Canadian Admits: I Was Wrong About the Election

Conservative leader Stephen Harper will be the Prime Minister of Canada for four solid years now, guaranteed. This is because his party won a majority stronghold in this week’s general federal election, with 167 seats. So that’s it. I’m sticking my head underwater. Bring on the wars, tear down the schools, hide the women in the kitchen. It’s happened.

As I reported a couple weeks back, I thought a Conservative majority was impossible. I thought this country was getting wise to Harper’s tricks, and that they were disgusted by his dirty political tactics. Nope.

A big factor in the Conservatives’ superlative victory is the fact that the Liberals, led by the cardboard Michael Ignatieff, lost seats left and right, in a record low showing (as opposed to last election’s total of 77 seats, the Liberals now have 34, meaning they lost 43). Of course, the next day he stepped down as party leader (as did the Bloc Quebecois’ Gilles Duceppe, whose party also lost 43 seats, cutting them down to a slim four).

The good news is that much of the support lost by the Liberals and the Bloc Quebecois went to the NDP whose leader, Jack Layton, was the only one who ran a virtually smear-free campaign. His hands certainly aren’t clean, but the NDP ran fewer attack ads on the whole than the other parties, focusing instead on a fairly clear social platform. For the first time in history, the NDP is now the official opposition, a position they stole from the Liberals, who did nothing to earn it or deserve it. The NDP’s record showing consisted of increasing their support by nearly seventy seats (102, as opposed to the last election’s 36), and it is this blogger’s hope that this unprecedented event brings a bit of sense to parliament.

However, a lot of the support previously allotted to the Liberals and Bloc Quebecois also went to the Conservative juggernaut, which is proof of how sour people were on the pair of now deposed leaders. If people are willing to change their very political slant just to vote you out, your party has botched the campaign in the worst way possible, and probably deserves to be run out of town.

To sum it up, this election is a historical one in the history of Canada: the Conservatives stole seats from every party, as did the NDP. I hate that Stephen Harper can do whatever he wants for the next four years, which probably means that I’ll soon be out of a home, or drafted to Iraq, but it’s certainly positive that the NDP holds more sway now. As someone who followed the election closely for the last month, mark my words: nobody earned their position more than the NDP. So good on them. And hey, even the Green party won a seat, putting them at +1 from the last election. Neat.