As Canada’s 2004 general election, the country’s 38th, got underway, things were looking up for the Liberals. All things considered, things were fine; the economy was doing well, the country was no longer gripped with the fears of Quebec separatism, as they had been for most of the previous decade, and the government’s decision to keep Canada out of the Iraq War, while met with annoyance and disapproval in the United States and the United Kingdom, was very well received at home. As the campaign began, the Liberals looked set to return to government with yet another majority (in fact, a majority generally assumed to be far larger than the one they had won just four years earlier), a fact made all the more notable given how vastly the Canadian political landscape had changed. Both the Liberals and the New Democrats had replaced their leaders, with former finance minister Paul Martin succeeding Jean Chretien for the leadership of the Liberals (and, as a result, succeeding him as Prime Minister) and Toronto city councillor Jack Layton winning the leadership of the NDP following the retirement of Alexa McDonough. Most notably, though, the Progressive Conservatives and the Canadian Alliance, after themselves going through changes in leadership (with Peter MacKay succeeding Joe Clark for the former and Stephen Harper succeeding Stockwell Day for the latter), had voted to merge, with New Brunswick Premier Bernard Lord narrowly beating out Harper for the leadership. Compared to 2000, only the Bloc Quebecois had not gone through a change in leadership, with party leader Gilles Duceppe ironically remaining a point of stability in Canada’s otherwise hectic political landscape.
For some parties, these changes in leadership paid off; for others, not so much. Layton’s personal popularity, for instance, helped boost the NDP in the polls, while his seemingly stronger support for more left-wing policies (at least compared to McDonough) help prevent any internal divisions emerge in the party, as had very nearly occurred under McDonough’s leadership. For the PCs and Alliance, meanwhile, their changes in leadership had ultimately allowed the two parties to merge, with the united Conservative Party arguably putting the Liberals in the toughest position they’d been in since over a decade earlier. For the Liberals, though, replacing Jean Chretien with Paul Martin, while initially promising, soon turned out to be a bit of a mistake. It’s not that Martin was a bad leader or had a lot of baggage; on the contrary, Martin’s successful and well-received tenure as Finance minister appealed to many Canadians. The problem was that Chretien had hardly ended up resigning voluntarily. Since the late 1990s, when speculation first began that Chretien’s retirement was imminent, Martin slowly began taking control of the party machinery and winning over the loyalty of his fellow Liberal MPs, naturally hoping to have a leg up in the presumably imminent leadership race. The problem was that Chretien did not retire as expected, instead opting to stay on as Liberal leader and contest the 2000 election. Even after that, his retirement kept getting pushed back further and further, and he started hinting about running for a fourth term, and the infighting between him and Martin reached its breaking point. In 2002, Martin left cabinet, either through his own resignation or because he was dropped by Chretien (the story differed depending on who you asked), and essentially declared open war on Chretien’s leadership. While Chretien initially refused to resign in the face of such threats, when it became clear that Martin had amassed enough support and control over the party that Chretien would lose a rapidly approaching leadership review, Chretien changed course and announced that he would retire in early 2004 (later changed to late 2003).
With Martin’s control of the party now evident, most of the oft mentioned leadership candidates, including Allan Rock, Martin Cauchon, and Brian Tobin (most of whom were Chretien allies), opted against running. John Manley, Chretien’s Deputy Prime Minister and Martin’s successor as Minister of Finance, ran a brief campaign for the leadership before withdrawing once it became clear that he lacked the support to win the leadership (or even prevent Martin from winning a first ballot victory), while Sheila Copps, another former Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Canadian Heritage, ran a long-shot campaign that failed to win many people over; on the first ballot, with only her and Martin in the race, she won less than 10 per cent of the overall vote. With Martin having (overwhelmingly) succeeded in becoming leader, Liberals initially looked toward a period of reuniting the party, with an appearance by musician Bono at the Liberal convention seeming to help lessen the tension between the Chretien and Martin camps. This reunification, though, would not end up happening any time soon. Still bitter at their refusal to support his leadership, Martin and his supporters shut the Chretien wing of the party out of any positions of power, both in the party and in government. When he unveiled his cabinet in December 2003, Chretien supporters were entirely left out. Copps was sent to the backbenches, while Rock, Manley, and Cauchon, among others, being forced into retirement under the threat of a nomination challenge which, the Martin camp assured them, they would almost certainly lose. Copps herself already found herself facing a nomination battle with Martin ally Tony Valeri.
Even still, despite their internal disunity, the Liberals looked set for an overwhelming majority government, though many bad decisions by Martin ultimately prevented this from happening. First, Martin refused to call an election at the height of his popularity, from late 2003 to the very early months of 2004. Worried that he would instead offend Canadians for trying to take blatant advantage of his honeymoon (as he believed happened to John Turner in 1984), he continued to delay the election, missing out on a golden point in early 2004 where his honeymoon was still at its peak and, more importantly, the Conservatives were still leaderless after only just having merged. His bigger mistake, though, was ignoring Chretien’s advice when it came to the so-called sponsorship scandal, which, in short, had seen federal money meant to support Canadian unity instead being funneled into the Liberal Party’s Quebec wing. Given the potential harm the scandal could do to the Liberals, and given the slowly growing public outrage surrounding it, Chretien offered Martin two things: first, he offered to stay on as Prime Minister until February 2004 and essentially “take the fall” on the scandal, resigning after its initial reports had been released and allowing Martin to take over without being tainted by the scandal. Second, Chretien offered to refer the investigation to the RCMP, which, though it would keep the scandal out of the public mind (and result in few details about the scandal in the process), had the risk of alienating voters by keeping the details under wraps. Martin refused both these offers, instead opting to set up a public commission to investigate the scandal, which (although initially praised) would eventually prove to do Martin more harm than good.
By the time the election was called for late June 2004, Martin’s overwhelming lead had mostly disappeared, as a result of both his honeymoon ending and continued reports on the sponsorship scandal hurting the party, with the latter proving to be the defining issue of the campaign. A strong campaign from the Conservatives and an inept one from the Liberals narrowed the gap between the two parties significantly, while an unpopular budget from the Ontario Liberal government of Dalton McGuinty put their stranglehold on Canada’s most populous province at risk. In Quebec in particular the sponsorship scandal hit the Liberals hard, with support for the Bloc Quebecois and the Conservatives (thanks to the popularity of the bilingual Lord in the province and a strong lieutenant in the form of Andre Bachand) skyrocketing compared to pre-election polls. An ad released late in the campaign accusing the Conservatives of being hard-right radicals and the “Canadian George W. Bush” didn’t do the Liberals many favours either, as voters turned away from the ads largely seeing Lord as the moderate conservative he was. As Election Day approached, the gap between the two parties had narrowed significantly, and nobody was really quite sure how the election would turn out.
Ultimately, despite Martin’s mistakes as leader and despite the sponsorship scandal, the Liberals were still able to win re-election, albeit with a minority government of only five seats. While voters saw Lord himself as a moderate pragmatist, the fact that half of the Conservative Party were (seemingly) socially conservative, hard-right ideologues in the mould of Stockwell Day left many Canadians wary of voting for them, despite arguably supporting Lord more than Martin. As for the remaining parties, the Bloc Quebecois, largely due to the sponsorship scandal, won a record 55 seats, while the NDP were able to rebound from the McDonough years and win 25 seats, nearly doubling their overall count. For the Liberals, the silver lining of the results was their performance out west, where Martin’s greater popularity (when compared to Chretien) and Lord’s struggles with Western conservatives allowed the party to actually make gains when compared to 2000, picking up a fair amount of seats in both British Columbia and Saskatchewan. For Martin himself, one of the more disappointing results came in the riding of Hamilton East—Stoney Creek; although the Liberals retained the riding it was under the candidacy of Sheila Copps (who had narrowly managed to survive her nomination battle), proving that she would be remain a thorn in his governments side in the backbenches for the foreseeable future.
As for the Conservatives, the greatest part of the result (aside from nearly forming government) was their performances in Ontario (where the party was able to win 37 seats, a significant increase for a party that had had just 4 seats in the province before the election) and in Quebec, where the party was able to win 7 seats, including that of Lord’s Quebec lieutenant Andre Bachand, the former Progressive Conservative MP who had, after initial skepticism, stuck with the merged party after it became clear that, under Lord’s leadership, it would not become the second coming of the Canadian Alliance.