FIRST READING: David Eby’s snap election could blow up in his face

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When Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa called a snap election in 1976, the official reason was that he needed a new mandate to address “a number of very important events (that) will affect the future of Quebec.”

Bourassa already had a majority government. He also had two years left in his mandate; Quebecers weren’t scheduled to go to the polls until the fall of 1978.

But optimism was riding high in the wake of the 1976 Montreal Olympics, and Bourassa pegged it as a good time to cash in that goodwill for a mandate that could at least last into the 1980s.

The result was one of the most catastrophic backfires imaginable. Instead of renewing his majority, Bourassa was steamrolled by the first election win by the newly founded Parti Quebecois – a party that Bourassa had spent the campaign mocking. The Quebec Liberal even lost his own seat to a separatist poet.

On Tuesday, B.C. Premier David Eby called a snap election, also with a majority, and also with two years left in his mandate. The stated reason was that U.S. President Donald Trump is an “existential” threat to B.C., and the NDP premier needs his mandate renewed immediately to deal with it.

Trump is attacking our jobs, driving up our costs and threatening our ability to make decisions for ourselves, in our own country, for our own people. He wants to make Canada and B.C. an extension of America.

For B.C. and for Canada, this is an existential moment. We have to…

— David Eby (@Dave_Eby) September 22, 2026

The more likely reason is that, after an entire summer of polling behind the B.C. Conservatives, the opposition’s sudden collapse under leader Kerry-Lynne Findlay suddenly turned the tide, yielding two weeks’ worth of polls with an NDP lead.

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It’s a gamble, and a gamble that has often paid off for premiers in recent years. Ontario Premier Doug Ford secured his third consecutive majority with a snap election in 2025. Eby’s own predecessor, John Horgan, used a snap election in the opening months of the COVID-19 pandemic to secure not only a majority, but the most decisive result in B.C. NDP history.

But such gambles have also precipitated some of the most catastrophic reversals in Canadian political history.

The textbook example of snap election backfire is Ontario Premier David Peterson. In 1990, after just three years of his four-year mandate, he called an early election to capitalize on polls showing his Liberal party with a commanding 50 per cent of the vote.

In an instant, Ontarians who had been telling pollsters they liked Peterson changed their tune once it meant they had to mark it on a ballot.

The first poll issued after Peterson’s election call showed that his lead had instantly evaporated, and that he probably wasn’t going to retain his majority.

“I’m getting a lot of questions about the early election. Maybe we didn’t do a good job explaining why we called this early election,” one Liberal candidate, Bernard Grandmaître, told the Ottawa Citizen at the time.

The Liberals not only lost their majority, but they lost the election entirely to a majority win by the Ontario NDP.

A similar turnaround occurred in Alberta in 2015. There again, a comfortably established incumbent, the Progressive Conservatives under Premier Jim Prentice, called an early election to consolidate what they assumed was going to be an easy win.

Instead, Prentice walked into a defeat that even the opposition didn’t see coming: An NDP majority, and his own party devastated beyond repair.

Quebec political history even yields a second example of Liberals calling a snap election, only to be punished with a surprise victory from the Parti Quebecois.

That’s what happened to Quebec Liberal Premier Jean Charest in 2012. He called an early summer election in an apparent attempt to catch the electorate in a good mood, and wound up guaranteeing a defeat bad enough to cost him his own seat.

“He gambled, and he lost,” read one analysis.

One of the most explosive landslides in Canadian history, in fact, was the unintended result of a snap election call.

In 1984, John Turner had just succeeded the hideously unpopular Pierre Trudeau as federal Liberal leader, and thus prime minister. Turner could have continued overseeing a Liberal majority for at least another year. But buoyed by a brief resurgence in Liberal poll numbers, Turner scheduled a summer campaign.

The 1984 election instead transformed into two months of ever-plunging Liberal support until, on Sept. 4, the Canadian electorate handed Progressive Conservative Leader Brian Mulroney a supermajority of 211 out of 282 seats.

The electoral consequences of snap elections has been examined in depth by political scientists, and the usual takeaway is that Canadians don’t like being asked to vote if they don’t have to, and they’re inclined to punish whoever made them do it.

In 2022, a paper out of the University of Toronto concluded that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s decision to call a snap election in 2021 yielded just enough blowback and voter apathy to deny him a sought-after majority.

“Negative attitudes toward the election call are a decisive consideration for many voters, inflicting an electoral cost to the Liberal Party which likely deprived it from a legislative majority,” wrote the report authors.

A 2004 paper in the journal Political Studies concluded that even when incumbents successfully secure power with a snap election, they can expect a measurable hit to their support if the call seems “opportunistic.”

The paper’s test case was the 2000 federal election, where Prime Minister Jean Chrétien dropped the writ a year early for no other reason than conditions seemed good to renew his majority.

He got that majority, but authors calculated it came at the expense of alienating one per cent of Liberal voters. “Some voters are prepared to punish prime ministers for opportunistically calling a snap election, but in this case the electoral penalty was small,” it read.

When snap elections function as intended for the incumbent, it’s often in instances where election day is being moved up a few months, instead of coming in the middle of a term. It also helps if an incumbent’s lead in the polls is overwhelming.

In 2024, Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston had his snap election call rewarded with an even larger majority. But Houston was bumping up election day by just eight months. His Progressive Conservatives also enjoyed a more than 20-point advantage.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford strengthened his majority with a snap election in 2025. But there again, Ford’s entire term up to that point had shown him with a lead of at least 10 points over the opposition.

Eby might be angling to re-enact something along the lines of the aforementioned 2000 federal election.

At the time, Chrétien had a majority and he also had nearly two years left in his mandate. But he plunged Canada into a fall election largely to capitalize on a fractured conservative opposition; the newly formed Canadian Alliance having failed to unite the country’s various warring right-wing factions.

But Chrétien was also extremely popular; most of the 1990s saw him enjoying approval ratings of more than 60 per cent – a record of sustained public support unmatched by any other prime minister of modern times.

In the entirety of Chrétien’s decade as prime minister, in fact, there wasn’t a poll that ever gave his Liberals less than a 15-point lead over the second-place opponent.

As Eby attempts the same, his personal approval rating stands at 41 per cent, according to the Angus Reid Institute. And in the entirety of his two-year term to this point, his party has rarely managed a lead of more than five points over the B.C. Conservative opposition, despite the latter’s near-constant internal chaos.

As late as last week, even as defections from the B.C. Conservatives began hitting double digits, the Angus Reid Institute still put Eby’s NDP at just 41 per cent against 37 per cent for the Conservatives.

In one of the more obscure ways that U.S. President Donald Trump has tried to lash out at Canada, on Monday he boasted about a possible potash deal with Belarus.

“The United States is working on a massive Deal with respect to the purchase of Potash from Belarus,” Trump wrote on social media.

Canada currently supplies 90 per cent of U.S. potash, and Trump promised that Belarusian product would be “cheaper” than the Canadian stuff. 

Unmentioned was that Belarus – a dictatorship since the 1990s – remains under heavy U.S. sanctions in part for its participation in Russia’s war on Ukraine. This is why Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe (whose province produces almost all of Canada’s potash) issued a statement on Monday criticizing Trump for seeking “blood potash.”

Anyway, Belarusian dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko swiftly poured cold water on the idea, saying in an English-language meeting transcript that they don’t have any more potash to sell to the United States. This is mostly because it’s actually really hard to ship potash from Belarus to the U.S., so most of their exports are going to closer markets such as China.

But the saga illustrates an uncomfortable material reality about Canada’s ongoing efforts to “diversify” its trade to Europe. Namely, that Canadian exports largely consist of very heavy things like potash, and (as with Belarus) it’s easier to push those things across an adjacent land border than ship them 4,000 kilometres across the Atlantic Ocean.

Also, fun fact: Canada is home to a Belarusian government-in-exile first formed in 1919.  

First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.

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