There was more Harperphobia than Trudeaumania in Monday’s byelection results, starting with a big hit inflicted by the Liberals upon the governing party in one of the safest Conservative seats in the country.
Over the past six months, the prime minister has made abundantly clear that he feels he deserves a pass and possibly even a pat on the back for his handling of the Senate scandal.
On Monday, the voters of Brandon-Souris — a riding with a long history of loyalty to the Conservative brand — sent him just as clear a message that they beg to differ.
When all is said and done, every other explanation for the dogfight that took place in Brandon-Souris over this byelection campaign falls short of the mark.
That starts with the notion that this group of Manitoba voters was so overtaken by Trudeaumania 2.0 that they collectively set out to reverse a six-decade voting pattern to embrace the Liberals.
At the end of the day, the substantial increase in the Liberal share of the vote in Brandon-Souris but also in Provencher — a Conservative Manitoba seat that on Monday lived up to its reputation as a blue fortress — was not matched by an overwhelming show of renewed Liberal strength in long-held ridings such as Toronto-Centre and Bourassa.
In the long-shot battle for those traditionally Liberal seats, the NDP put up as good or better a fight as it had under Jack Layton and against Michael Ignatieff in 2011.
In Bourassa, the New Democrats maintained a level of support on par with the score they had finished with at a time when the so-called Orange Wave was sweeping Quebec.
If Monday’s results were to set the pattern for the next general election, the Conservatives under Prime Minister Stephen Harper would be headed for their most rocky ride in a decade in the 2015 campaign. But with almost two years to go to that vote, the tide could be reversed many times over.
Still, as a rule, a governing party that is in decent shape in public opinion does not have to fight tooth and nail to keep safe ridings between general elections.
In this instance, a scandal that leads deep into the prime minister’s own office piled up on cyclical fatigue with a third-term government.
In the immediate, the byelection results will all but end the daily torture that Harper has been enduring at the hands of the opposition parties in the House of Commons.
The pursuit of alleged Conservative wrongdoing and mismanagement has been rewarded where it matters most — in the ballot box.
More importantly, perhaps, the results send a clear message that the character of both the government and its leader is now on voters’ radar. Neither the perspective of more tax cuts and a balanced budget nor the advent of a megatrade deal with Europe — not to mention a consumer-friendly throne speech — provided enough of a diversion to shelter the government from the Senate fallout.
It is the second time this year that voters sent the Conservatives the message that absolution for ethical breaches is not just for the asking.
Last spring, the Conservatives went down to defeat in Labrador after former minister Peter Penashue was found to have broken the election spending rules. Because that riding had been won by the narrowest of margins in 2011, it was an outcome that was easy for the governing party to shrug off. However, the score in Brandon-Souris speaks to a serious deterioration of the situation.
It was known going in Monday’s four byelections that Canada has a divided opposition but the NDP and the Liberals still managed to deliver a one-two punch on the government this fall.
There is little doubt that NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair — with his unrelenting prosecution of the government over the Senate issue — softened Harper up for the Liberals in Brandon-Souris and helped his own party’s cause in Toronto-Centre.
Overall, the byelections lived up to their advance billing in that they did feature a lot of shadowboxing between the NDP and the Liberals. However, it was the Conservatives who left the ring with the most bruises.
Chantal Hébert is a syndicated Toronto Star national affairs writer.