According to some of the leading political thinkers in Canada, including the outgoing prime minister, Stephen Harper, who was defeated on Monday, the Liberal Party should not exist. Yet in defiance of not just Harper’s ideological opposition but also a considerable body of political science theorizing, the Liberals not only persist but still keep winning elections, such as the landslide that garnered Justin Trudeau a majority in Parliament.

Canada has three major parties that vie for national leadership: the right-of-center Conservatives, the centrist Liberals, and the social democratic New Democratic Party. Of the three, the Liberals are by far the most popular and also the most politically anomalous. Canada became a mature democracy in 1918, when women got the vote. Since then, there have been 29 elections, of which the Liberals have won 19. They’ve governed Canada for roughly 70 percent of the last century. Politically, the Liberals are chameleon act, shifting quickly from Bill Clinton–like centrism to social democratic measures that would make Senator Bernie Sanders proud. The New Democrats, who have never held power at a national level, complain that the Liberals steal all their best ideas, most famously single-payer health care, which began as an NDP initiative in Saskatchewan but became national under a Liberal government.

There is a considerable body of political science in Canada that argues that the Liberal Party are doomed to be supplanted by a more forthrightly left-wing party. University of British Columbia graduate student David Moscrop summed up this school of thought in a column in the National Post earlier last July when he wrote that he’s “confident that the decline of the Liberal party is the new normal. Canadians should get used to a world in which Liberal governments are a thing of the past.” In support of this contention, Moscrop cited “Duverger’s law” (named after the French academic Maurice Duverger) which “states that a plurality electoral system with single-member districts (like Canada’s first-past-the-post system) will tend towards a two-party system (split along left/right political lines).”

By Duverger’s Law, Canadian politics should resemble the United States, with two major parties clearly divided along left/right lines. But Canada remains strangely defiant of this so-called law.

Moscrop’s column looks foolish in retrospect, but he wasn’t an outlier. Rather he was echoing an opinion voiced by other academics as well as journalists, who have regularly predicted the imminent death of the Liberal Party.

