SEPTEMBER, 2018 – It was not supposed to be this way. Through most of 2015, Justin Trudeau was seen by many as a lightweight, a Hail Mary throwback to the era of Trudeau the elder, trying to salvage a party that had been pushed into third place in the 2011 election. If any party was to challenge the Harper Tories, it would certainly be Thomas Mulcair’s New Democratic Party (NDP), building on the late Jack Layton’s breakthrough performance in the 2011 federal election, when the NDP became the official opposition—a breakthrough that came to be called the Orange Crush (a play on words referencing both the party’s official colour and a popular soft drink).
The above is the first paragraph of “The Defeat of Stephen Harper: A Case Study in Social Movement Electoralism”. [1] The complete text can be found here.
[1] Paul Kellogg, “The Defeat of Stephen Harper: A Case Study in Social Movement Electoralism,” Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’Études Canadiennes 52, no. 3, Fall (2018): 591–623.