the reality is that harper faced the most incompetent opposition in this country's history for years, and it's the only reason he won any election at all. he only managed to "unite the right" *once* - in 2011. in 2006 and 2008, the liberals were able to bleed enough moderate conservative support from him to hold him to a minority, even while the liberals were bleeding massively to the ndp.
look at these numbers for the conservatives:
2000: 38.19
2004: 29.63
2006: 36.27
2008: 37.65
2011: 39.62
it only looks like steady growth if you start at 2004. if you start at 2000, you begin to understand that it's all about making up lost ground. he was barely ever able to hold what he started off with.
now, look at ndp numbers:
2000: 8.51
2004: 15.68
2006: 17.48
2008: 18.18
2011: 30.63
pretty massive growth, if you ask me. so, where's the talk of a shift left?
what happened over these years is that the liberals became uncompetitive because they shifted to the right, which shifted voters left in dissent. what happened last week was that voters went back to the liberals, because they righted themselves.
and, so long as they resist the urge to move right, the liberals will remain in power for a long time. the conservatives can come back to 35-36 if they'd like; the liberals still have another ten points on the left available to them, if they govern wisely.
you also have to factor in the reality that any electoral reform will hurt the conservatives far more than it hurts the ndp.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/why-canadas-shift-to-conservatism-isnt-dead/article27008590/
Bud tugley
Note you don't include the 2015 numbers as it would show your NDP numbers crashing again. Face it - Canadians don't want socialists to form government. They don't want socialists sufficiently badly that they'll gamble on Trudeau Jr. when they wanted Harper out, but they won't gamble on the NDP.
deathtokoalas
the 2015 numbers were not available to the authors. however, i did point out that what happened was that the liberals won not by swinging conservatives but by swinging back the support they had lost to the ndp under martin, and especially under ignatieff. dion lost a little ground to the ndp, but more to the greens (i have a theory that certain voters thought the green shift was being peddled by the green party; that the advertising confused them basically), but really lost more ground to low turnout.
what it suggests is that what happened over this period was not that canadians became more conservative, but became tired of voting for a liberal party that was acting like a conservative party. this initially came out of concern about martin's austerity measures (although this was a perception issue - martin's budgets attempted to undo his own funding cuts, as a consequence of the improved fiscal situation) and really accelerated with ignatieff, who was arguably to the right of harper.
the evidence is pretty clear, and it makes the narrative being pushed by ibbitson largely ridiculous. canadians were punishing the liberals for veering too far to the right by voting for the ndp, which allowed the conservatives to come up the middle.
the only chance the conservatives have of forming a government any time in the near future is if the liberals repeat this mistake, and i don't think this is likely - because i think the party (finally) understands what happened.
the bottom line is that we're as liberal as we've ever been, and we're not afraid to veer left for as long as it takes if the liberals refuse to be liberals, until they decide to be liberals.
had the liberals done what it seemed like they were going to do - which was campaign on the soft right as the ndp did - we'd likely have an ndp majority right now, and it would have been as hard to remove as any previous liberal dynasty. as it is, the liberals won because they came out to the left of the ndp.
now, they just need to stay there.
they're going to be in for a long time. 10-15 years. maybe 20. trudeau's replacement probably hasn't been elected yet and may even still be in school. deal with it.