The Surge in PPC Support Is Changing Canada’s Political Landscape

The leader of the People’s Party of Canada Maxime Bernier may be the only candidate for the party that has a solid shot at winning a seat during the 2021 snap election, but that doesn’t mean the PPC isn’t having a permanent effect on Canadian politics. 

Despite the government-subsidized legacy media mostly ignoring the PPC, outside of occasional negative coverage of PPC rallies and protests, and Bernier not being invited to the debates, the party has stirred up a lot of curiosity in Canadians, who are increasingly facing few real choices to vote for in elections. 

Although some will point to the fact that the PPC hashtags constantly trends on Twitter, it’s the Google Trends statistics that are the most telling. Any small but dedicated group of people can get something trending on Twitter, but outpacing all the major parties on internet searches is actually quite impressive, as it indicates Canadians want to know more details about PPC candidates and their platform. 

Despite little chance of PPC candidates being elected the party could create an important wedge in Canadian politics if they are even able to garner just more than 5 percent of the vote. 

The PPC will have half of their campaign expenditures reimbursed if they get just 2 percent of the vote nationally. Their voters will also have demonstrated that they can act as a strong liberty-focused / small-government voting bloc and don’t just vote based on establishment political narratives about “vote splitting” and the “lesser of two evils.”

If the establishment Conservatives want those PPC voters who could very well make up the gap between them and the Liberals in several ridings then they must become more like the PPC in order to do so, which would mean fewer lib-con candidates like Erin O’Toole and Michelle Rempel.

The first step to winning in politics, in the long run, is first winning over the culture and the PPC surging to 10-12 percent in some polls shows Canadians are regaining an appetite for small government conservative arguments, after two hard years of big government lockdowns and regulations.

Nationally winning 10 percent of the vote would mean that in some ridings the PPC would either have the chance to win with a plurality of the vote or at least be within punching distance of the winners, making conservative Canadians realize the PPC can become a viable political vehicle.

The Conservative Party will lose seats because of the PPC growth, and although there will be sour feelings for the PPC within the Conservative base, they inevitably will have to face the fact that their party moving to the left has opened up their political right flank, and they can no longer simply claim ownership of right-of-centre politics when there is a more principled option for right-wing Canadians. 

We may find that the reason why the Canadian left has been so dominant in Canada is that having four different parties competing for votes has over time made Canadians more left-wing due to the volume of leftist political messaging. With only one party that kind-of-sort-of pushes Conservative unsurprisingly Canadians have come to see Conservatism as antiquated, but the PPC seems to be changing that the way the Reform Party and Canadian Alliance did by reintroducing a strong small-government message back into Canada’s political culture.

So in spite of all the rhetoric about how PPC supporters are bad because they are “splitting the vote” and “helping Trudeau win” or some other nonsense, in the long run supporting the PPC or other conservative alternatives like Jonas Smith in the Yukon or Derek Sloan in Banff-Airdrie will be what helps shift Canada’s political to the right and make the general public more concerned with liberty and small government efficiency.  

At the end of the day, people should vote for whoever won their vote, or Canada will forever be suck into the trap of picking only between the increasingly similar Liberals and Conservatives in an attempt to replace one with the other, in a self-defeating attempt to inject some accountability into the system.