(LifeSiteNews) – Canadian politics for decades has followed a predictable outcome, which is the party in power wins in a landslide and seems to stay there for about 10 years, sometimes more or less, but the same pattern always occurs. The party in power eventually collapses, only to again come back in one iteration or another, after some “time off.”
Let’s look at recent history.
In 1984, Justin Trudeau’s father, Pierre Yves Elliott Trudeau, decided he was not going to seek re-election, leaving the party to John Turner, who, as reported here, is the person perhaps most responsible for Canada legalizing abortion on demand in 1969.
However, the Liberals, who had been in power for most of the previous two decades under Trudeau’s father, lost the 1984 election in a landslide to Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives. The Progressive Conservatives won 74.8 percent of seats in the House of Commons, which is the second-largest majority government won (in terms of the percentage of total seats) in Canadian history.
Mulroney, who just died this year (and who despite his many flaws was a welcomed and needed relief from Trudeau Sr.), went on to govern Canada for nearly a decade, which is about the same time Trudeau Jr. will have been in power come 2025, as he was first elected with a majority in 2015.
In 1993, the Mulroney government was declining and its popularity was waning, no thanks to introducing a new federal tax, the GST, on all goods and services. As a result, Mulroney seeing the writing on the wall resigned as party leader and left it in the hands of Kim Campbell.
Polls at the time showed that the Liberals under then-leader Jean Chrétien would win the coming 1993 election in a landslide. As the polls predicted, the 1993 election saw the Progressive Conservatives lose all but two seats after holding some 156, exactly what the current Liberals have, in what was the worst election bloodbath in Canadian history.
To be fair, many of those seats were lost to the up-and-coming Reform Party under then-leader Preston Manning, who was a solid pro-lifer and won 52 seats, mostly in western Canada.
The current Conservative Party was founded out of the old Reform Party officially in 2003.
Then, in 2006, Stephen Harper of the Conservative Party came to power. He stayed on as the leader of Canada until 2015. Like the same pattern before, his party’s popularity waned, although there was not a massive loss of seats in 2015 compared with 1993, but still, the party’s time was up.
While the People’s Party of Canada under Maxime Bernier had a decent vote total in the 2021 federal election, which was the last election held, the reality is Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party is the only realistic option that has a chance of forming a majority government come 2025.
Come the 2025 election, it’s fairly certain that the Conservative Party will win close to 200 seats and the Liberals will lose close to 100. The challenge then becomes, how long can it stay in power? Will Trudeau, like his father before him, come back and win again, or shudder the thought, will one of Trudeau’s kids decide to enter politics one day?
Will a Poilievre government be any better? Maybe short term, but probably not long term
As I wrote earlier this week, the reality is Canada is being held hostage by a pro-abortion, anti-life socialist party, the New Democratic Party (NDP), under its leader Jagmeet Singh, which has an informal coalition with the Trudeau government that began last year to keep them in power.
But there is hope on the horizon.
History shows, as mentioned earlier, that Canada’s election cycle is cyclical, which will help offer relief soon but could bite Canadians again come another 10 years. While not ideal, this is a political reality and one which I doubt will not change anytime soon.
But how will those 10 years be under Poilievre, assuming he wins a majority come 2025? Well, in his first two years, he will be undoing a lot of the mess the Trudeau government has put Canada through, notably the many internet censorship bills that became, or will become law, and attacks on legal gun owners.
Hopefully, he will also slow or even reverse many of the extreme ideological environmental laws and edicts passed under Trudeau, such as trying to ban the sale of new gasoline-powered cars after 2035 and banning plastics, not to mention getting rid of the carbon tax.
Then, maybe in late year three or four of his term, I guarantee you will see a shift from Poilievre toward the center-left to appease traditional Liberal voters and “woke” Canadians.
But let’s look at the facts on why this could be. Poilievre supports abortion and, to be blunt, has a very poor track record when it comes to issues of life and family.
Even his wife supports abortion. Last December, Poilievre’s wife, Anaida, made headlines for championing the couple’s pro-abortion views in a full public spectacle. This is not what Canada needs from the wife of a potential leader.
Campaign Life Coalition (CLC) has given Poilievre a “red light” rating for his poor voting record on life issues.
Also, Poilievre and his wife, and Trudeau as well, are simply wrong in thinking Canadians have a “right” to abortion.
As CLC communications director Pete Baklinski told LifeSiteNews a while back, “There exists no court-defined or Charter right to abortion in Canada. Abortion was first decriminalized in 1969. Prior to this, committing an abortion was a crime under the Criminal Code.”
Baklinski said that Trudeau is spreading “misinformation by stating that abortion is a right in Canada.”
“Our Charter makes it clear that ‘everyone has the right to life.’ It’s time for Mr. Trudeau to take the Charter seriously, stop discriminating against preborn children, and include them in the definition of ‘everyone,’” he said.
Looking to history, abortion was decriminalized in Canada in 1969 when then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (Justin Trudeau’s father) passed a heavily criticized Omnibus Bill that amended the criminal code to allow abortions to be done in hospitals under permissive circumstances.
This law remained in effect until the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the 1969 law as unconstitutional in the 1988 Morgentaler decision. The law was removed on a technicality, however. The court ruled that it violated a woman’s Charter right to security of the person since the law could not be applied equally across the country.
The court encouraged the Canadian Parliament to come up with replacement abortion legislation. This effort failed when then-Prime Minister Mulroney’s draft law was dismissed in a Senate tie vote. The result is that since then Canada has no abortion law at all, and thus abortion is permitted up through all nine months of pregnancy.
The fact is, on paper at least, Mulroney was a far more pro-life politician because at least he was willing to open the abortion debate. Let’s be clear here, Poilievre will never open this debate despite some conservative MPs such as Leslyn Lewis and others being solidly pro-life, saying they would do so.
This reality begs the question. Overall, will a Poilievre government be any good for Canada, and most importantly, for the unborn? Only time will tell, but looking at history, at the very least the 10 years after 2025 will most likely mean Canada won’t be under Liberal rule.