1) Based on the roughly one hour of coverage I’ve watched, the best line of the night so far came from pundit Warren Kinsella on SunTV. At about 8:50pm, he noted that the Conservatives “can’t win a seat in Calgary twice.” I’m sure this isn’t the first time someone has used this line, but it gets to one of the major themes this evening – will the Conservatives be able to make inroads in places like Ontario where they’ve had trouble getting traction?
2) For all you hard-core politics data fiends tuning in tonight, your best bet in terms of TV coverage (at least from what I’ve seen) seems to be the French CBC. I got dizzy as the election night news team zipped through a riding-by-riding breakdown of the race in Quebec and BC. Merci, tout le monde – the French CBC is head and shoulders above the other networks in terms of getting into the nitty-gritty details. Even with my very limited French, their coverage isn’t too hard to follow.
3) David Akin on SunTV was referring about 30 minutes ago to the New Democratic Party’s expected strength at the polls as “Orange Crush.” (Apparently they are serving up Orange Crush at the party’s Toronto election night headquarters; perhaps we’ll see the party faithful waving orange flags and wearing orange hats later on.)
A question to ponder tonight – if the “Orange Crush” talk turns out to be true, it will be interesting to see how heavily concerns about jobs and employment weighed on the minds of Canadians in their mid- and late-20s as they voted, and whether these concerns helped drive en masse them towards the New Democrats. We’ll have to wait for the data-crunchers to release their exit polling findings before we get into that side of things.
I could be wrong, but at times in this campaign it seemed the two main parties were addressing themselves exclusively to people with jobs, and only the New Democrats spoke to the needs of people in more precarious circumstances.
