Peaceful Wolverine On April 20, 2023, Haliburton Highlands Health Services, the board that runs Haliburton County’s two hospitals in Ontario, announced it would close the emergency room in Minden and consolidate everything at Haliburton, 25 km up the road. They gave a bare six weeks’ notice.
Minden’s ER had handled more visits the previous year than the one it was being folded into. A lot more: 12,768 against 9,766.
The town rallied. A petition with more than 3,300 signatures went to Queen’s Park. Business owners went with it, and one told reporters that unless the closure was paused, he couldn’t see the governing party keeping the riding.
The riding, Haliburton-Kawartha Lakes-Brock, has been represented by Progressive Conservative Laurie Scott for most of the time since 2003. The province’s answer, repeated by Health Minister Sylvia Jones the whole way through, was that this was a health board decision. The ER closed on June 1, as planned.
On February 27, 2025, Scott won a seventh term. Her vote went up: 26,446, against 25,594 three years earlier. The two parties to her right, New Blue and the Ontario Party, where a conservative angry about the ER closure might have parked a protest vote, took about 2,200 votes between them.
Two calculations
A voter who supports a party they’re unhappy with is running a calculation that goes roughly like this:
“I showed up; I made my complaints known, at the door, on Facebook, and at the town hall; I emailed my representative; then I voted for them anyway, because the alternative was worse.
So — they know I’m still with them, but I’ve let them know I’m unhappy.”
A reasonable party would/should/could take that as a signal to do better.
However, from the party’s point of view, the math doesn’t work the same way. Their calculation is different: Which seats can we lose? In those seats, which voters could actually move? What moves them?
And on the campaign trail, that’s where the money goes, that’s where the announcements go, that’s where the premier shows up in a hard hat.
The first calculation doesn’t appear anywhere in the second. Not as a factor. The unhappy-yet-loyal voter appears as a constant: A number written down before the campaign starts. It doesn’t change when the campaign ends.
One bit
A ballot carries one piece of information: Which box got the X. Everything else attached to it — the complaint, the reluctance, the “this is the last time,” the letter to the MLA — is commentary, and the system has no field for commentary. It’s the ‘memo’ field on a cheque, which has no effect on whether or not the cheque clears.
The commentary is just for you and the people you talk to.
Every large business you deal with already runs this logic on you. Insurers and phone companies charge long-standing customers more than new ones, because long-standing customers don’t shop around.
There’s a name for it: The loyalty penalty. The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority found that in 2018 alone, six million loyal home and motor insurance customers had overpaid by £1.2 billion, roughly C$2 billion at the time, and banned the practice, which it calls “price walking,” from January 1, 2022.
Canadian telecoms hand out retention deals to the customer who threatens to leave, and a decade at full rate to the friend who never threatens or researches alternatives.
The company isn’t punishing loyalty. It’s just declining to pay for something it already has.
Political parties are not more sentimental than Rogers.
What moves them
Recent memory: Saskatchewan, August 10, 2023. Three byelections on one night. The NDP took Regina Walsh Acres and Regina Coronation Park from the government. The Sask. Party’s Blaine McLeod held the rural seat, Lumsden-Morse, but the party’s share there fell to 54 per cent from more than 70, because the Saskatchewan United Party, whose entire caucus was Nadine Wilson, took 23 per cent.
Premier Scott Moe’s response to the Regina losses was that the government needed to listen on affordability and cost of living. But the fact is, conservative losses in Saskatoon and Regina are expected sometimes. The cities aren’t certain for one side or another, and it’s never really a surprise.
Lumsden-Morse, though… The Premier’s response in that case was a promise that Education Minister Dustin Duncan would shortly bring a plan on what’s appropriate in classrooms. That plan arrived on August 22 as the pronoun policy. On September 19, Justice Michael Megaw of the Court of King’s Bench paused it pending a challenge from UR Pride, a Regina LGBTQ organization, finding it could cause irreparable harm. The same day, Moe announced he would recall the legislature two weeks early and use the notwithstanding clause. Bill 137 was introduced October 10 and passed October 20.
Through the run-up to the October 28, 2024 election, rural Saskatchewan emergency rooms kept closing for lack of staff. Rene Bourassa, the mayor of Radville, said his town’s hospital had gone through multiple emergency closures that year and that he still felt the government was doing what it could. NDP-collected data put five rural facilities at a combined 3,684 days of closure. When the count was final, Carla Beck’s NDP had taken every seat in Regina and all but two in Saskatoon; the Sask. Party kept every seat outside the two cities except Athabasca, in the far north, and Nadine Wilson lost hers.
One grievance got a policy in twelve days and a law in ten weeks. The other got nothing, and cost nothing. The difference wasn’t which grievance was more serious. It was which one arrived attached to a vote that had already moved.
This isn’t a conservative problem
Montreal’s West Island is about as safe as Liberal territory gets federally. Lac-Saint-Louis has been Francis Scarpaleggia’s since 2004; Pierrefonds-Dollard has gone Liberal in every election but one since 1988. Quebec’s Bill 21, passed by François Legault’s government in June 2019, bars teachers, police, and some other public workers from wearing religious symbols, and it is the kind of law that community cares about: The English Montreal School Board went to court to block it.
In the fall 2019 campaign Justin Trudeau was the only national leader who wouldn’t rule out federal intervention, and said intervening at that stage would be counterproductive. In 2022 he said the government would consider it if the case reached the Supreme Court. In January 2025 the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. Six years, three elections, and over those elections Scarpaleggia’s share went 58, 56, 68 per cent, and Sameer Zuberi’s in Pierrefonds-Dollard went 56, 56, 60.
And that is exactly why six years was an acceptable wait.
In Winnipeg, starting in 2017 Brian Pallister’s PC government converted three of the city’s six ERs into urgent care centres: Victoria in 2017, Concordia in June 2019, and Seven Oaks in July 2019, weeks before the writ. Concordia and Seven Oaks sit in traditional NDP territory. The PCs were re-elected on September 10, 2019, anyway, and the health minister said afterwards that voters had endorsed the changes.
He wasn’t wrong.
The neighbourhoods that lost their ERs were never going to vote PC, so from where he sat there was nothing to lose. On October 3, 2023, Wab Kinew’s NDP won a majority on a campaign that opened and closed on healthcare, and got those neighbourhoods’ grievance onto the agenda, because it had marginal seats in the suburbs to win with it. A party with nothing to lose in your riding and a party with nothing to gain in it are, in the end, the same thing.
And “anyone but Conservative” is not a way out of any of this. A voter who would never leave the Liberals is rare. A voter who would never let a Conservative win is common, and from the Liberal party’s side of the table those are the same voter. Strategic voting is loyalty to a bloc instead of a brand. The Liberals can lose the West Island’s affection without losing its vote, and they know it, and they budgeted for it.
The strongest case for staying put
The best defence of the loyal voter goes like this: I’m not a team player. I weigh every election on the merits, and every time, the alternative is worse on the things I care about most. Landing in the same place isn’t loyalty. It’s a conclusion.
That’s true of a lot of people. It’s also politically invisible, because the party can’t see the difference.
A vote arrived at by careful annual reasoning and a vote arrived at by never thinking about it look identical on the tally sheet, and they get priced identically. The party doesn’t reward the reasoning. It rewards the possibility that the reasoning might one day go the other way. Where that possibility is zero, so is the reward.
What actually counts
In every case above where a party moved, something changed that showed up in a number. A third party at 23 per cent in a stronghold. Two Regina seats. A byelection loss. In Alberta, Jason Kenney won his leadership review on May 18, 2022, with 51.4 per cent of his own members and resigned that night; a decade earlier, a rural conservative revolt called Wildrose split the vote badly enough that in 2015 a Progressive Conservative government in power since 1971 lost to the NDP.
None of those people voted for the other team. Most of them would have been insulted at the suggestion. What they did was make their vote uncertain, and uncertainty is the only currency a party accepts.
You don’t have to change your vote to matter. But you do have to be someone whose vote could change. If your party is sure it can’t, then it has already counted you, and it’s spending your number on someone else.