Election Results and My Disappointment

My personal opinion on yesterday's election: disaster. I was shocked when I checked the news this morning to find out we now had a Conservative majority, an NDP opposition, a negligible Liberal party, a practically non-existent Bloc Quebecois and a Green MP.

I knew that a Liberal majority (ha!) or even minority wasn't happening. I was hoping for a reduced Conservative minority, and polls showed the NDP were doing well so I expected them to increase their presence. I think I was really hoping for a centre-left coalition, a government that could actually hold on for more than a year and that could be effective. Instead...this.

A lot of undecided voters, or disaffected Liberal voters, or people who didn't like Michael Ignatieff and didn't believe Jack Layton could really be Prime Minister, in the end seemed to think that there just wasn't really any choice besides Harper. Really? Harper? The one whose party has been found in contempt of Parliament, who has muzzled cabinet ministers and MPs, who has limited access for the press? The one who has cut funding to women's organisations and squandered a budget surplus, who claimed to have steered Canada through the recession by taking credit for policies enacted by the previous Liberal governments and then denied there was a recession at all? The one who twice prorogued parliament to avoid disclosing information and losing power? Yes, that one.

This is what has really disappointed me. It's not that the party that I don't support won. It's democracy, that can happen (though, to be fair, just under 40% of the country voted Conservative, which means about 60% did not. If that's not reason enough for an AV or PR system, I don't know what is...). No, it's the fact that, for whatever reason, Canadians decided that transparency, openness, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, respect for parliament and democracy and truthfulness were not really that important. (True, again, for 60% of people these things were important, but about 200,000 more people voted for the CPC in this election, so there's that.)

From the Globe and Mail's April 27 endorsement of Harper: "Mr. Harper could achieve a great deal more if he would relax his grip on Parliament, its independent officers and the flow of information, and instead bring his disciplined approach to bear on the great challenges at hand. That is the great strike against the Conservatives: a disrespect for Parliament, the abuse of prorogation, the repeated attempts (including during this campaign) to stanch debate and free expression. It is a disappointing failing in a leader who previously emerged from a populist movement that fought so valiantly for democratic reforms."

To me, these are not small failings that can be shrugged off. These are some of the most fundamental principles in a modern democracy. We don't say suppression of dissent and debate is okay as long as we have stability. That's what dictatorships do. And no, of course I'm not saying that Canada under Harper is a dictatorship; I'm saying that it's very important not to lose sight of the closed nature of Harper's government just because we didn't suffer as badly in the economic crisis as everyone else.

Now that we have four or five years under a Harper majority, it'll be interesting to see how these issues play out - will he relax his grip now that he doesn't have to fight tooth and nail for his government, or will he tighten it because, frankly, he can?

Election Results and the Slow Death of the LPC

I have many thoughts on yesterday's election, but I'll split them up into a few posts so if you're interested in some and not others, you don't have to be too bored.

*************************

So that's that. Far from the result I was hoping for, Stephen Harper's Conservatives were elected to a majority government yesterday with 167 seats (all figures from Elections Canada). The NDP is now the official opposition with 102 seats, up from 37. The Liberal Party had its worst showing ever, going from 77 to 34 seats, and its leader Michael Ignatieff has resigned after failing to win his own riding. And the Bloc Quebecois was all but eliminated, winning just four seats, none of which belonged to leader Gilles Duceppe. Voter turnout was 61.4%, up from 58.8% in the 2008 poll.

Some people are talking about the left vote being split - that people who didn't want to vote Conservative went far-left instead of centre-left, voting NDP instead of Liberal, which helps to account for the LPC's dismal showing. There's some truth to that - 53.4% of the vote went to the NDP, Liberal and Green parties, and 39.6% to the Conservatives - but look at the seat changes. The NDP only took six of their seats from the CPC (and lost two to them); they took 16 from the LPC (and lost one to them), and, amazingly, they took 45 seats from the Bloc Quebecois. The vast majority of the party's gains were in Quebec, where, in the 2008 election, the party won one seat. That's right, one. And it was their first in 17 years. Most of the Liberal seats in the rest of the country went to the Conservatives, particularly in Ontario and the Maritimes.

So Quebec rejected the separatist BQ, threw out half of their Liberal MPs and a few of the Conservatives who'd managed a seat in the last election, and voted overwhelmingly for the NDP. And this was no question of splitting the vote - the Liberals polled the lowest of all of the major parties in the province (14.2%), while the NDP took 42.9% of the popular vote. The NDP is due credit for running a great campaign and for convincing people to give the 'third party' - who a decade ago barely qualified for official party status - a chance.

But the real issue is the demise of the Liberal Party, the failure of Ignatieff to connect with voters in his own constituency and in the rest of the country. Part of Ignatieff's failure is due to very effective attack ads run by the CPC, which have been running since before official campaigning began. The Conservative Party has done a very, very good job of painting Ignatieff as too intellectual, too American, too elitist, to aristocratic - too out of touch with Canadians to be Prime Minister. And Ignatieff never managed to overcome this image - a lot of people who wouldn't call themselves Conservatives were uneasy about his leadership, or disliked the man. I was shocked yesterday to hear my mom offhandedly mention that my dad wouldn't vote Liberal because he hates Ignatieff; I wasn't aware that my father even knew who Ignatieff, or any other politician, was.

Ignatieff wasn't elected at a Liberal leadership convention; he came in second at the 2006 convention behind Stephane Dion and served as deputy leader, and took over as interim leader in 2008 when Dion stepped down. His leadership was ratified at a party convention six months later. Neither Dion nor Ignatieff inspired voters; the party's seats in Parliament have been in decline since the Sponsorship Scandal and subsequent election in 2004 (that election was under Paul Martin, who didn't have much of a chance after the scandal was made public. I still maintain that Martin, whose work as finance minister under Jean Chretien left Canada with a budget surplus and with bank regulations that helped us weather the financial crisis, which Harper took credit for, could have been a great PM had he had a real chance). The Liberal Party has been in decline for nearly a decade and has tried a series of quick-fix solutions: a too-early leadership convention without enough consideration of candidates, propelling Ignatieff to leadership only two years after he became an MP for the first time, forcing elections without any clear policy vision.

The party has overlooked the fact that has become glaringly evident in this election: nobody trusts them to move this country forward. It's not because of the Sponsorship scandal anymore - if anything this election showed that transparency isn't actually that high up on Canadians' lists of concerns. It's because the party has no vision. In opposition, the LPC gave the average voter the impression that it was really good at opposing Conservative policies, but not great at coming up with alternatives. If you asked people what the LPC stands for, I don't think anybody would have an answer besides whatever is the opposite of what the CPC says. Much as I like Ignatieff and think he'd have made a good PM, generally people don't trust a leader that nobody had heard of five years ago and who has no real record to go on.

A Conservative majority means that there can no longer be threats of early elections, and there will now be four or five years until the next one. As the LPC doesn't even have the official opposition to worry about anymore, they can and should take this time to re-build the party. To take their time picking a leader people will be able to connect with (and to realise that it's still to early for that leader to be Justin Trudeau, who while good-looking and charismatic is still young and inexperienced and will have to prove himself more than anyone else because of his name and needs to be given time to do that). To develop a real policy platform that is proactive rather than reactive, and to bring back the left of centre votes that moved to the right for economics and stability or to the left for leadership, real opposition or lack of anything better.