The Conservatives have a strong base in Western Canada. It is inconceivable that the party will lose Alberta anytime soon. Quebec has shifted massively toward the NDP — which is the natural federalist home for many progressive Quebecers. The NDP’s Quebec caucus is larger than the rest of its delegation and there is little doubt the NDP will defend its Quebec base. The party has been taking Quebec-friendly positions on equalization, the Constitution and representation by population.

But the federal Liberals no longer have a regional base. They lost Western Canada in the 1970s and Francophone Quebec in the 1980s and ’90s. They’ve now lost their base across this province, including among new Canadians concentrated in the suburbs of Toronto as well as downtown Toronto voters. The federal Liberals managed to lose touch with Ontario and lose touch with Canada’s urban areas.

The Liberals’ refusal to defend and support Ontario for the better part of two decades has been staggering. Their refusal — when pushed — to choose the GTA over Calgary or Montreal was perplexing. The Liberals have been asking themselves for more than a decade: “How do we reach out to Western Canada? How do we rebuild in Quebec?”

They did not spend enough time asking how to hold Ontario. The value proposition the Liberals were selling was increasingly unattractive to its core supporters. Much of the Liberal program was based on a strategic bargain: Ontario taxpayers would happily redistribute a chunk of their wealth so the Liberals could buy off voters in Atlantic Canada, Manitoba and parts of Quebec. It worked through the ’90s. The model is now dead.

The good news for Ontario is that the province will now be a competitive battleground. The province will not be taken for granted by the federal Liberals or ignored by the Conservatives or the NDP. The Conservatives won most of the province’s seats, but many victories were narrow and the product of splits between NDP and Liberal voters. Ontario voters and the Ontario government can press the federal government on issues crucial to Ontario’s future — and they may get a reasonable response.

NDP and Conservative candidates ran local campaigns that said they would fight for Ontario and the GTA. That is extraordinarily healthy. It could represent the normalization of Ontario politics, whereby Ontario MPs can defend their constituents without worrying about how Quebec nationalists, Atlantic Canadian fishers or oilpatch executives will react. Their own MPs will do their bidding.

What would that positive federal agenda look like? It would begin by taking principled positions on all federal fiscal transfers to provinces, which is not currently the case on infrastructure, social housing, job training or equalization. It would include policy and fiscal changes on employment insurance, the reallocation of seats in the House of Commons, immigration, the restoration of the Great Lakes and energy investments that consider Ontario’s long-term interests.

New and returning MPs from all three parties have an incredible opportunity to tell Ontario voters: we get it. MPs from different parties will no doubt differ on a whole range of questions — which is healthy — but hopefully they take the same lesson from these election results: the Liberals forgot their Ontario base and we won’t make the same mistake.