As we anticipated just before the voting began here at Examiner Opinion Zone, Monday’s Canadian election was not just business as usual. In fact, this election was a political tsunami, changing the political landscape far more significantly than most such contests ever do.
First, the losers: For the first time in more than a hundred years, the Liberal Party of Canada will be forming neither the government nor the official opposition in the House of Commons. Before May 2, 2011, their worst electoral result was in 1984 under the leadership of John Turner, with 40 seats. This time around, under the leadership of Michael Ignatieff, the party went from 77 seats to just 34. Ignatieff lost his own seat and announced his resignation after the election, saying he is going back to academic life, making him the third leader in row to leave the Liberal Party after an electoral defeat.
Without suggesting that support for Quebec’s separation has vanished, the party promoting that option on the federal scene has taken a severe beating—so severe a beating that the Bloc Québécois might not be able to recover at all. They went from 49 seats when the election was declared to a paltry four. The party lost its official status, which means, among other things, that they cannot count on any public funding for their staff and they won’t be allowed to ask questions regularly during parliamentary sessions. Immediately after the election, the leader of the Bloc, Gilles Duceppe, who was himself one of the many who lost their seats, announced his resignation. And as we can imagine, people are not exactly lining up to replace him.
If this election has been a very difficult one, to say the least, for the Liberal Party of Canada and the Bloc Québécois, the results for the other parties were a lot more positive—and no, we’re not talking about the Green Party electing its first ever MP.
One big winner Monday night was the left-leaning New Democratic Party, which will form the official opposition for the first time in its 50-year history. Before the election, they held 39 seats; today, they have 102, with 59 of them coming from the province of Quebec alone. Why did so many Quebec voters turn to the NDP when for the last 20 years, the Bloc Québécois has been the most powerful political party in the province? Various theories have been floated, but what’s clear is that the arrival of the NDP, and the almost complete disappearance of the Bloc, will dramatically change the dynamic of the debate, since less of it will be about the role and place of the province of Quebec, and more of it will be about what social and economic policies would most benefit the country as a whole.
The real winner, of course, was the Conservative Party of Canada, which has finally won a majority after two consecutive minority governments, going from 143 seats to 167. They won that majority mainly because of the seats they won in the greater Toronto area. Often viewed as a party that could not seduce urban voters living in major multicultural cities, the Conservatives were able to prove this perception wrong by winning in the 5th-largest city in North America, where almost half of inhabitants are not born in Canada. And that’s probably the biggest achievement for the Conservatives in this election: stealing the votes of traditionally Liberal voters.
Today, Stephen Harper, the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, can take pride in what he has accomplished. The Conservatives defeated the Liberals, their longstanding opponents, reducing them to third-party status; got rid of the Bloc and all the constitutional debates that went along with that party; and won a majority, relegating the NDP to a distant second.
This major realignment of political forces should be a good thing for Canada. For one thing, we should see more debates on public policies that matter to voters from a right wing vs. left wing perspective—debates on whether bigger or smaller government is better, whether more or less public spending is necessary, and so on. And because the Conservative Party won the majority, they can really implement those fiscally prudent policies they’ve been talking about for five years now.
If they fail to deliver on that front, we might just see another major realignment come next election.
