We’re days away from a general election. The new Prime Minister is about to lead the Conservatives to the worst defeat in their history. Reform, building on a low base from the last election, is taking scores of votes away from the Conservative government. And a split vote on the right is about to bring a red wave sweeping through the House of Commons.
I’m not talking about the UK in 2024, but about Canada in 1993. That election saw Preston Manning lead the Reform Party to overtake the Progressive Conservatives as the main party of the right, Jean Chrétien lead the Liberals back into government for the first time in nine years, and Prime Minister Kim Campbell lose her own seat and reduce her party from an overall majority to just two MPs.
Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK, told the CBC that he had his “Canadian cousins” in mind while setting up his new party. But how close is Farage to pulling off what Manning did over thirty years ago?
What happened in 1993?
The Reform Party was founded in 1987 with the aim of being a voice of western Canada. In the 1988 election, they only nominated candidates in the west, which meant their nationwide vote share only reached around 2%. Alberta, the most conservative province in the country, was their best result, though they only reached 15% in that province.
Five years later, the governing Progressive Conservatives were punished for the recession and an unpopular former leader. In western Canada, particularly in Alberta but also in British Columbia, Reform’s western message strongly resonated, allowing them to finish in first place in those provinces. This gave them most of the seats in that part of the country, mostly at the PCs’ expense.
But that’s not all the PCs had to face. Following the failure of the Meech Lake Accord, support for Québec sovereignty boomed in the early 1990s. This was led by a new regionalist party called the Bloc Québécois, which focused exclusively on another PC stronghold. The Bloc took a majority of seats in Québec, again at the PCs’ expense.
The Progressive Conservatives in 1993 faced two parties, each focusing on a specific region of the country where the PCs did well previously, and each resonating strongly in the regions they were targeting. That, combined with the right vote splitting in two in Ontario (and the left vote more or less uniting there too), left PC support thinly spread across the country, which is how a party gets very few seats under first past the post.
The Progressive Conservatives remained the fifth party in the House of Commons for ten years. They merged with the Canadian Alliance (the successor to the Reform Party) in 2003, to form the present-day Conservative Party of Canada.
What’s happening in 2024?
Reform UK has taken much of their votes from the Conservatives over the last couple of years. However, unlike Canada’s Reform Party, Reform UK’s vote is spread pretty uniformly across Great Britain; as there is no region in the UK where Reform is polling highest, it becomes difficult for them to gain a great deal of seats.
There are two regions where Reform has overtaken the Conservatives, those being Wales and the north of England. However, both of these regions are traditionally Labour areas (notwithstanding what happened in the north in 2019), which doesn’t leave many seat opportunities for Reform in those areas. Meanwhile, in the areas where Conservatives have traditionally done better (particularly the south and east of England), they are managing to stay ahead of Reform and keep the seat advantage that comes with it. It is the lack of regional concentration in Reform, and the limited concentration that they do have being in non-Conservative areas, that is allowing the Conservatives to retain their status as Britain’s main party of the right.
But the biggest issue for the Conservatives is going to be the vote split with Reform. While it would be incredibly lazy to assume that every Conservative and Reform voter would vote for any alliance between them, this vote split alone could cost the Conservatives as many as 190 seats (plus 25 for Reform where they’re in second place). This will be what makes the election a disaster for the Conservatives next week, though it will fall short of complete catastrophe.
The 2024 UK General Election will be held on Thursday 4 July from 7am to 10pm.
