For a party once thought endangered, the Liberals are enjoying a surprising afterlife

Supporters of the progressive company of Canada had often to fete in Montreal this weekend.

For unity thing, the party is on the verge of commanding another majority in the House of Commons. Sixteen months ago that seemed implausible, bordering on inconceivable.

For another, it continues to exist as a significant presence in Canadian politics. Fifteen years ago that seemed very far from guaranteed.

In the spring of 2026 the biggest controversy facing Liberals is whether the party has gone too far to attract yet another supporter to its side. But at least as compared to the Liberal Party's recent challenges, Marilyn Gladu is a good problem to have.

Between 1896 and 2005, the Liberal Party held power for a little over 78 years. The Liberals won the most seats in 21 of 31 elections over that period. And every Liberal leader from Wilfrid Laurier to Paul Martin served as prime minister (even if John Turner only held the job for 79 days).

But after Jean Chrétien's Liberals won 172 seats and 40.9 per cent of the vote in 2000, a great slide began. In 2011, the Liberal Party landed at 34 seats and 18.9 per cent of the vote — the worst result in the party's long history.

For the first time ever at the federal level, the Liberals were neither the first nor the second party in the House — Stephen Harper's Conservatives had a majority government and Jack Layton's New Democrats, with 103 seats, were the Official Opposition.

It was possible then to think that the Canadian political system had fundamentally changed.

As a dominant party of the political centre, the Liberal Party had been something of an anomaly across comparable Western democracies. Now perhaps — like the Liberal Party in the United Kingdom — it was set to finally fall away, clearing the way for a more distinct right-left political debate between the Conservative Party and the New Democratic Party.

"Superficially, at least, the system has now clicked into an orientation that would be pretty familiar to someone from Australia, New Zealand or the [United Kingdom]," Richard Johnston, a political scientist at the University of British Columbia, told Maclean's in 2011.

The subhead of a book written by Peter C. Newman, the famed Canadian political journalist, heralded "the death of Liberal Canada" (an echo of a famous book about the demise of the U.K. Liberals). It was speculated that the Conservative Party would be Canada's new natural governing party.

Candidates in both the NDP leadership race in 2012 and the Liberal leadership race in 2013 proposed that their parties explore co-operation with the other — collaboration that presumably would have set the stage for a full merger.

Since then, the Liberals have merely won the most seats in four consecutive elections and governed for 10-and-a-half years (and counting). When Mark Carney's Liberals won 43.8 per cent of the vote last year it was, by that metric, the party's best result since 1980.

So what happened to the demise of the Liberal Party?

Some of the answer may be tied up simply in leadership and timing. 

Justin Trudeau proved to be a more popular (and capable) leader than Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff. By 2015 the Conservatives and Harper were more vulnerable after a decade in office. And with Tom Mulcair as leader the NDP proved unable to hold the gains it had made.

A decade later, the Liberals seemed headed for another resounding defeat. But then Trudeau was pushed out, Carney arrived and Donald Trump wholly upended Canada's political reality.

"I think that we're in a series of ebbs and flows and part of what accounts for the ebbs and flows is about leadership, but part of it is also about the economy [and] what's happening on the global scale," says Amanda Bittner, a political scientist at Memorial University.

"I think that the challenge is that if it wasn't for Trump, we would not have Carney. We would have [Pierre] Poilievre."

At Issue | Carney's expanding Liberal tent

In 2015 and thereafter, Trudeau was credited with pushing the Liberal Party to the left — expanding federal support programs and embracing progressive social values. That might have challenged the idea that the Liberals were still a centrist party, but Carney has now pushed the party back toward the centre or right (a move personified by the addition of four former Conservative MPs).

That may put the last decade in line with the party's uniquely flexible history — or cynical history, if you are a Conservative or New Democrat who takes a dimmer view of the Liberal Party's success.

Liberal success in the 20th century was built upon the foundation of the party's popularity in Quebec. And after being reduced to just seven seats in Quebec in 2011, the Liberal Party has regained a significant foothold in the province — Carney's Liberals won 44 seats in Quebec last year.

But Johnston says a different kind of geographic advantage has driven recent Liberal success. 

"The Liberal Party is able to more often than not win the closely contested ridings. And those are for the most part [in] Ontario and [British Columbia]," he says.

Carney attends party convention with Liberals on edge of majority

As other researchers have shown, the biggest split in Canadian politics is now between voting habits in urban and rural ridings. And Liberal strength in urban (and suburban) areas has driven the party's results in recent elections — in 2019 and 2021 they were able to win the most seats even while losing the popular vote (as the Conservatives piled up huge margins in more rural ridings).

Notwithstanding the threshold Carney's Liberals might cross next week, the defining trend in Canadian federal politics, Johnston says, might now be that hung parliaments are the norm, not the exception.

"The larger story of the 21st century — and I don't really think that the last election puts this in dispute — is that getting a majority is just generically harder," Johnston says.

For as much as Trudeau succeeded in reviving the Liberal Party, the Liberal vote didn't get back above 40 per cent under his leadership. By popular vote, Trudeau's Liberals were still weaker than Chrétien's. And Chrétien didn't do as well as Pierre Trudeau's Liberals in the 1970s and 80s.

"Is there still a story of long-term decline? I would say no," says Bittner. "But is there a story where the Liberal Party is fragile? I would say yes, in the sense that every party is actually fragile."

In the last 40 years, nearly all major parties have experienced some kind of boom and bust. The old Progressive Conservatives went from 211 seats in 1984 to two seats in 1993. The NDP went from 103 seats in 2011 to seven in 2025. The Bloc Québécois won four seats in 2011 and is now back to 22. (The modern Conservative Party has so far remained relatively stable, but its problem might be winning enough seats to govern.)

The lesson of 2011 might be that no party's future viability is guaranteed. And that apparent trends in politics are never more than an election away from changing.

Senior writer

Aaron Wherry has covered Parliament Hill since 2007 and has written for Maclean's, the National Post and the Globe and Mail. He is the author of Promise & Peril, a book about Justin Trudeau's years in power.

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