The recent New Brunswick election is likely to be the last provincial campaign before the next federal campaign. On the surface, the New Brunswick results –a majority Liberal government – fall into the pattern of the recent elections in Nova Scotia, Quebec and Ontario. However, New Brunswick is the first province where an incumbent Progressive Conservative government was defeated.

So what is the significance of the New Brunswick results for the federal parties? Do the results presage a victory for the federal Liberal party? What lessons/warnings can federal parties take from this recent contest? Answering these questions requires a closer examination of how the New Brunswick campaign evolved and of the final results.

What Happened

Polls taken shortly after the election call on August 21seemed to promise a sweeping Liberal victory. Had the shifts in the overall popular vote from 2010 reflected in the polls taken in late August by Forum and Corporate Research Associates been applied uniformly to each of the 49 constituencies, the Liberals would have won between 39 and 41 seats. Applying a similar methodology to the polls taken in mid-September would have produced a narrower but still comfortable Liberal victory with 33 seats to 16 for the Progressive Conservatives.

Yet, the actual result was a much narrower Liberal majority of 27 seats compared to 21 for the PCs and 1 for the Green Party. Indeed, had the Liberals not won six of the seven most closely-contested seats in the province by margins equal to or less than 2.5% of the vote, David Alward’s government would have been re-elected with 27 seats despite losing the overall popular vote by just over 8 percentage points. Recounts have been requested in all seven of these seats.

The Liberal success in the popular vote was built on overwhelming support among francophone voters, a demographic that traditionally supports this party when it has a francophone leader. Of the twenty seats with substantial francophone populations, the Liberals won 19 compared to the seven they captured in 2010. In these francophone seats the Liberals won 54.9% of the popular vote, almost double the PC share of 27.7%.

In the rest of the province, the PCs won the popular vote over the Liberals by 40.0% to 33.4% and took 20 of the 29 remaining seats, compared to eight for the Liberals and one seat for the Greens in Fredericton South, a riding that includes the main University of New Brunswick campus. This marks the first time the Greens have won a seat in New Brunswick; electing their leader, David Coon, with 30.7% of the vote in a four-way race. Clearly, putting effort into a strategic riding paid off.

Not only did the Liberals do better in the francophone constituencies than the PCs did in the anglophone constituencies, they also did a better job of turning out voters in those seats. The turnout in the 20 francophone seats was 68.9% compared to 62.4% in the 29 anglophone seats.

Significance and Lessons for the Federal Parties

For the Liberals, what happened in New Brunswick shows that campaigns matter. The Liberals clearly lost ground during the campaign after party leader Brian Gallant displayed confusion about key elements of his party’s fiscal platform. In contrast, the PCs gained ground by putting forth a coherent economic plan, promoting development of the province’s shale gas and forest resources. The Alward government was also helped by a positive report early in September showing a large decrease in the province’s stubbornly high unemployment rate. The first lesson might therefore be that Justin Trudeau, with a much smaller lead in the polls than the New Brunswick Liberals, has no room for “rookie errors” and must be on his guard against complacency. Having a new, young, bilingual leader with little political experience was an advantage for the Liberals among New Brunswick francophones, but the party was left vulnerable in the rest of the province when Mr. Gallant showed himself to be ill-prepared on economic issues.

The federal Conservatives are unlikely to be able to narrowly miss taking a majority of the seats while trailing by eight percentage points in the popular vote as the New Brunswick PCs did. But they can take heart from the fact that a party that entered the election well behind in the polls fell just short of re-election when the votes were counted. The lower voter turnout in the traditionally PC, anglophone ridings of New Brunswick underlines for their federal counterparts the importance of getting your vote to the polls.

What about the NDP and the Greens? Both slightly increased their share of the popular vote over 2010 (from 10.4% to 13.0% for the NDP and from 4.5% to 6.6% for the Greens) but, for the most part those who wanted a change in government coalesced behind the Liberals who increased their share of the vote from 34.4% to 42.7 %. At the federal level, the NDP and Green parties will have to work hard to avoid a similar outcome.

That coalescing of the anti-government vote behind the Liberals, despite the less- than-impressive performance of their new leader in the campaign, is probably the most hopeful sign for the federal Liberals and the most discouraging for the federal NDP.

To sum up, the New Brunswick results provide lessons of both encouragement and warning to the federal Liberals and Conservatives, while offering little comfort for the NDP and a reminder to the Greens of the potential of focusing their efforts on winnable constituencies.