WHERE WE LEARN CANADIANS LIKE A MINORITY LIBERAL GOVT.
FIRST READING: The most pointless election in Canadian history
Seriously, there has never been an election in which so little changed
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Election 44 was empirically the most pointless election in Canadian history. Monday night’s preliminary results delivered a seat count that was almost exactly the same as in 2019. As of press time, the Bloc Québécois won two more seats (34), the Tories lost two (119), the Liberals gained one (158), the Greens lost one (2) and the NDP gained one (25).
Until last night, the poster child for “pointless Canadian elections” was 1965. That was the year Liberal Prime Minister Lester Pearson called a snap election in a bid to turn his minority government into a majority. Instead, all Pearson did was add a piddling three seats to his caucus. Election 44 essentially re-enacted 1965, but with a seat change that was even more inconsequential.
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Leading a deeply divided party, Green Party Leader Annamie Paul hoped to at least win her riding of Toronto Centre. She got a distant fourth place, winning only about 2700 votes.
Conservatives won the popular vote again. The only party that has never flirted with the idea of proportional representation once again emerged as the most potent victim of first-past-the-post. The Tories got more than 34 per cent of the vote; more than two points higher than the Liberals.
While the last days of the election may have featured some talk of a Conservative minority governing with NDP support, that is now only possible if the Conservatives were to form a coalition with every single NDP MP and also 22 of the 32 Bloc Québécois ones.
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The Green Party ended up being the chief beneficiaries of the Raj Saini scandal. Saini, the Liberal incumbent in Kitchener Centre, was kicked out of the party late in the election due to sexual misconduct allegations. As a result, Green candidate Mike Morrice ended up taking the riding, becoming only the second Green MP after Elizabeth May.
Maryam Monsef, the Liberal MP who was once in charge of Trudeau’s aborted electoral reform plans, will not be returning to Ottawa. Monsef, who referred to the Taliban as “our brothers” early in the campaign, became the only Liberal upset in Southern Ontario Monday night, losing to Conservative Michelle Ferreri.
Leona Alleslev, the Liberal MP who crossed the floor to join the Conservatives, lost her seat Monday night to her Liberal challenger. Fun fact: Her now-former riding, Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, is the most heavily populated in Canada, with roughly as many people as all three territories combined .
Maxime Bernier won a distant second place in Beauce, the riding he previously held as a Conservative (and he was beat by a dairy farmer). But his grand national project to punish the Conservatives for forsaking him has paid off handsomely. While it’s incorrect to characterize every PPC voter as a disaffected Tory, early results had at least half a dozen ridings where the Conservatives would have won if purple voters had instead gone blue, including Cambridge, Cloverdale-Langley City and Nanaimo-Ladysmith.
Federal election returns virtually identical Parliament
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Right back where we started
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will be returning to Ottawa without the majority government mandate Liberals had hoped for when he called the early election last month.
Early Tuesday, the Liberals were hovering between 155 and 157 seats. The former is the number they had when Trudeau called the election in August, and the latter is what they won in 2019.
The Conservatives were teetering on 121 or 122 seats, after winning 121 less than two years ago.
They will remain the official Opposition, with leader Erin O'Toole promising the "changed" party he leads will speak for all Canadians from all walks of life.
The Bloc Québécois and NDP will bring up the rear, each individually potentially holding the balance of power in the minority House of Commons, both also within a few seats of their 2019 tallies.
With more people voting by mail than ever before, the final result in some ridings might not be known for days.
Elections Canada will start counting more than 780,000 mailed-in ballots Tuesday, and it expects most to be finished by Wednesday, but officials did warn some ridings could take up to four days for final counts.
Some extremely close races in Vancouver Granville, Edmonton Centre, and Davenport in Toronto were still going back and forth between parties as votes were counted well into the night.
Trudeau attempted a conciliatory tone in his acceptance speech, promising Canadians that he knows all they want is to finally get back to normal after the pandemic. He says the government they elected will do just that.
O'Toole said that in his concession phone call, he warned Trudeau off calling another early election to make a grab for a majority government.
“I told him if he thinks he can threaten Canadians with another election in 18 months the Conservative party will be ready," O'Toole said at his election night event in Oshawa, Ont.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, who two years ago was chided for dancing and celebrating at an election night party despite losing 20 seats, delivered a very short, more subdued speech from Vancouver, even though this time his party did make some gains.
Most election parties were smaller and quieter than usual, with pandemic restrictions keeping crowd sizes to a minimum.
The People's Party of Canada more than doubled its share of the popular vote and might have played spoiler to the Conservatives in some ridings by drawing away right-of-centre voters, but failed to elect a single MP.
The Green Party's pre-election turmoil left it with less than half the vote share it achieved in 2019, following a campaign where Leader Annamie Paul finished fourth in her own riding, and was asked not to visit many others by her own candidates.
No leaders stepped down Monday, but the future is murky for many, including Trudeau, who failed to secure a majority mandate after triggering the early election.
O'Toole was clearly sending the message in his speech he has no intention of stepping down.
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