Universe of Support: Suburban Voters in Canadian Federal Elections

This chapter reviews the position of suburban voters within Canadian federal elections. In response to the impression that federal elections are won and lost in the greater Toronto area I ask - how do suburban voters factor into the campaign strategies of political parties? I examine the significance of suburban voters, emphasizing those in Toronto, as a contested demographic. I draw attention to the allocation of campaign resources through analysis of the 2019 party leader tours of the Liberals, Conservatives, and New Democrats. This is supplemented by an analysis of party platforms from 2008, 2011, 2015, and 2019 as a measure of campaign marketing. In doing so, I seek to address the nature of Canadian elections and normatively reflect on the consequences of this nature.

Supply-Side Liberalism: Fiscal Crisis, Post-Industrial Policy, and the Rise of the New Democrats

A new generation of liberals emerged in the 1970s, a decade of stagflation, deindustrialization, global capital flight, and public sector fiscal crises. Prevailing interpretations of New Democrats like Bill Clinton and Michael Dukakis explain their emphasis on entrepreneurialism and post-industrial sectors as the byproduct of cynical electoral strategies of “triangulation,” that is, primarily as a reaction to the rise of Reagan Republicanism. This article instead positions their political economy as part of a much longer history of liberals’ efforts to restructure the economy in order to stimulate new jobs and tax revenues that might also generate public revenue and support a progressive policy agenda. With roots in local, state, and regional industrial policies inspired by the New Deal, “supply-side liberalism” reemerged with force in the 1970s and 1980s, revealing heretofore unappreciated continuities that contextualize and clarify the origins of New Democrats’ promotion of a set of seemingly “neoliberal” economic policies.