It could plausibly be argued, then, that Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government was felled more by the business cycle than by its actions or those of its opponents.

Plausibly—but insufficiently.

Let’s take a closer look at why the Conservatives lost. The party’s raw vote total dropped by only 231,905, as John Geddes notes in Maclean’s. What changed between the 2011 election (when the Conservatives won 39.6 percent of votes cast) and the 2015 election (when the Liberals won 39.5 percent) was the size of the electorate, which increased by 2.8 million. Almost all of this additional turnout translated into additional votes for the Liberals, who won 4.1 million more votes in 2015 than they had in 2011. These new Liberal voters were as likely to be old as young. They paid scant attention to the much-publicized accusations that Harper had turned into some kind of un-Canadian dictator. What they did believe was that the Liberals would do a better job protecting the middle class and creating jobs than the Conservatives.

While Canada has had a relatively benign economic experience since 2008, the emphasis has to be on the “relatively.” While the Canadian middle class has fared comparatively well, the emphasis has to be on the “comparatively.” In less excruciating form, Canada faces the same social challenge that bedevils every other advanced democracy: the tendency for the rewards of economic growth to concentrate in the top income brackets. Harper’s opponents successfully made this issue the ballot question, and the Harper government could not offer a compelling answer.

The question won’t go away. The answer offered by the successful Liberals—more redistributive taxes, more deficit-financed government spending—is unlikely to work. The big idea of Canada’s next prime minister, the Liberal Party’s Justin Trudeau, echoed the thesis of U.S. President Barack Obama’s Osawatomie, Kansas, speech of 2011: that a sustained increase in government spending on infrastructure can accelerate economic growth over the long term. It’s possible to write an equation on a blackboard demonstrating this. But it’s very doubtful that modern governments have the capacity to do it—to choose investments based only on economic returns, not on political considerations. Canadian history is an industrial graveyard of proofs to the contrary, from the redundant transcontinental railways built by Liberal governments in the early 20th century; through the failed attempt by the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau, Justin Trudeau’s father, to build an automobile industry in the high-unemployment zone of New Brunswick in the 1970s; to the National Energy Program of the final Trudeau government of the 1980s—the worst policy debacle in Canada’s post-World War II economic history.

Canadians are prone to placing excessive confidence in their governments, but they do learn their lessons. The elder Trudeau’s statist turn in the early 1980s ended in a Liberal wipeout at the polls in 1984. Will his son have more success economically or politically? Almost certainly not. But taxes will likely be higher, government spending less controlled, and the misuse of public funds for political ends more conspicuous. When Canadians vote next, the moment will be ripe for the right kind of conservative with the right kind of message—if and only if Canadian Conservatives can eschew the temptation to say it louder.