David McLaughlin is a former clerk of the Executive Council and cabinet secretary in Manitoba.

It has been 40 years since an opposition party led the governing party in the polls by so much, for so long, prior to a federal election. In the previous case, Brian Mulroney went on to win the largest majority in Canadian history in 1984.

If history is on its way to repeating itself, then the question becomes not whether there will be a new Conservative government, but how it will govern.

To date, most attention has been aimed at what the Conservative Party would do in government, with very little attention paid as to how they would do so. But voters react to how parties govern, or plan to govern – not just their policies. After all, when voters tire of the way governments do things, that is usually the time and reason they vote them out.

The most common assumption is that since the current Conservatives talk like populists, they will govern as populists, and there are discernible characteristics of populist governments that we can look to for clues as to what might come.

A recent study identified close to 50 populist-styled governments in 33 countries between 1996 and 2020, from Argentina to Zambia (literally, A to Z). While not all exhibited the same........

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