Kim Campbell and the Biggest L in Canadian History

So, if you can believe it, I’ve been thinking a lot about Canadian politics lately. We’ve got a shiny new Prime Minister (for at least a few weeks), we’re going through a national breakup with the US, and Doug Ford is finally using his supervillain powers for good. There’s a lot going on that you could call historic.

It’s gotten me thinking about some other honorary Canadian Heritage Moments in our political history, which inevitably got me thinking about Kim Campbell, Canada’s first female Prime Minister for all of 153 days, who was the catalyst for the most staggering electoral defeat in all of Western political history.

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Picture this: you’re a Canadian Prime Minister who’s been in power for nearly a decade. While you were once swept into power in a popular electoral landslide, in the last several years your reputation has taken hit after hit with controversies and scandals. Some of these come from global crises you need to respond to, but many more of them are entirely self-inflicted wounds. 

Attempts to change core elements of Canadian society to be more inclusive of certain groups are met with uproar. Western Canada, in particular, is upset about deficit spending and higher taxes. Over a long enough time, enough people hate you for enough reasons that it’s clear that if you attempt to run in the imminent election, you’ll be defeated in a landslide as decisive as the one that brought you into power.

I’m sure you know exactly who this describes: Brian Mulroney, Prime Minister of the Progressive Conservative Party from 1984 to 1993.

The comedic pratfalls of the Mulroney administration are too varied to get into here, but they involved several elaborate, failed attempts to give Quebec a higher constitutional status, as well as managing to both raise taxes and increase the deficit, successfully pissing off everyone.

The upshot is that by 1993, it was clear the Progressive Conservative Party (PCs) were totally cooked. By most measures, he was the least popular Canadian Prime Minister ever up to that point. And what can you expect a politician to do when things get difficult?

That’s right, run away from the situation and pass the baton to literally anyone else!

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Kim Campbell was an up-and-coming star of the PC party, serving several roles in the Mulroney cabinet. When Mulroney announced he was stepping aside and that the PCs would elect a new leader to run in the next election, she became the leading contender very quickly. 

The challenges facing Campbell were immense. Anger at the Mulroney government had fermented and formed two new regional political parties which threatened to upset the balance of the existing parties and squeeze the PCs out all together. Quebec had the Bloc Quebecois, a new, explicitly Quebec nationalist party for people who felt like Mulroney’s constitutional failures meant that staying in Canada was a lost cause. If you were a Western Canadian upset that Mulroney had even tried to do this, there was the all-new right wing Reform Party.

Of course, it’s not like Campbell had nothing going for her at all. In a time when the PCs were viewed as old and stale, just the fact that she was a relatively young woman brought some immediate energy and novelty back into the party (much like how the Liberal Party changed its image when Justin Trudeau became leader in 2013). There was also, of course, much excitement around the fact that she would be Canada’s first female Prime Minister, a genuinely huge historical moment which was unfortunately undercut by… everything that came after.

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It became clear pretty quickly that Campbell was not necessarily prepared for what running a national campaign would be like. While she enjoyed a brief surge in excitement in the polls when she officially assumed the job of party leader and Prime Minister, a consensus soon formed that she was somewhat out of her depth.

The party seemed unprepared for just how intense the competition with the Liberals, Bloq, and Reform would be[1], and they never had any serious plan to win back their previous coalition, or failing that, convince Liberals to back a failed government they hated.

Emblematic of Campbell’s failures to create or control the narrative was the notorious Face Ad, in which the PCs appeared to be mocking Liberal leader Jean Cretien’s facial deformity and implying it meant he was intellectually incapable of being Prime Minister. This is and was a horrifically shitty thing to even imply, and it says a lot about the Campbell campaign (and her PR sensibilities) that she thought this was acceptable.

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The PCs were always going to lose the 1993 election. Between Mulroney’s failures and the emergence of the new parties, it was probably inevitable, even if Campbell ran a perfect campaign.

But, oh man, did she not run a perfect campaign.

In 1988, the PCs under Mulroney won 43% of the vote and 169 seats in Parliament. In 1993, the PCs under Campbell won 16% of the vote, and… two seats. Exactly two seats.[2]

It’s hard to overstate how seismic the results of this were. The PCs, a party that had existed since Confederation, functionally ceased to exist overnight. Reform became the default right-of-center party in Canada, totally supplanting the PCs.[3] Thanks to vote-splitting[4] between the PCs and Reform, the Liberals swept to a massive landslide victory, and would govern the country for the next 13 years uninterrupted in the face of newly scattered opposition. The ascension of the Bloc led directly to the 1995 Quebec independence referendum, which only resulted in a vote against secession by less than one percent of the population. In many ways, the modern Canadian political landscape was forged in 1993, as Campbell killed the PCs and the political order shuffled around to fill that power gap.

The moral of the story? No matter how badly Trudeau might have done if he had run in the election, it could always have been worse.

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1. People always seem to forget that the Liberal Party are extremely good at winning elections, just because they’re so bad at everything else.
2. If you’re wondering, Campbell didn’t even win her own seat in Vancouver, which basically never happens to a party leader.
3. Eventually, after years of anemic results and sick of cannibalising their own vote, Reform agreed to absorb the PCs and merge into the modern-day Conservative Party of Canada. This party would be led by Stephen Harper, who you can learn more about on the cover of mathNEWS 129.6.
4. Vote-splitting is a phenomenon in First-Past-The-Post systems where having two ideologically similar parties makes it less likely any of them will gain power. Imagine that you have two right-wing parties with 30% of the vote each, and one left-wing party with 40% of the vote. Even though 60% of voters prefer right-wing ideology, the seat is awarded to the single party with the highest number of votes, so the left-wing party would get it. This is what was happening in Western Canada.