The age of minority governments has arrived. Can the parties adapt?

It's always dangerous to assume that what has happened in politics will continue to happen. But with the results of the 2021 federal election now in (or nearly so), it seems reasonable to assume at least one thing: minority Parliaments are now the rule, not the exception.

If so, political parties are going to have to get a lot better at working with each other. Or Canadians are going to get very tired of voting in elections.

There have now been seven federal elections since the Progressive Conservative and Reform parties came together to become a united Conservative party in 2003. Only two of those elections ended with a party winning a majority of seats in the House of Commons. The Conservatives did it under Stephen Harper in 2011. In 2015, the Liberals did it with Justin Trudeau.

Minority governments used to be relatively rare; only 10 of the 37 elections between 1867 and 2000 produced minorities. And most of those governments emerged during specific eras (there were three minorities in the 1920s and then a run of four between 1957 and 1965).

But it may be that federal politics has never been more competitive than it is now.

Today's Liberal and Conservative parties have been resilient contenders for government, but neither is quite as dominant as the old Liberal and PC parties were. After crashing in the 1990s, the NDP can now be expected to win at least 15 per cent of the popular vote.

And the Bloc Quebecois has turned out to be difficult to chase away. The sovereignist party nearly disappeared in the 2011 and 2015 elections that produced majority governments but has since rebounded to become the third party in Parliament.