to lose seats in byelections. Between 1990 and 2021, 42 Liberal ridings have come up for grabs as a result of the death or resignation of an MP. And in only eight of those instances did the Liberals lose the resulting byelection.

Monday night’s result in LaSalle-Émard-Verdun represented the second time in just three months that a Liberal riding has flipped in a byelection. The last one was Toronto-St. Paul’s, which was won the by the Conservatives on June 26.  

To find another pair of Liberal byelection losses occurring so close together, you’d have to go all the way back to 1955, when the Liberal government of Louis St. Laurent lost a New Brunswick byelection to the Progressive Conservatives — and then saw the exact same thing happen in Toronto a month later. And those losses would turn out to be a preview of coming attractions, with St. Laurent fated to lose the 1957 general election.

First time in 22 years that a Liberal cabinet minister’s riding has flipped in a byelection (except for that other time in June)

LaSalle-Émard-Verdun wasn’t just any Liberal riding. It was the riding previously held by David Lametti, the former justice minister. In the rare instance that a Liberal riding flips in a byelection, it’s usually a nobody; a backbencher whose grip on power was never that great to begin with.

Under normal circumstances, you’d have to go back 22 years to find a similar phenomenon. In 2002, the Windsor riding previously held by Herb Gray — a former deputy prime minister under Jean Chrétien — was toppled in a surprise win by the NDP’s Brian Masse (who’s still there).

But these are not normal circumstances, of course, and it’s actually only been 13 weeks since the Liberals have lost a cabinet minister’s riding in a byelection. Toronto-St. Paul’s, which fell to the Conservatives in June, has previously been a safe seat held for decades by serial Liberal cabinet minister Carolyn Bennett.

First time the Liberals have lost a Montreal riding in a byelection since 1990

Just as with Toronto-St. Paul’s, the loss in LaSalle-Émard-Verdun was particularly scary to Liberal insiders because of where it happened. Even in some of the Liberals’ most dire opinion polls of the last 12 months, the party was usually slated to continue winning seats in Montreal. As with Toronto, the Quebec metropolis has represented the country’s most reliable base of Liberal support ever since the Trudeau government took power in 2015.

So, to find another instance of a Liberal riding in Montreal getting flipped in a byelection, you’d have to go all the way back to 1990, when Justin Trudeau was still a teenager.

That was when Liberal MP Jean-Claude Malépart’s death from lung cancer suddenly put his Montreal riding of Laurier-Sainte-Marie into contention. It was won by a 43-year-old Gilles Duceppe, who had run as an independent because his eventual political party — the Bloc Québécois — didn’t exist yet.

First election (possibly ever) in which two candidates received zero votes

This entry isn’t about the Liberals, but it’s history nonetheless. The ballot in LaSalle-Émard-Verdun was obnoxiously long, with a record-breaking 91 candidates. This was the doing of the Longest Ballot Committee, a group that has taken to packing byelection ballots with as many names as possible in order to protest Canada’s first-past-the-post electoral system.

The group previously made history in Toronto-St. Paul’s with an 84-name ballot that would notably result in Canada’s first-ever federal election candidate to receive zero votes. The results in LaSalle-Émard-Verdun would result in two candidates who received zero votes; Ysack Dupont and Daniel Stuckless. It could well be the first time in the entire span of democratic history that a single electoral contest has featured not one but two candidates who didn’t even bother to vote for themselves.

The Parti Québécois has recently begun championing the cause of getting Amira Elghawaby fired, and her post scrubbed from the federal payroll. Elghawaby was appointed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as Canada’s first-ever Special Representative on Combatting Islamophobia. As has been covered by the National Post, she has a habit of excusing the radical anti-Israel demonstrations that have been a feature of Canadian downtowns since October 7. But the Parti Quebecois is incensed by her “lunatic” call for Canadian universities to hire more Muslims. In a statement, the party said this was antipathic to Quebec’s secular society and risked dragging Quebec “into the Middle Ages.”

Tuesday saw the extremely bizarre phenomenon of hundreds of pagers in Lebanon exploding all around the same time, in what is widely believed to be an Israeli operation targeting members of the terrorist group Hezbollah (many of whom are now critically injured). The oblique Canadian angle on this is that the telephone pager was invented in 1949 by a Canadian, Al Gross. Although none of Gross’ pagers are ever known to have blown up. 

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