Still Shifting? Revisiting John Ibbitson’s Canada as "Breaking Point" Looms

Across his career, Ibbitson has shown a remarkable ability to identify long-range trends. But Ibbitson consistently overstates the political implications of these structural shifts.

Jul 16, 2025

Twelve years after the publication of The Big Shift, John Ibbitson and Darrell Bricker are preparing to release its sequel, Breaking Point, scheduled for publication in October. That first book, released shortly after Stephen Harper's 2011 majority win, laid out a confident thesis: Canada was undergoing a permanent political realignment. The demographic and economic weight of the country was shifting westward, away from the "Laurentian Consensus" that had governed Canadian politics since Confederation and toward a new coalition rooted in Alberta, suburban Ontario, and immigrant communities. Harper, they argued, was the first leader to grasp and harness this new reality.

But history did not unfold as they predicted. In 2015, Harper lost to Justin Trudeau, whose Liberals went on to win four consecutive elections. With Harper gone and the Laurentian elite seemingly back in control under Trudeau and now Mark Carney, some may be tempted to dismiss The Big Shift as a misfire. Yet that would miss the deeper value of Ibbitson’s structural analysis and overlook the continued relevance of the fault lines it identified.

With Breaking Point on the horizon, now is a fitting time to re-examine Ibbitson’s arguments, not just in The Big Shift, but across his career, which includes Loyal No More, Empty Planet, and his 2015 Harper biography. What emerges is a writer with a gift for identifying long-term social and demographic change but a recurring tendency to pin those changes tightly to the fortunes of particular conservative leaders. The question is whether Breaking Point will transcend that pattern or repeat it.

The Big Shift in Context

The Big Shift argues that the traditional postwar elite consensus, rooted in Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal, what Ibbitson dubbed the "Laurentian Consensus" around 2010, was unraveling. This consensus had emphasized strong federal institutions, bilingualism, social programs, and above all, a determination to keep Quebec within the Canadian federation. Ontario, particularly, had acted as the careful manager of national unity, balancing Quebec's demands with the interests of the rest of the country.

But as the authors saw it, this consensus no longer matched the realities of 21st-century Canada. The West, particularly Alberta, had become the country’s economic engine. Immigration was reshaping suburban Ontario in ways that were making voters more fiscally conservative and culturally pragmatic. Quebec, while still linguistically and culturally distinct, was losing political and demographic weight, irrelevant behind a linguistic “Ottawa River curtain.” Harper, according to the book, was the first to build a coalition around these new facts on the ground.

The Big Shift is strongest when describing these slow, generational transformations: population movement westward, the rise of the suburbs, the growth of immigrant influence. It was less convincing when it forecast a new Conservative dominance that would last for generations. That misstep is a familiar one in Ibbitson’s work.

The Harper Problem

Ibbitson has a habit of identifying real structural changes, then attaching them too confidently to a particular leader. In The Big Shift, Harper is treated not just as a beneficiary of changing political geography, but as the architect and inevitable long-term steward. The 2011 majority win is portrayed as the consolidation of a new national order.

Yet within four years, Harper was out, replaced by a resurgent Liberal Party led by Justin Trudeau. Similarly, in Loyal No More (2001), Ibbitson argued that Mike Harris had initiated a revolution in Ontario politics, where the province would abandon its historic federalist centrism and adopt a more Western-style self-interest. That book, too, concluded with predictions of political dominance that failed to last. Harris left politics a year later.

These tendencies also shape Ibbitson’s biography of Stephen Harper, which paints the former prime minister in admiring tones. His writing often reflects a conservative worldview, and while this does not invalidate his structural analysis, it sometimes distorts and undermines his forecasts.

What The Big Shift Missed

Despite its insights, The Big Shift left important questions unexplored. Most notably, it downplayed Quebec. The authors imply that Quebec no longer needs to be "managed" by Ontario or accommodated by Ottawa, a break from a century of Canadian political thinking. But they offer little analysis of how Quebec would respond to this reduced role, or of the new forms of nationalism that were emerging after 2007 and that were ultimately consolidated under the CAQ after 2018. The Big Shift was never translated into French and received scant attention in Quebec, where its core thesis, and particularly its dismissive treatment of Quebec’s political relevance, went largely unnoticed. Despite the authors’ claim that Quebec no longer needed special accommodation within the federation, the book provoked little response from francophone commentators, suggesting that its provocative reordering of Canada’s power map bypassed the province’s intellectual and political elites altogether.

The West, too, was misread. Alberta is presented as triumphant, the new center of gravity in Confederation. This view underestimated the depth of Alberta’s institutional alienation. The authors noted the West’s frustration with Ottawa but cast it largely as a prelude to power, not as the seed of rupture. Since 2013, that frustration has hardened into something more volatile, first in the form of Wexit rhetoric, now in the increasing plausibility of a referendum on separation under Danielle Smith.

Other blind spots include the Indigenous resurgence, the climate transition, and the rise of populist politics globally, forces that have reshaped Canadian politics in ways The Big Shift did not anticipate. Even so, its core insights about where people live, how they vote, and what that means for federal coalitions remain useful.

Ibbitson’s Broader Pattern

Across his career, Ibbitson has shown a remarkable ability to identify long-range trends. He is especially skilled at detecting what might be called tectonic political movement—slow shifts in geography, demography, and institutional culture. His 2019 book Empty Planet, again co-written with Bricker, challenged the dominant belief in unchecked global population growth. They predicted a sharp population decline that would reshape economies and geopolitics, a view now increasingly validated by global data.

But Ibbitson consistently overstates the political implications of these structural shifts. He tends to write with great confidence at what turns out to be the midpoint of a transformation, declaring it complete when it is in fact still unfolding. And he consistently elevates the conservative politician who seems to embody the trend, only to see them displaced before the shift solidifies.

Still, his frameworks endure. The concept of the "Laurentian Consensus" has entered the political vocabulary, and the divide between "Laurentian" and "post-Laurentian" Canada remains a useful lens. He understands the importance of political geography—a field too often neglected in favor of purely ideological analysis when discussing 21st century politics.

Previewing Breaking Point

While the full argument of Breaking Point remains to be seen, early previews suggest a darker tone. This is not the story of the West’s victory, but of its disillusionment. With Trudeau gone and Mark Carney positioned as the next standard-bearer of the Laurentian Consensus, Ibbitson appears ready to parrot Preston Manning’s argument that the West’s patience has run out. Alberta, in this telling, is no longer waiting to be let into the center of power. It may be preparing to walk away. If The Big Shift was about the West rising to lead the country, Breaking Point may argue that the country has refused to follow—and risks fracture as a result. The danger, however, is that Ibbitson once again allows his partisan sympathies to shape the narrative. If Alberta’s estrangement is framed as Canada’s punishment for electing Liberals, the structural roots of Western alienation will be obscured. The real story is deeper: a federation that has failed to adjust its institutions and culture to reflect a new balance of power.

Conclusion

John Ibbitson remains one of Canada’s most compelling political analysts. His strength lies in identifying the structural forces that shape political life over generations. But his weakness is a recurring overconfidence in conservative leadership as the vehicle of those forces. As Breaking Point nears publication, it offers a chance to revisit the valuable but incomplete arguments of The Big Shift. The shift itself may still be underway. But the question now isn’t whether the West will take power. It’s whether the federation can hold if it does not.

References:

https://activehistory.ca/blog/2015/11/04/is-the-big-shift-history/

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/05/the-canadian-ideology/

https://www.americasquarterly.org/blog/has-canada-undergone-a-big-shift-to-the-right/

https://www.bartleby.com/essay/The-Big-Shift-By-Darrel-Bricker-And-PKK4XCBTK6Z3W

https://www.buzzfeed.com/paulmcleod/book-review-the-big-shift-why-stephen-harper-will-keep-winni

https://c2cjournal.ca/2013/04/how-the-west-won-c2c-journal-reviews-the-big-shift-by-darrell-bricker-and-john-ibbitson/

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/407-west-of-centre/episode/16143299-short-the-big-shift-meets-the-breaking-point

https://www.convivium.ca/articles/a-post-politics-consensus/

https://cpsa-acsp.ca/papers-2013/Tozzo.pdf

https://www.dromartistcollective.org/the-laurentian-consensus-and-political-crises-in-canada/

https://fcpp.org/2013/05/10/media-release-barry-cooper-reviews-bricker-and-ibbitsons-the-big-shift-whither-the-laurentian-canadian-worldview/