There has been much commentary in the wake of Monday's election debating the permanence of the NDP's leap into Official Opposition status. I believe the NDP rise is a permanent one.
But there are many who believe that the NDP's new significance on the federal scene will be a flash in the pan and that a new Liberal leader could reasonably expect to lead his or her party back to Official Opposition status in the 2015 federal election. One of the arguments common to this way of thinking is a comparison to the experience of the Action démocratique du Canada in Quebec over the 2007 and 2008 provincial elections.
Going into the 2007 provincial election in Quebec, the ADQ had 4 MNAs but ended up winning 41 seats and supplanting the Parti Quebecois as the official opposition against Jean Charest's minority government. In 2008, Charest triumphed and the ADQ was reduced to just 7 seats and lost official party status.
There are some fundamental differences between the ADQ experience and the federal experience that, I think, disqualifies comparisons of the two parties.
- Jack Layton is not Mario Dumont. Layton has much more experience than Dumont did and, while I do not know the quality of the staff that advised Dumont through this period, Layton certainly has experienced, credible and street-smart advisors playing a senior role in his office and at the party.
- The NDP has seen its popular support and seat counts grow in every federal election since Layton assumed leadership of the party in 2003. It has done better in 2004, 2006, 2008 and, of course, in 2011. This was a result of a deliberate multi-election strategy that paid significant dividends. There is no evidence to show that any of its political opponents has, in all those elections, figured out a way to put a dent in this slow but steady advance. The ADQ 2007 results appear to be a definite flash-in-the-pan that caught that surprised that party and its leader.
- The ADQ entered the 2007 campaign with just 4 MNAs with any legislative experience. The NDP caucus for this Parliament has 35 members who were MPs in the 40th Parliament or previous Parliaments. That's two new MPs for every experienced MP. The ADQ had nearly 10 inexperienced MNA for every experienced one.
- Charest “pounced” on his inexperienced opposition by calling a snap election in 2008, just 21 months after the ADQ had been Official Opposition. If Harper is true to his word on fixed elections, the NDP opposition will have four years to convince Canadians that is, in fact, the “government-in-waiting”. That time, to gain experience and for new MPs to learn on the job, will be invaluable and make it much more difficult for the Liberals to “spring back.”
I agree with your analysis, largely. The one thing is that the popular vote for the ADQ had grown steadily in every previous election they had been a part of, before 2007. Gilbert Lavoie had written an article on that in Le Soleil at the outset of the 2007 election and it proved to be one of the most useful pieces of analysis written for that campaign. In that respect, the ADQ in 2007 and the NDP now are actually quite similar.
It's true that there are some differences, and that no 2 situations are the same. But the NDP's Quebec wing may have more in common with Mulroney's Quebec wing and what happened to it. Remember that many of Jack Layton's new MP's are nationalists and separatists. This risks driving their numbers down with federalists and other Canadians. If I were the Liberals I would try to cause divisions in the Quebec NDP.