Mixed Emotions

As much as I was yee-haw-ing all over the place about Iggy and Duceppe being defeated in their own ridings as their parties both tanked in the wake of the “Orange Crush” I cannot be happy about a Conservative majority. It’s definitely a bittersweet night.

With a Harper-led majority we have as a country just given the class bully our lunch money. Apparently, we were willing to overlook his Contempt of Parliament and are ready to let him build prisons for a phantom crime wave, hand over the management of our healthcare to private corporations, dismantle the CBC, continue to erode our rights, pave the way for UBB and other nonsense taxation, and otherwise f-ck us in more positions than are outlined in the Kama Sutra.

That aside, I would be remiss not to point out that for an election that “didn’t matter,” those few who voted made some interesting decisions:

• The Bloc was flattened — from 47 seats to just three, losing its Official Party Status and their leader.
• The Liberals were similarly gutted — dropping more than half their seats from 77 to 34 with Ignatieff losing his own riding.
• Most of the votes from both of those parties helped push the NDP to their historic surge from 36 seats to over 100.
• The Green Party now has a seat in Parliament, courtesy leader Elizabeth May — for what it’s worth, I think the media consortium’s decision to shut the Greens out of the national debates had everything to do with her win

(screenshot above taken at 9:40 PST, before the final numbers were in)

Voter turnout, while up in the advance polls was still low — hovering around 60% — and of those who bothered to vote, just under 40% voted Conservative which somehow translates into 54% of the seats. NDP earned about 30% of the popular vote and 34% of the seats. Liberals dropped to less than 19% pop and just 11% of the seats; Bloc 6% pop, fewer than 1% seats; Green just under 4% pop, fewer than 1% seats. Oh, and my federal party? They managed about the same number of votes as the Communist Party. Sigh.

The popular vote doesn’t seem too out of whack overall until you consider these examples:

• in Ontario, a 5% increase in popular vote translated into 19 additional seats for Conservatives.
• in Saskatchewan, the NDP got a solid 32% of the popular vote but not a single seat.
• Despite the Bloc losing almost all of their seats, they still had 23% of the popular vote in Quebec

Other thoughts & observations

• Elizabeth May may have won the soundbite/retweet contest with “Amateurs built the ark; professionals built the Titanic,” but please do not attribute this to May — earliest citation goes back to 1979 at least.
• Both Duceppe and Ignatieff gave great speeches in the face of stunning defeats.
• I was annoyed with local A News coverage who chose to bring in two political commentators and no French translator and cut away from Federal leaders twice when they switched to French.
• While Jack Layton’s supporters waved Canadian flags, Harper’s waved Harper Conservative flags OTOH, Layton received a cheer in the Conservative room and Harper was booed in the NDP room.

In the end, I hope that as Official Opposition the NDP holds the government accountable. I know my MP will be hearing from me on a more regular basis. I also hope we can open the door to a national discussion on election reforms — while I don’t expect the Conservatives to approve of any kind of reform, just having a real discussion could almost justify this mess.