• CHAPTER 1: The Long Goodbye: The Contours of the Election by Christopher Dornan 
• CHAPTER 2: Stephen Harper and the 2015 Conservative Campaign: Defeated but Not Devestated by Faron Ellis 
• CHAPTER 3: Back to the Future: The Resurgent Liberals by Brooke Jeffrey 
• CHAPTER 4: From Third to First and Back to Third: The 2015 NDP Campaign by David McGrane 
• CHAPTER 5: The Bloc Québécois in a Rainbow-Coloured Quebec by Eric Belanger and Richard Nadeau 
• CHAPTER 6: Opportunities and Obstacles: The Green Party's 2015 Campaign by Susan Harada 
• CHAPTER 7: Roll Back! The Conservatives Rewrite Election Laws, 2006–2015 by Louis Massicotte 
• CHAPTER 8: Mounting a Local Campaign by Allan Thompson 
• CHAPTER 9: Like, Share, Vote. The CTV/Facebook Partnership and the 2015 Election by Mary Francoli, Josh Greenberg, and Christopher Waddell 
• CHAPTER 10: A Debate About Debates by Andre Turcotte 
• CHAPTER 11: "Because It's 2015": Gender and the 2015 Federal Election by Brenda O’Neill and Melanie Thomas 
• CHAPTER 12: Polling and the 2015 Federal Election by David Coletto 
• CHAPTER 13: It's Spring Again! Voting in the 2015 Federal Election by Harold D. Clarke, Jason Reifler, Thomas J. Scotto, and Marianne C. Stewart 
• CHAPTER 14: The Fall of the Harper Dynasty by Jon H. Pammett and Lawrence LeDuc 
• APPENDIX A: The Results in Summary 
• APPENDIX B: Vote Percentages by Riding 
• Note on Contributors 

For a party and a government whose modus operandi had been incrementalism, it all came to a shuddering and definitive end. The project of remaking Canada according to an image of conservatism, step by step, was over. The new government, anathema to everything the previous government stood for, would deliberately run deficits, legalize marijuana, expedite entry to the country of tens of thousands of refugees from war-scarred Islamic nations, and award citizenship to people who hid their faces in public on grounds of religious belief and cultural practice.

The Conservative Party of Canada under Stephen Harper — or, more properly, Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party, since he was its founding leader and executive authority — had taken four elections to inch its way to majority government. In 2004, the party lost the general election but brought the Liberals to minority status, the first toehold in the Conservative climb to office. In 2006, the Liberal minority was defeated and replaced with a Conservative minority, and the Liberal leader resigned. In 2008, the Conservatives were returned with a greater number of seats — still not quite enough to command a majority but sufficient to ensure that the Liberal leader resigned. In 2011, the Conservatives at last won the majority they had so assiduously sought. The Liberals were reduced to third-party status, with only thirty-four seats, while the Conservatives won 166. For the third time in a row, the Liberal leader resigned following the election.

Some governments are content to manage the affairs of the nation. Others take power with revolutionary intent. Harper’s Conservatives made no secret of their missionary zeal to demolish what they saw as an intrusive, arrogant, condescending, and economically irresponsible state apparatus, entrenched after decades of Liberal rule. But the revolution would be carried out by accretion, via the accumulation of myriad government decisions and policy implementations. Canadian priorities and imperatives would change by increments.

The goal was not to impose a new hegemony on a resistant population, as though an occupying force had seized control. The social engineering the Conservatives had in mind was altogether more ambitious. It was to transform the default thinking of the country, to shift what counted as common sense. The goal was to manufacture consent for the axioms of Conservative rule, the most prominent of which was that the role of government was to empower individual enterprise, not to command-plan how people should live through costly, unwieldy, and obnoxious bureaucratic measures funded by taxes that throttled prosperity. This, the Conservatives calculated, was the long route to staying in power into the twenty-first century the way the Liberals had all but owned the government of the twentieth. After all, elections are so much easier to win when the electorate already consents, when the majority of voters share the values and perspective of one party, preferring those over the values and perspectives of the other parties. An agreeable electorate is pre-convinced; they do not have to be persuaded at great effort and expense of something they are not inclined to believe. Over almost a decade, the Conservative government did all it could to make its core precepts the launching pad for its perpetual re-election.

And yet it did so with ham fists. It was extremely effective in targeting, bludgeoning, and belittling its political opponents. And it used the instruments of power to promote its structure of values, from renaming a national museum to opening an Office of Religious Freedom, from killing the long-gun registry to doing away with the long-form census. But it conducted itself throughout as though either ignorant or dismissive of the first part of Dale Carnegie’s famous maxim: in order to influence people, one must win friends.

All political parties are fiercely partisan — and necessarily so. They all have designs on power and they are all committed to frustrating one another’s ambitions. But the Harper Conservatives behaved more like a cult than a traditional party. They did not treat their opponents as honourable adversaries; they saw them as enemies, and they saw enemies everywhere. They made no effort to understand the positions of other parties or interest groups in order to effect negotiations and arrive at accommodations. The Conservatives would no more negotiate with the NDP or the Liberals than they would negotiate with terrorists. And since they perceived the political structures and institutions of the country as creations of their ideological antagonists, rigged against them, they felt no obligation to honour past practices. Oddly, for conservatives, they had little respect for tradition — except when it served their political ends. And for a party in which Christian faith was so important to so many, they were curiously uncharitable toward anyone not a member of their political sect.

It was a government of resentment from the outset, a government as devoted to settling scores as to implementing a policy program. There were times when it seemed as though the Conservatives had no policy program beyond vilifying their enemies, that the true mission of the Conservative government and the best safeguard of the interests of the country, as they understood it, was to prevent anyone else from ever forming a government. And because the Conservative grievances attached to anyone outside their ranks, they often extended to sectors of the electorate. The Harperites not only chafed at the other parties and the strictures of Parliament, at the public service, the courts, the media, the scientific community, unions and universities — all of which they saw as arrayed against them — they too often comported themselves as angry at the very people they represented.

The Conservative government did not pretend to engage in political dialogue. Whether in Question Period, in parliamentary committees, or in rare media appearances, ministers and MPs simply refused to answer questions, instead parroting prepared speaking points and attack lines. Legislation was packaged in enormous omnibus bills while debate in the House was curtailed, so that the laws of the land were enacted without traditional review by the Commons. When one judges Parliament a theatre of intransigent animosity, what profit is there in arguing for one’s position? The Conservatives simply dispensed with what they saw as a charade. The naked exercise of power is, one supposes, a form of transparency.

But if a party expends almost no effort to persuade the public of the virtues of its policies, it is next to impossible to effect a political paradigm shift of national values. Hence the grandiose attempt to re-engineer Canadian groupthink to align with Conservative principles was doomed. One cannot win friends by alienating people.

Not only did the Conservatives fail to rewrite basic Canadian values, in all likelihood it was those values that proved their undoing. Canadians differ on whether tax credits offered to families for child care are preferable to a national day care system, whether punitive jail sentences for criminal offenders are a deserved deterrent or simply vindictive, whether deficit spending on infrastructure is an economic stimulus or an invitation to fiscal recklessness — and they do so heatedly. But in the main, they react badly to power exercised spitefully, to a political arena drained of respectful disagreement, to a politics in which denigration is not just a means but the goal.

The Harper Conservatives were constitutionally, insistently inconsiderate of others. Pollsters identified a “desire for change” as the salient feature of the 2015 campaign, but this was really a euphemism. More than two-thirds of the electorate had simply had enough of what they saw as the boorish (at best), vindictive (at worst) personality of their government.

On election night there was nothing even remotely incremental about the outcome. It was repudiation, pure and simple. It took the Conservatives four elections to win a majority. It took one term of majority government for them to lose office and terminate the reign of Stephen Harper. In his victory speech that night, the newly elected prime minister, Justin Trudeau, caught the fundamental mistake — the character flaw — of the defeated government. “Conservatives are not our enemies,” he told his supporters and the country, “they are our neighbours.”

Given the Conservative failure to effect a sea change in the country’s attitudes and perspectives, the party’s prospects for re-election in 2015 turned on the arithmetic of how the vote would split between the three major parties — with the Bloc Québécois and the Greens perhaps eating away at Liberal and NDP vote share — and how that vote would translate into seat returns. With some 70 percent of the country opposed to the Conservatives, in retrospect the government’s defeat seems inevitable, but at the time the outcome came as a surprise to almost everyone. Going into the election, it seemed perfectly possible that the Conservatives could be returned to power. Even in the last days before the vote, the talk among the punditry was of the role of the governor general should no single party carry sufficient seats to command the confidence of the House. By the eve of the election, it seemed altogether likely the Liberals could win the most seats, but no one was talking openly about a Liberal majority.