The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue with Andrew Coyne: key takeaways from Canada's election results

Episode Date: April 30, 2025

Andrew Coyne is a Globe and Mail Columnist and one of Canada's most trusted commentators. On this Munk Dialogue Andrew and host Rudyard Griffiths unpack Canada's election results and where the parties and provinces go from here: now that they have sidelined the People's Party, can the Conservatives appeal to the centre? Will there be a surge in separatist sentiment in Alberta and Saskatchewan? And after the resounding defeat of the NDP, will Canada become a two-party system? Rudyard and Andrew also try to make sense of why young people skewed Conservative while Boomers supported the Liberals. How should we understand this demographic reversal of traditional voting habits?Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Monk Debates. Rudyard Griffiths here, your chair and Ersweil moderator, joined once again for one of our ongoing conversations with the Globe and Mail's Andrew Coyne. Andrew, great to have you in studio. Good to see you. What a fortunate time to have you join us the Tuesday after a big federal election here in Canada. I want to unpack that all, both for our Canadian viewers and listeners, but also for our American friends tuning in. elections are often about lessons. Lessons for voters, lessons for parties.

If you had to draw a lesson from this election, from this 36-day campaign, what would it be? Well, isn't that an interesting question? Depends who the lesson would be for, I guess. I suppose one lesson is that existential dread is a pretty powerful motivating. course. The liberals prior to this election, you know, as recently as three months ago, were given up for dead and with good reason. They were 25 points behind the polls. You would not get anybody giving you any odds that they would be able to pull out of that. But then there's

the day of S. X. Machina of Donald Trump threatening the country's very existence in a way that it was impossible to ignore. You couldn't just write this off as Trumpian bluster because we just don't know what he's capable of. And so it sort of raised the liberals from the dead. I'm probably mixing my metaphors here, but partly because it distracted attention from subjects they'd rather not talk about, i.e. their record of the last 10 years,

but partly because it put the focus on to leadership. There wasn't any instantly recognizable program of action you could take to to counter Trump or not one that there was much disagreement among the parties on but what you could say was our guy is better prepared, better ready

for this sort of event than your guy is. So Mark Carney with his experience and his resume and his sort of persona was a more persuasive to many people a combatant than Pierre Poyev in part because Mr.

Ployev has made a career out of sounding vaguely Trumpian himself. The pitching is appeal to some of the same types of voters, mouthing some of the same rhetoric, etc. So it's just played to

the liberal's advantage in a number of ways. I mean, you know, invoking fears of the Americans is an age-old trope in Canadian politics. Usually it's pretty discreditable. Usually it's crying wolf. But I always remind people the story of the boy across wolf ends with the wolf devouring the boy.

In this case, the wolf was actually present and sure the liberals were milking it for political gain, but it doesn't mean there wasn't an actual concern and it wasn't a valid basis on which people to cast their vote. So that certainly is one lesson. I guess a second lesson would be you reap what you sow, that Pierre Pueueva had invested a great deal of time and energy over the years in creating this persona for himself. worked in certain ways. It certainly helped hasten the departure of Justin Trudeau from Canadian politics, which ultimately Mr. Pover may come to regret. And secondly, to give him his due, he did manage to basically see off the threat from the People's Party. The People's Party in this

election was probably the biggest loser, maybe even more so than the NDP, got less than 1% of the vote. this is the party for our American viewers who's well to the right of the conservab, a very overtly Trumpian party. So he had – that's an achievement to – to Pahliava's credit, but it did mean that when the time came when people were looking for somebody to protect them, they didn't turn to him. And it didn't have to be that way. You can imagine a conservative leader in that crisis who would have been seen as a unifying force, a stabilizing force, or reassuring force, and people would have turned to in a moment of crisis in the way that they did. didn't turn to play off.

Yeah. Lessons for Canadians for this election. You're writing a book on democracy. It'll be out in the next couple of weeks. We look forward to sharing news of that with our audience, with the Monk Debates community. So you're thinking a lot about democracy yourself going into this election. How do you think Canada did? There's a lot of democracies under the world now that are under pressure, under attack, feeling

inadequate to the tasks at hands? How do you rank Canada, Canadians' experience, and maybe not even so much their experience, their participation in this election in these 36 days? Yeah, so it revealed, I think, both the strengths and some of the weaknesses of Canadian democracy. Procedurally, you know, in some measures, we do very, very well. You know, there's no hint of any serious fraud or that kind of thing. And we, you know, the good old paper ballots, I think once again prove they're metal. There's no way you can really, you know, hack that system. And it's wonderfully homespun and inspiring. Every time I vote and I go into the local school room to vote, it's just, it's like something out of a Frank Capra film or something, you know, you just feel good about the system.

And, you know, I thought it was a very good moment on election night when everybody paid tribute to each other and everybody committed to, you know, I didn't, I don't think they even had to say that they would respect the result, but it was, you know, all the right vibrations were given off by all the party leaders. And that is a great strength of our politics is our political culture. So at a time when a lot of people are in some democracies giving up on the system or succumbing to radicalism in the sense of conspiracy theories, etc. I don't mean to say it doesn't exist in Canada, and there were the odd person running around saying, you know, they're using pencils rather than pens and isn't that? something nefarious, but it doesn't really have a huge foothold here, or not enough to really shake the foundation.

So all that's to the good. I think you saw some of the downsides, though. So, for example, the liberals, one of the things we're very worried about coming out of this, rightly or wrongly, we'll see how well-grounded it is, is there going to be a surge in separatist sentiment or alienation in Western Canada, particularly in Alberta and or Saskatchewan? because once again they voted heavily conservative and once again the liberals remained in power. Well, okay, but look at the results a little deeper.

You find the liberals did better in the West generally and in let's say Alberta in particular than they have in more than 50 years. Like the liberals got close to 30% of the vote in Alberta but I think got only two seats. 30% of like almost a third of the vote, they got two out of, was it 37 seats? That is an enduring one.

weakness of our system is we have, you know, this far-flung country with all these regional visions that are real enough to begin with. Yeah. And our system exaggerates and exacerbates and makes it worse. And just, and sometimes it's come close to killing the country. And, I mean, the liberals got something like 30 odd seats in the West this time. In 1980, you know, the year of the National Energy Program, the Liberals had two seats west of Ontario.

Yeah. Crazy. Now, they had much more support than that, but the system just, just, just as a, you know, It creates these vastly disproportionate portions of effects, which in a regionalized country like Canada can be quite toxic. And it means that we have historically, it's been many decades since we've had real national parties.

The liberals have not carried a majority of the seats in Western Canada since 1949. Wow. And the Tories, you know, they'll regularly get 20% of the vote in Quebec, have only carried Quebec three times since 1891. So our system, that's one of the many systems, problems with our system that I outlined in the book. book. Yeah. Let's talk about some of these divisions that were surfaced during the election. We can come

back to region in a moment. What interests me, Andrew, were the big skews that we saw on age. We saw an entire cohort, really 55 and younger, who were clearly voting conservative. In each of those different demographics, in fact, sometimes as you went younger down to 35-year-olds, the lead on most polls of the conservatives over the liberals, in fact, increased. So somewhat counterintuitive in that you think that younger voters would generally be more open to a liberal-leaning party and outlook. Older Canadians this election surprised conservatives in many ways because the 55-and-older group skewed liberal to the extent to which in the past conservatives could probably have counted on more of those you know, senior boomer voters. What do you make of these splits that we're seeing that seem

counterintuitive to normal patterns of voting? And what do they say about intergenerational tension in Canada between those who would argue that if you buy into this narrative of a lost decade, that this was felt more by younger Canadians who hadn't built up those assets, which enjoyed this remarkable period of asset inflation over the last decade. If you were older, 55 and older, you maybe had a house, an investment portfolio. You have these assets. Your attitude is one of protection, of security, of seeking to ensure that those benefits, those gains that you've enjoyed aren't taking away from you. My sense, Andrew, that we'll see what happens going forward, but this is something we should be paying attention to, these generational tensions

that have emerged now and been crystallized in this election and in the vote and the outcome. I have two responses to that. One is maybe it'll be a nitpicking thing, but I actually think the data is pretty mixed on that. Some polls show this data that fit that narrative. Some polls didn't. And I really want to look at all the data before I was. But whether or not the Tories led amongst those young people, clearly they did better than they would normally have done. There's clearly an issue, legitimate issue there.

Among Gen Z, I don't want to take away from that issue, even if the data is. Scaled, scaled to be determined data to be parsed. But clearly the Tories are doing better amongst young people than they would normally have done. Clearly an issue there. So there's a legitimate issue there. There's also the degree to which people were exploiting it. And there's different ways you can approach an issue politically. I just want to maybe put parenthesis around this.

this business that somebody seized on a photo of a guy of sort of boomer age given the finger to some people I think they were from the rebel or some organization like that who were harassing him and obviously not his finest moment

because the picture was distributed by a conservative leaning became a meme though became a meme I'm not sure how spontaneous that meme was I think it was a very deliberate effort and it was torched into he's giving you the finger

you young people. It was basically a hate campaign against boobers, Franklin. So anytime there's this division in society, I don't care what kind of division is, if it's regional or racial or whatever, there's responsible ways to approach that in the irresponsible ways. We want people in politics to be trying to bridge these gaps rather than exacerbate them. So second maybe parenthetical point. But to come back to your point, look, the housing affordability issue, obviously it skews in two different directions. And frankly, people in politics of whatever party

have been kind of talking out of both sides of their mouth in this. We're going to build more homes, but the prices won't come down. Nobody's going to lose their home. Nobody's going to have any value go down in their house. Exactly. Exactly. And so I must say I've approached this issue when I listen to the parties on this with a fair degree of skepticism that is the classic thing of politics.

of promising everything to everybody on all sides of the issue. There's no way you can really drive housing more affordable, at least in the short run, without somebody losing to sell the house. Now, can you do it over a period of time, in which case it's a gentle thing and people have time to plan around it and maybe not get into the situation that many people were of using their houses in ATM and banking on it, always increasing in value?

That's obviously not a sustainable situation. But if you're not going to just basically pull the rug out from under their feet, it's going to be gradual, in which case you're not delivering a whole lot of assistance in a hurry to the younger court. So it's a problem from hell, frankly. Anybody who claims there's a simple or quick fix to it, I think, is talking through their hat. But clearly, part of the solution's got to be over time is building a lot more housing. I mean, the other thing I'll just say on this is there's been a lot of blaming of immigration.

I don't say people have been blaming immigrants, but blaming immigration as being that this is the be-all and the end-all of it. And there's no doubt that the government-led immigration kind of get out of control, frankly. I'm in favor of high but controlled immigration. But look, we had population growth as rapid in the 50s and 60s. We didn't have housing charges. Why? Because we were building a lot more housing.

The problem to me is not too many people. It's too few houses. We're still building today. We're still building a few. houses annually than we did in the 1970s when the population was whatever it was, two-thirds or a half of what it is now. So that's the issue to me is, and I'm glad to see people focusing on it, and frankly, the immigration issue has performed us the signal service of actually getting people to pay attention to this issue. We've made more progress in tearing down barriers

to housing construction in the last six months than we have in 16 years before that. Let's talk about two other divisions. Angry young men who seemed overwhelmingly, maybe the angry is pejorative of my part, but young men who were overwhelmingly going conservative and a deep gender split with women at two to one and most demographic cohorts walking away from the conservative party. This is remarkable to me too,

that we've reached a moment where gender is so polarizing in terms of political preference. Was this just a one-off, Andrew? Was it the unique set of characters and maybe some policies? Or are we seeing something which we know is happening in society that women are outperforming men? They are succeeding in a knowledge-based economy. They are more versatile, frankly, in adapting to the types of changes. that this economy and other advanced economies have gone through in the last decade, whereas a lot of men feel left behind and many of them demonstrably are.

Yeah. Well, this is the other point I was going to make about the age thing. It's not young people going to the conservatives. It's young men. Young women are not going to the conservatives. And I think anytime there's a gender gap like that, it cuts both ways. How much of that is, and this is similar to the Trump phenomenon, how much of that is actually economically based,

and how much of that is culturally based. It was an interesting question. I think a lot of it is, as I say, you can phrase this in either direction. The left has not found a language, has not cared to find a language in recent times that speaks to young men. I think a lot of young men feel like the culture

is basically hostile to them, that they're being villainized and talked down to and blamed for everything. And it isn't to say that there aren't issues that young men and men in general need to think about and need to adjust on. We've all had grounds to think about that in recent years. But if you're in the game of persuasion, which people politics should be, I think the left needs to think about why have they not been able to speak this.

But similarly, the right is clearly not speaking a language that is appealing to young women. Yeah. So to me, it's more about how people are perceiving how they're being approached or not approached. Are they being treated with respect? Are they being approached and appealed to in a way that suggests that you would like their votes? Or are they being left at one side? Yeah, going on Jordan Peterson's show is not a great way to cultivate female voters. There was a lot of mistakes made in this.

I mean, to be fair to probably ever, and certainly he was playing up this angle, that conservatives did very well by some measures in this election. They got 42% of the vote. That's historically high in recent times. conservatives. A lot more seats. Increased their seats. But when you compare to where they were and what they could have been, I mean, the other way to put that is, you know, given how badly the liberals had alienated so much of the public, winning that many seats was a bit like falling off a log. Why is not, the question they really needed to be asked themselves is, why isn't Pierre

Paulyev prime minister today? Yeah. And there were a lot of mistakes. So much the campaign focused on him when it was clear that he was a liability and net liability for the party. compared to Mark Carney. The degree to which they still seem to be running a frontrunner campaign, you know, playing peek-a-but-but-with-the-media and that kind of thing, when it was clear they weren't the frontrunners anymore. The inability, it seemed to come to terms with the fact that the Trump factor had completely turned the campaign upside down, that it wasn't going to just be about affordability. Now, to be fair, I mean, in the latter part of the campaign, as Trump receded, they got a bit more oxygen for that message, and that's why they closed the gap, I think,

in the last couple of weeks. But the failure to come to groups with that in the first weeks of the campaign I think was just, I don't understand it. It's either hubris or you're just frozen in the headlights and you can't think of another way of approaching it. But, you know, there's going to be a lot of questions,

and I think rightly so, about whether Pueyev is the right leader for the party. You know, on election night, he was saying, I'm not going anywhere and nobody wanted to challenge him. But I think there's a lot of discontent, tent, first of all, amongst people who thought they had this election in the bag and saw their leader and the strategy endorsed by the leader screw it up. And secondly, there are broader divisions in the party that you saw on election night.

So Poirie ever gave a very statesmanly speech himself. Yeah. But one of his left tenants, Jim Mil Giovanni, and I don't, can't imagine this would have been just spontaneous and on his own initiative, spent most of election night attack. backing Doug Ford, the Premier of Ontario, and all that Doug Ford represents within the party. And the Ford people and the people who are sympathetic for or is sympathetic to that kind of conservatism are unlikely to take that lying down. So I think if anybody thinks, oh, it's fine. He did better than he might.

You know, it wasn't the worst case scenario that it looked like in the middle of the campaign. I think there's more reckoning to come. I think he's greatly weakened as a leader as a result of this. I think that first caucus meeting after the election is going to be very interesting. And again, not to get two in the weeds, but that's where they vote whether or not to assume the powers that are granted to the reform act, amongst which powers is to dismiss the leader. And I would imagine. A secret ballot.

I would imagine caucus members who are, some of them, furious at the way the campaign was conducted, will at the very least, we'll be reading him the Riot Act about you need to change. your messaging. Again, with the demise, not demise, but with the decline of the people's party to less than 1% of the vote, which you can credit in some parts to Pierre Paulyev, I think he's got some room now. If part of what was driving this kind of Trumpian populist message was trying to keep the people's party from breaking out, mission accomplished, now it's time to go after you know, Mr. and Mrs. Normal Canadian. Perfect segue. You're going exactly where I wanted to go next, which is to move off what was a very helpful retrospective of the last 36 days to what happens next. And let's pivot to Mark Carney. So he has now arrived at Lanoshevin Block. He will be walking up to his office for the first time, and on that desk will be a series of files that will immediately grip him, his cabinet, and his officials.

What do you think is on the top of that pile right now? Top top of the pile is Trump. And the difficulty is it's hard to know exactly what that file contains. What exactly does- A blank page? Or a page full of doodles or, you know, what exactly does Trump intend? You know, he says something one day,

he says something completely different the next day. How do you parse that out? So make a wager there. Trump is seeing a minority government, if he understands what that concept is. Does this affect? It can and it can't. There was some sort of rending of garments on election night that, oh, it's a minority government, that connotes weakness, and Trump will take advantage of it. It doesn't have to connote weakness.

I mean, this idea that you can only have strong government if a party with 40% of the seats somehow manages to land, you know, 40% of the vote, somehow it gets 80% of the seats or whatever I think is is it ain't necessarily so what that often entails is that party then rams home legislation that they don't really have a mandate for and in our country particularly it these are regionally based parties which means you're alienating one part of the country or another by doing so so I think that attitude frankly has run its course what I think it does put a premium on is the parties are going to have to find some way to work together and I think in the presence of

circumstances. I think the public, you know, you can explain a large part of the election result. The public is scared silly by this situation, and rightly so. And I think is measuring everybody by a very different yardstick than they normally would. Sometimes I think the public kind of looks at them and goes, well, he's playing the game better and he seems like he's got, you know, the wind in his cells. I think the public is in no mood for political nonsense right now. They're looking for people to be a bit more statesman-like. And so I, I think you saw some of that in the way that the leaders spoke on election night. I think they were aware that this is a different atmosphere and a different mood,

and the public would like people to work together. And so I think maybe just for a brief while, but I think there'll be the metrics of the strategy of the game is going to shift into who can look the most cooperative, who can look the most statesman-like. And maybe for a brief time anyway, they'll be able to work. together. We'll see. But I think that, and it depends how serious the situation gets with Trump, but the worst the situation gets. And I don't for one second think that it's all over and he's not going to harass us anymore. He's going to. He's a crazy person. And sometimes he needs

a distraction or, you know, he clearly seems to believe this 51st state nonsense. You're going to give him, do it. There's certain things he does appear to believe. He does appear to believe that tariffs are a way you make money off of other countries, and he thinks that trade deficits are, that you're leaking funds to other countries, and he does seem to think that Canada is, A, cheating in the United States, but B, would be our cherished 51st states. So, you know, you've got to take them seriously, frankly,

and literally, as they say, in that. And so that's going to be job one, is dealing with that, to the extent that anybody knows what the possible strategy we can do. but longer term, we've got to get out from under the kind of exposure and the vulnerability to the United States that gives him his leverage or ostensibly gives him leverage. And we have to be mindful that even if Trump fell under a bus tomorrow, somebody, you know, depending on all the vote splits in Wisconsin,

somebody could replace him with similar types of ideas. There's a virus loose in American politics right now that's not particularly in our interests. at the same time, and partly again because of our political system, the incoming Prime Minister, Garnie, has got to be really, so this is, you know, your third file, if I've got my numbering right, is national unity. He's got to approach these issues, and we've got these big decisions to make about defense spending and building pipelines and cutting the deficit and diversifying our trade and increasing our productivity with all the huge types of policy changes that requires.

We've got to do that, these big decisions, these sacrifices involved in ways that doesn't make one part of the country or the other feel like they've been left behind or have been made the sacrificial lamb. And that's going to tax everybody's ingenuity and diplomacy and political art. So here's this guy Carney who's not a career politician, was a rookie, I think showed both his inexperience on occasion during the country. campaign but also showed a certain, I find this slightly distressing, but a certain native cunning for politics. But he's going to have to learn and deploy those skills to his utmost if he's going to be able to square that circle of making big policy changes, some of them painful policy changes in ways that don't just make the country more divided than ever. Just to connect those two dots as we wrap up this conversation, do you have a concern, Andrew, that the president does understand

maps. He seems to especially like colored maps. We now have a colored map in Canada that has an awful lot of blue in western Canada and an awful lot of red in central and eastern Canada. Does Trump, whether Carney likes it or not, connect the National Unity file with the 51st state file? And the rhetoric about the 51st state pivots from Canada being part of the 51st state to Alberta and Saskatchewan, why not add British Columbia so that we have a contiguous landmass from Alaska down to California and we'll call this the great Puerto Rico of the north. Well, there's no doubt that some version of that is something

that I wouldn't be surprised at all if Trump tries to play that kind of card. I think you'd have a hard time getting BC looking at the vote pattern to go the same way. But again, they didn't get the seats from it, but the liberals did get 30% of the vote in Alberta. So it's a little harder than it might have been in the past to say, oh, Alberta wants nothing to do with either Canada or the current federal government. And it's certainly it's fantasy land to think that you could actually, A, separate from Canada.

People who even talk about that, I don't think I've given the first second thought to how impossible that is to actually do. And secondly, to then join the states. It's fantasy land politics. but unfortunately there's a certain constituency within Alberta, and some extent within Saskatchewan for that. I think it is a small minority. I think the polling data is pretty clear on that.

But it's got the year, unfortunately, of the Premier of Alberta, who is very much of the Trumpian mold, who sometimes descends into fantasy herself. And she certainly put everybody on notice that she would like to exploit that particular undercurrent and that capacity for people to make trouble to try to press her demands for policies she'd like to see shifted. That is not a particularly creditable way to pursue policy differences in this country.

It's one, unfortunately, that we've indulged for far too long with regard to Quebec. We never should have, and we're now going to pay, we paid a large price for it with Quebec, basically 50 years of trouble with Quebec, and I fear we're going to pay another price for it now because Albertans of that persuasion with some justice can say, well, you were willing to talk to Quebec in that way. Why won't you, if you're willing to pay ransom when they made threats, why won't you pay ransom when we make threats? And so, again, I think we're going to have to handle that deftly

and complete the work that was begun with the Clarity Act. I'm not saying it's going to be easier or quick, but basically the message of the Clarity Act, that I think a lot of Quebecers consciously, they're unconsciously absorbed, was this is not actually doable. This is not actually happening. We can discuss a lot of things about how the Federation can work in different ways, but we're not talking about separation.

Yeah. Final question, Andrew, if you look at what Mark Carney has done and what the Liberal Party has done, they, in a sense, have assembled a new and powerful coalition. We'll see how enduring it is. but they've taken a large portion of votes from the NDP. And since continuing a process that have been started under Mark Cunning's predecessor, Justin Trudeau, to begin to kind of mow the proverbial orange grass of Canada's left-leaning party. They've also won a significant number of seats in Quebec,

including regions of Quebec for those listeners and viewers who are familiar with the province. I mean, in the eastern township, Sherbrook, Magog, places which, you know, had been held by the block for a number of decades now. How do you think Carney is going to square what I think you're absolutely right about, the necessary requirement for some bold moves on the part of the federal government, to do things that will be very disruptive of both regional and different types of vested interests in the country, when the Liberal Party itself is a coalition that now has a significant portion of voters who are not into the Mark Carney, who's the Goldman Sachs banker, the former head of Brookfield, a significant portion of a, and quite a strong Quebec caucus in the Liberal Party who will have very different views on energy and pipelines and the proper role of the Federation and the federal government's role in the Federation.

I worry about these things, Andrew. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself, but I wonder what your thoughts are as we wrap up. Yeah, I mean, in politics, you're trying to expand the tent, but not so far that the tent collapses in on itself. And, I mean, in a sense, you could say it might be a good thing that he only won 168 seats rather than 200 and some odd seats. I mean, that was the worst thing that ever happened to Brian Mulroney, for example. He had too large a coalition, and it turned out to be combustible.

So he has the both the advantage and the difficulty that in the course of this campaign, I think a lot of people saw in Mark Carney what they wanted to see. If they were blue liberals, they could say, aha, he's a former banker. He's just like me. And if they were environmentalists, they could say, oh, he cares about the environment. He's just like me. So on and so forth. And when you start governing and you have to make choices, you start to disappoint some of those people.

You can't, in the end, be all things to all people when it comes to policy. I think this was a very strange election. And so, yes, they were able to take a lot of votes from the NDP. They pursued the age-old liberal strategy of telling the NDP voters, you can't vote for the new Democrats. You have to vote for us to stop the conservatives. And Paul Yehever gave them the perfect foil in that regard. Certainly Trump did.

The question is, and so we got this extraordinary election where more than 80% of the vote, to the two major party, which has not happened since 1930, it has not happened that they both got over 40% of the vote. The question is, is that a long-term thing? Is Canada moving to a two-party system? I'm a skeptic of that. I'm a skeptic of that because tribal loyalties in politics run deep,

even in this country where not much of the population actually belong to parties, which I'm coming to believe is a strength. but even so the brand if you will of the New Democrats just like the brand of the liberals these parties have been counted out before as the conservatives have been

each party has gone through a cycle where they have historically bad results people go they can't possibly recover from this the New Democrats in the early 90s for example were flattened their backs this is obviously the worst result they've ever had but I'm a skeptic that that means

that they are done for I think there's reasons why these parties have endured over the years that they offer people an identity and a set of policies that is separate and distinct from the liberals. And so my bet would be that these parties are going to endure, that we're not going to go to a two-party system. But I'll stand to be proven wrong. But the other thing is the other thing that contributes to that is region. if a party can clump its vote regionally in some way, shape, or form because of first past the post, they can get disproportionate results and they can survive to fight another day.

So we'll see. But my bet would be against the two party thesis vote. I'll stand to be proven wrong. Andrew, thank you so much for coming on to talk with the Monk Debates community to do this the day after election where you were up very late, writing and commenting. I urge everyone to go to the Globe and Mail. Check out Andrew's column. It landed today, and I'm sure there'll be more columns in the days to come.

So Andrew Coyne, thank you so much for coming on the program. Ladies and gentlemen, that's it. We hope you've enjoyed this video and audio version of the Monk Debates in conversation with Andrew Coyne. We're going to keep at this as long as Andrew is game, and I know you're really enjoying these conversations. We're seeing all your comments, all the video views and podcast downloads. So please share the links, bring more people into the monk debates community. We're about civil and substantive conversation, discussion, and debate. And we need you to make sure that these types of conversations can continue.

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