With the collapse last week of the supply and confidence agreement between the federal Liberals and NDP, Canadians are now facing the prospect of a snap election call at any time. The deal had been expected to keep the current Liberal government in place until at least June of next year.
Recent signals from the Ontario government (including an expensive fast-tracking of corner store booze) have created rumblings of an election call earlier than the “fixed” election date in June of 2026.
The quick changes in the electoral landscape give pause to wonder if it isn’t time for legislation creating true fixed election dates for our upper houses of government.
At the municipal level, election date certainty is the norm. Local voters have known since the last vote that their next trip to the polls would be on October 26, 2026.
Since the passage of the Good Government Act (a wishfully named bill if there ever was one) in 2009, elections for municipal government in Ontario are held every four years on the fourth Monday of October. Prior to that elections were held every three years. If you go back far enough, they were held every two years and at one time, unimaginable though it seems, annually.
This evolution in election timing seems indicative of a recognition that it takes considerable time to get anything of significance done. Governing periods of only a year or two did not provide adequate time for politicians to accomplish enough to give voters a true sense of the how well they were performing, leaving elections as little more than partisan popularity contests.
In addition, frequent elections have the effect of essentially paralyzing government for long stretches as politicians hit the hustings.
As it is these days, governments virtually never stop campaigning. “My friends, the 2022 campaign starts today,” Premier Doug Ford famously told a crowd at a Progressive Conservative policy conference in February of 2020, just 18 months after securing a majority government in June of 2018.
In fact, the electioneering begins sooner than that. Opposition politicians focus most of their time from Day One of their term vociferously denouncing every initiative offered by the governing party. Meanwhile government members dash about the land handing out cheques for every project they manage to get on the books, although there’s literally no reason, outside of the prospect of a positive photo op, for these cheques to be delivered in person by an MP or MPP.
To be sure, mechanisms such as confidence votes which can send voters to the polls prematurely are needed as part of the system of checks and balances required to prevent government over-reach. But these tend to be few and far between, as governments generally try to avoid being thrust into a campaign over failed legislation.
Extremely premature voluntary election calls are also thankfully rare, as governments are also wary of repeating the mistake of Liberal Premier David Peterson in 1990, when voters punished his party with exile to the electoral hinterlands for initiating what they saw as a needless trip to the polls.
Governing in these times of financial and social upheaval is serious, complicated and time-consuming business. Perhaps it would be a good thing if governments were compelled in most cases to complete their mandates, rather than calling a vote based on what they perceive as advantageous electoral timing.
Patrick Raftis is editor for Midwestern Newspapers: Reach him at editor@midwestern newspapers.com
