Election Results

[bjarvis]

As of this moment, the allocations of the 308 seats in Parliament area:
Conservatives: 124 seats
Liberals: 103 seats
Bloc Quebecois: 51 seats
NDP: 29 seats
Independent: 1 seat
It appears as many as 15 seats may require recounts but are unlikely to make significant difference to the overall results: a Conservative minority with Liberals in opposition.

Overall, about 30 seats changed hands, lost by the Liberals and picked up by the Conservatives & NDP. Despite the change in government and the addition of a few new faces, this new Parliament will look an awful lot like the previous one.

The major party leaders retained their seats. In Hamilton East, Tony Valeri, who had a major fight with Sheila Copps two years ago for the right to run as a Liberal, lost to the NDP. Former astronaut Marc Garneau lost to the BQ candidate. Star candidate Michael Ignatieff won his Toronto-area seat. Ralph Goodale, finance minister, won his seat in Saskatchewan. Deputy PM Anne McLellan lost her seat in Alberta. Gay former MP Svend Robinson attempted a come-back but was defeated by Liberal lightweight (IMHO) Hedy Fry. Foreign Affairs minister Pierre Pettigrew lost his seat.

NDP leader Jack Layton will be joined in the House by his wife, Olivia Chow. I think this is the first time a husband & wife team have had seats in the House. Fortunately, they're of the same party.





While I'm disappointed the Liberals didn't win, the writing has been on the wall since prior to the xmas holidays. Staying in power for four consecutive terms was hard enough but winning a fifth term would run strongly against history. A little time wandering in the wilderness may actually do them some good: this is an excellent opportunity to develop some policies which are a little more imaginative than we're-not-Americans and hey-we-balanced-the-budget-eight-years-ago. That, and it's always entertaining to watch governmental novices fall over themselves trying to find their parliamentary legs.

While the Conservatives may form the government, they will have a hard time implementing the far right-wing aspects of their agenda as they will require the support of the BQ or a combination of the NDP and renegade Liberals. Some of the new Conservatives from Ontario are the more extreme elements from the prior provincial Harris gov't, although they may be offset by the more centrist Conservatives from the atlantic provinces & Quebec.

The Senate is still vastly stacked in favour of the Liberals and they will likely not hesitate to lay claim to the philosophical space between a minority and majority status. In their eyes, the Conservatives were not given a majority and therefore were not granted unfettered permission by the electorate to do anything they wished so the deference which might be given to a majority gov't will be lacking.

I'm not too worried about the gay marriage thing at the moment: unless something underhanded is attempted, a free vote in the house will likely cast about 180 votes in favour of the status quo. What kind of underhanded stunt? Convoluted wording of triple or more negatives to obscure the resolution, attaching something evil to the resolution (say, text linking pedophilia to gay marriage and then asking for a vote on the topic), holding the vote at an obscure late hour to ensure the opposition is largely absent, etc.. I can think of a dozen parliamentary tactics which could be employed depending on how the topic is presented. The safest thing for the Conservatives to do, however, may be to either hold & lose a quick non-binding free vote immediately to clear the table or simply not bring up the topic at all until some future time when they hope for a majority so that they can appear to be more centrist in the interim and not piss off components of their neo-puritan religious base.

Prime Minister Paul Martin Jr. has announced he will resign the leadership of the Liberal party but retain his seat as MP. I think he's moved too quickly to announce his resignation. At the very least, he should have waited to see if the Conservatives could actually survive their first budget. The last time a Liberal prime minister was resigned after a Conservative minority took power, there was an election in 9 months: that's just not enough time to have an effective leadership campaign and allow the new leader to establish his credentials before thrusting him/her into an election. While there are candidates who may be jockeying to take Martin's place as leader, there is no heir-apparent or distinct front-runner yet.

Comments

[ruralrob.livejournal.com]

I honestly hope they deal with the same sex marriage issue quickly. A free vote should lose, barring underhand tactics and I'm not as worried as you are on that possibility - and hopefully that will put and end to the stupidity once and for all.

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

I'd prefer they hold a free vote sooner rather than later, make it an honest & clean one and let it lose. Then again, since they know it would likely lose, it's likely to be delayed at least a little: any new gov't will want to start their term with a small series of procedural wins rather than an unambiguous & unmistakable loss.

Of course, I'd be very happy to be proven wrong. :-)

[pectopah.livejournal.com]

As the morning pundits keep saying, "The campaign for the next election starts today." Harper made a point of not discussing same-sex marriage on his tours through Quebec, it isn't even included in their Quebec platform. I think at this stage gay marriage wouldn't be the first thing on the agenda (despite what Harper said in the campaign). Also, Duceppe said this morning that if Harper comes through on his promise to correct the fiscal imbalance, then the BQ would support the government. That could be a problem if Harper actually delivers.

As for Martin, I think he read the writing on the wall and got out in a way that seemed dignified. There was open discussion after the Christmas campaign break and the poll numbers for the Liberals were dropping about who would replace Martin after the election. Martin was finished. The morning punditry on the CBC focused on Ambassador McKenna as the current front runner, but Belinda Stronach is also making noise. We shall see.

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

Martin was finished.

True, but I think it's unfair. If God Himself was running the Liberal Party, they would still have lost seats. And the one who solidly deserves the most blame (IMHO) is his predecessor, Chretien.

Belinda could run but I think it's too soon after coming in 3rd for the Conservative leadership only a few years ago. At least she has a seat in the Commons and, if she plays her cards right, will get some camera face time as a prominent opposition critic.

Frank has a good shot, largely on name recognition, but it's hard to get TV time at home when you're stationed in DC. On the one hand, it's customary for ambassadors to submit their resignation to the new gov't which can then pick & choose who to retain; on the other, it would be wise of Harper to keep McKenna in DC because (a) he's useful there, and (b) it keeps him off the Liberal leadership campaign for just a little longer.

Let the games begin! :-)

[pectopah.livejournal.com]

I think you are right about Chretien holding much of the responsibility for the demise of the Liberals. The aforementioned morning pundits gave him something of a compliment, though. Their argument was that Martin waited to long to get the Liberals campaign going. Had it been Chretien, they say, he would have started campaigning from the get go. Who knows?

Yes, the Liberals would have lost seats regardless, especially in Quebec, where the Gomery Inquiry was THE news story for weeks. Plus the provincial Liberal government is widely reviled. They are not finished in the province, but are decidedly smaller.

I don't know much about Belinda, other than her former role as the female half of the Conservative version of Brangelina. Thanks for filling me in on her history with the Conservatives. She got a lot of flak in her riding for switching parties, but she won again.

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

I remember John Crosby (one-time Liberal) sitting as a Progressive-Conservative, then later taking a run for the party leadership against Brian Mulroney in in 1980-81 after Joe Clark resigned the first time (Crosby came in 3rd). It's not unheard of and not impossible, but it is an uphill battle. I really thought Stronach would not win her seat as a Liberal this time around, but she proved me wrong. Perhaps I'm just as wrong about her leadership chances.

Considering the anger concerning the Gomery Inquiry etc., I'm surprised the Liberals won as many seats as they did, and that the BQ actually lost three. Didn't see that coming.

[pectopah.livejournal.com]

The way the election shook out in Quebec isn't surprising. The Bloc lost two of its seats to Conservatives and one to a controversial radio personality. When Harper started campaigning vigorously in Quebec, ridings that had been traditionally Conservative started registering high numbers for the Conservative Party. The Bloc suffered because many voters who would normally vote Conservative had no one to vote for in a while and the Liberals were just too distasteful. What is more interesting is how low the Bloc's overall voting percentage was--43%. The Bloc doesn't always seem to grasp that votes for them are not automatically also votes in favour of separation.

There was no doubt, despite Gomery, that the Liberals would retain some seats in Quebec. They are all on the Island of Montreal and in ridings that have the largest percentages of anglophones and allophones. That Pierre Pettigrew lost to a Haitian-immigrant running for the Bloc in a riding with a majority-non-Francophone population is interesting.

to quote [life of] Brian, "look on the bright side of life"

[trawnapanda.livejournal.com]

I'm taking the "well it could have been a LOT worse" tack here. Steven and the Harpies Tories have got a smaller minority than the Liberals had, and they have no natural allies in the house. Financially, the Liberals are closest to them. Socially, no one is particularly close. And Steven was very rude about votes in parliament enabled by the Bloc "not legitimate coz they're separatists". I hope this comes back to haunt him.

The new election financing legislation is now in full swing -- parties will get $1.75/voter/year from federal coffers, and individuals are limited to $10k political donations, and $zero from corporations or trade unions. That will actually cost the Liberals most - they had deep pocket individuals supporting them, and no more, and don't have as good private-citizen-fundraising abilities as the tories and the ndp.

I just hope the Tories are there long enough for the right-wing loudmouths to surface and remind the electorate what social dinosaurs conservatives they are.

The first votes in the new parliament will be on Federal Accountability Act -- all the opposition parties campaigned on how dreadful the Libs were and thank heavens for the auditor general and so on. So he'd have no problem at all getting an anti-corruption bill through, and it will make a nice showpiece bit of legislation.

beyond that, who knows? cutting the GST? - Tories were the only ones to campaign on that. Others will want social programmes instead of taxcuts.

child care? Tories wanted a $100/mo baby bonus for all under 6yr olds; all others wanted something more organised - daycare. the BQ were very clear about him not undermining their (quite good) daycare programme, and it is, in fact, provincial jurisdiction.

Then there's the gay vote. I'm less concerned about that than I was before the election. There were about 30 Liberals who voted against bill C-38, and some of them didn't get re-elected, so lets say 25 antigay Liberals. That still leaves about 80 prohomo liberals, and NDP+BQ (who were pretty solidly pro homo) are now 80 in total. That's 160, which is a majority. So a resolution would, by these back-of-the-envelope calculations, fail. Maybe Steven was proposing the resolution to play to his rightwing - and they'll go through the motions, "see, we tried but we were defeated, sorry". It won't come early in the term, but I'm less concerned. Even IF the initial resolution passes the Commons, it would then come back as a bill to repeal the Civil Marriage Act. That would have legislative hurdles, first in the Commons, and then (this is my strongest hope) the Senate. The red chamber passed C38 by a 2-1 majority, and the membership hasn't changed. They don't often block commons legislation, but the last time they did was back in the 1980s, on restrictive abortion legislation (back when Kim Cambell was minister of justice). (after that there's litigation, and it'll be a real bore to have to boil that cabbage twice, but there you go. Hopefully it'll never get that far).

Re: Jack and Olivia - no, they're the second husband/wife team. The first was Gurmant Greywal and his wife, in neighbouring Tory seats in the Vancouver area in the last parliament. Gurmant, you may recall, made allegations that the Liberals had tried to bribe him with a Senate seat so that the government would not fall on the budget. Those allegations turned out to be groundless, and when the Mounties investigated, he had decidedly suspicious looking riding association finances himself. He decided not to run this time (did he fall or was he pushed? who knows). His wife was re-elected on Monday. I suspect Jack and Olivia are a bit more on the ball than that.

As (I think) Trudeau rather cynically remarked (I think it was after the Joe Clark minority was elected in 1979), "the conservatives are like measles - you have to have them once a generation".

It's still going to be embarrassing to have Doris Stockwell Day as Foreign Affairs minister - this is the man who thinks the Niagara River flows north to south, and who thinks the Flintstones is accurate history (dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time). Or Vic Toews as minister of justice Scary.

Re: to quote [life of] Brian, "look on the bright side of life"

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

The first was Gurmant Greywal and his wife, in neighbouring Tory seats in the Vancouver area in the last parliament.

I had forgotten about them. I recall seeing the Greywal name on the CBC screen ticker Monday but lost track as the last polls were clocked in.

NO W

[izzybearscub.livejournal.com]

Talk about issues, but at least your not as screwed up as here in the states. AND... no W.

Re: NO W

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

Yeah, at least the Conservatives are constrained by their slight minority and ultimately it will be easier to undo their damage later. Sadly, some of those elected may ultimately prove to be dumber than W, but there's a high probability those dinosaurs will be kept on the back benches rather than brought into cabinet.