Election

Well, it happened, and happily (from my perspective), it went well. The polling that was showing a two-horse race between the Liberals and the Conservatives turned into exactly that on election night. Both parties had over 40% support; the Liberals had around 1.5% more, which netted them a plurality of seats because Conservative support is most heavily concentrated on the Prairies, and particularly in Alberta and Saskatchewan, which have fewer seats than the east (Ontario and Quebec).

It's a minority, unless a handful of MPs decide to cross the floors and join the Liberal party. Probably unlikely, but this sort of thing does happen from time to time. At the time of writing, the Liberals have 168 seats, needing 172 to form a majority government. As a minority government, they'll need to work with the opposition parties (though in practice, with the New Democratic Party and the Bloc Quebecois) to pass bills and stay in power. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. The NDP propped up the Liberals for the last couple of years while Justin Trudeau was becoming deeply unpopular, the price for which was subsidized dental care for children, seniors, and certain adults (the Canadian Dental Care Plan), as well as the start of a pharmacare plan.

This is big! This is the most important thing the NDP has done in my lifetime, immediately making life better for a whole lot of people. My father-in-law, one of those aggravating "I'm not going to vote, what does it matter" types, now has his diabetes medication covered. He just bought an insulin pump, which will be reimbursed fully. This is really good, and frankly, the sort of thing that minority governments leaning on the NDP should produce. Government should be about using power to make life better for the people living in a country. Obviously, in a lot of places, it absolutely isn't. But it's the sort of thing that can happen when progressive parties are allowed a little bit of power.

Unfortunately for the NDP, they got decimated in this election. Their support mostly went to the Liberals (but in other places, oddly, to the Conservatives). But this election wasn't about them, and while the results will be hard to stomach for them, I hope they're seen as a temporary thing rather than an outright rejection of the party and its policies. Because this was an election that in the end became a visceral reaction to the leadership south of us. We saw what was going on in the States and collectively told them to fuck off. The majority of Canadians didn't want the Conservatives elected, and voted accordingly. The Liberals, NDP, and Bloc Quebecoic collectively made up around 60% of the vote. Ordinarily, because of our electoral system, that might lead to a Conservative government, given our riding system. But enough support peeled off from the NDP and to the Liberals that the Conservatives were beaten for the fourth election in a row.

The night was wild and full of surprises. The Greens were reduced to a single seat, party co-leader Elizabeth May in Saanich-Gulf Islands. The NDP got battered, reduced to a single seat in Quebec, one in Manitoba, one in Alberta, the seat representing Nunavut, and a few in BC. The Conservatives did reasonably well in Atlantic Canada, picking up a few seats.

But people really don't like their leader, Pierre Poilievre. Poilievre is an effective opposition politican whose modus operandi is to attack, attack, attack. He was my MP, briefly, many years ago. And he's like the dog who, chasing the car, doesn't know what to do when it stops. One of the things he talked about was cutting the size of the public service, which lines up with a Conservative platform, sure. But he represents a riding in Ottawa, and Ottawa is where most of the country's public servants live. The biggest surprise of election night was that Poilievre lost his seat to Liberal Bruce Fanjoy, who'd been tirelessly door-knocking for years. This could be a lesson in humility for Poilievre, whose only employment has been political. But it won't be. Alberta MP Damien Kurek has already agreed to step down and so Poilievre can run in the by-election.

And he'll win. This is a rural riding that borders on Saskatchewan, a riding that Kurek won with almost 82% of the vote. Carney has indicated he'll call a by-election quickly: "no games, nothing." The next parliament will be interesting, and will dash the hopes of many seeing Poilievre quietly pack it in. In Battle River-Crowfoot, he will likely be re-elected until he retires. Mm, wonderful.