A consequential election ends with a stark choice and an uncertain future

John Duffy, the late political strategist and author, began Fights of Our Lives, his lively and encyclopedic account of the federal campaigns that shaped this country, with a simple premise — one always worth returning to at moments like this.

"Elections matter," he wrote.

Writing in 2002, Duffy was pushing back against what he saw as the lazy cynicism of "academics, journalists and political dissenters of various stripes" who had "worked very hard for many years to convince voters in democracies that elections are inconsequential or, even worse, rigged, so that this or that social group maintains dominance no matter what happens at the polls."

Duffy's view was that elections — fundamentally human endeavours — are precarious and dynamic, and the choices that leaders and voters make are consequential.

If anything, the last decade of global politics has made it much harder to be complacent. With the future of Western democracy newly uncertain, the climate crisis bearing down and polarization on the rise, it can now feel like elections almost matter too much. 

In Canada, even before this spring, the notion that any given election was possibly the "most important" to have ever occurred was in some danger of becoming a cliché. But it is at least much harder to dispute this time.

"We are facing the most significant crisis of our lifetimes," Liberal Leader Mark Carney said at Rideau Hall last month, moments after asking the Governor General to trigger this election.

Two weeks later, former prime minister Stephen Harper appeared at a rally in Edmonton with Pierre Poilievre and thanked Conservative supporters for being a "positive part of the most important decision that this country is going to make in decades."

Not to be outdone, former Reform Party leader Preston Manning emerged mid-campaign to warn that, above and beyond everything else, the unity of the country hung in the balance — and that a Liberal victory would drive Western provinces to secede.

Carney has stated repeatedly that this is the "most consequential election of our lifetime." That is perhaps a judgment that can only truly be made in hindsight, once the exact consequences are known. But given the choices and the circumstances, it certainly seems possible that the 45th general election will come to deserve that title.

Stewart Prest, a political scientist at the University of British Columbia, wrote this week that Canada's domestic challenges are "multiple and significant." But from watching the leaders' debates last week, Prest said it was clear that "Canadian voters, journalists, debate moderators and politicians alike are all still coming to terms with the depth of change in the world around them."

That is almost certainly true.

But this campaign was probably only ever going to be about Canadians starting to wrap their minds around the challenges in front of them — and, crucially, choosing who will lead the country's initial response.

Unlike the "free trade election" of 1988 — the last time Canada's relationship to the United States was so central to a federal election — this one is perhaps less easily reduced to a yes-or-no question on a specific, tangible thing. While it may come to be remembered as the "Donald Trump election," this vote concerns a stack of questions about how and what Canada should be at the start of this new epoch.