By BJ Bjornson
Well, a Conservative majority government, which is good news if you happen to be a corporation as you have tax cuts coming. Otherwise, I don�t really want to think where we�ll be heading over the next several years.
The big stories of this election was the horrific showing of the centrist Liberal party, which has appeared practically rudderless since Jean Chretien resigned as leader seven or eight years ago, and the near complete collapse of the separatist Bloc Quebecois. It is going to be a very different parliament from what we�ve had the last five years.
I have a hard time seeing how the Bloc recovers from their collapse, going from 48 seats to 3, but they at least do have a signal issue that they can rally around in the future, and it seems unlikely that Quebec separatism will just go away as its federal party suddenly has. Still, for the moment, they are no longer an official party, and that�s a big shift from the status quo.
The Liberals on the other hand have a far harder battle ahead of them on the national scene. They�ve drifted away from any coherent vision for the country and have instead staggered from position to position and leader to leader these last several years with their electoral fortunes seeming to suffer for it each and every time out. This time, their losses were big enough to hand the Conservatives victory, while the Bloc�s collapse gave the NDP a huge boost in seats and official opposition status.
Whether or not the NDP can maintain the kind of support they found late in this campaign will be a big factor in whether or not the Liberals manage to recover from what happened tonight. While the NDP have always presented a relatively coherent left-wing vision to contrast the right-wing antics of the Conservatives, this is the first time they�ve managed to win a major share of the seats in parliament, with their previous best total coming at a time when the Bloc was strong and the Conservative votes were split between Reform and Progressive Conservative parties. As the official opposition, they shouldn�t have too much difficulty pounding the Conservatives day in and day out over policy differences, though how the NDP and their leader Jack Layton weather the inevitable Conservative attack ads will also be a major factor in their future prospects, and with them, the Liberals.
The other big factor is who the Liberals find as a leader. Their choices recently have been less than inspired, and I haven�t seen too many great leadership prospects sitting on the sidelines in that party. One of the remaining major figures in the federal Liberal party, Bob Rae, was an NDP premier in Ontario and made some noises tonight that sounded like a merger was going to be a topic of discussion in the very near future, something the current Liberal leader certainly isn�t about to countenance, but then Ignatieff doesn�t appear long for the leadership position after tonight's results, particularly given he lost his own seat.
I don�t suspect that the Liberals as a party will be ready to merge their fortunes with the NDP anytime soon, but they�re going to have a hell of a time defining themselves in relation to their two more clearly delineated rivals. My best bet is that we�ll see them fighting on for at least another couple of election cycles, but without a powerful and charismatic national leader to rally support around, we may have just witnessed the end of the the Liberal party as a major national force in Canada. And with two major parties getting trounced in one night, we can say that whatever happens going forward, a major realignment has occurred. Should be interesting, if not particularly fun.
Monday, May 2, 2011
Election Night in Canada
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I don't think the Liberals are finished just yet. Jack Layton's speech in TO tonight sounded like he though he was the PM and not Harper. Maybe a first a sign that he doesn't know that now in a majority Parliament, as the official opposition, he really has no power. My point being that Layton defined a definite left agenda - fine with me - and Harper now I suspect will lose complete control of his authoritarian impulses to alienate even more of us. Both Harper's party and the NDP may leave the centre open for the Liberals if they can find a leader to rebuild the party. They've got 4 years. Me I'd like a merger of Liberals & NDP which given what I've seen of the votes cast in individual ridings would have meant a clean swipe for the Lib/NDP except in Alberta.
ReplyDeleteIt should be interesting to watch the dynamics of the NDP with the new mass of Quebec seats. I loved that the idiot from the Pontiac, Cannon, got the boot and Liz May kick Lunn out in BC to give us our first Green Party member of Parliament.
I don�t think the Liberals are done yet either, but they definitely need to find their footing if they hope to avoid that fate, and the inevitable leadership battle coming up won�t really help in that, though they do really need to find a better leader. So far, they�ve been mostly surviving on brand and the perceived lack of an alternative if one wanted to defeat the Conservatives. This election they lost the latter reason to vote for them, and they haven�t done much of anything to shore up the brand recently either.
ReplyDeleteThat said, Layton does have some work to do if this result is to be something beyond a high-water mark. His speech last night wasn�t too impressive, though he was talking to party loyalists who had just achieved an almost unthinkable result. It will be interesting to see if the NDP and Layton can shift their rhetoric from perennial also-ran third party status to that of a �government-in-waiting� official opposition. Layton has to do more than spout high ideals and oppose the Conservative agenda, he has to show Canadians that the NDP can offer an alternative as a governing party, which they�ve never had to do federally. If they fail to do that, the Liberals will have a much better chance to move back into contention.
As to the merger producing results based on the vote split in this election, I�m far more doubtful. That was the idea behind the whole �Unite the Right� movement, where it appeared that in Ontario at least, they could pick up dozens of seats from the Liberals based on the results of the Reform/Alliance and PCs, but instead only picked up a few seats and had to wait a few more election cycles for the Liberals to slowly self-destruct and lose the rest of them thanks to the Red Tories inability to stomach the hard-right result of that merger. What survives of that Red Tory vote won�t move to the NDP, and the Liberals always governed more right-of-centre, and a significant portion of their support remains there. Even I have hard time looking at the NDP platform as the kind of government I want to see. And of course should the merger make the resulting party shift further rightward to the centre than most traditional NDP voters like, there is the Green party waiting in the wings to drain away support from the left yet again.
In any case, it will be a while shaking out the results of this one, and should prove interesting watching.