Filibuster CartoonsTitle: The evolution of Canadian politics (click to view)
Date: May 4, 2011
The Canadian political scene is fundamentally unstable. Anyone who doubted just how volatile our system is, or how quickly things can change within it were given a jolting reminder Monday night, as Stephen Harper's Conservatives won a solid majority government, the NDP cruised to an equally-firm second place, and the Liberal and Bloc Quebecois parties were nearly devastated.
The final totals were: Conservatives 167, NDP 102, Liberals 34, and Bloc 4.
Canada's two-party system has now dramatically collapsed and rebuilt itself for the second time in twenty years. I guess we should have seen this coming, but it seems far too many of us bought into the trope that Canada is a country where Nothing Interesting Happens, and irrationally assumed that the political order of the 1990s was in some way permanent or natural.
To look at the party standings of the 1993 federal election is to glimpse into some weird parallel universe, so politically different was Canada in those days. A huge Liberal majority, a second-place Bloc Quebecois, a small right-wing presence, and a nine-seat NDP fringe. And that's without even acknowledging the biggest story of '93, which was the complete decimation of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada from 169 seats to two.
In subsequent elections, these alignments proceeded to shift somewhat, particularly on the part of the NDP, which rose to a comfortable fourth place, and the new Conservative Party of Stephen Harper, which gathered the right-wing vote under a single banner and made slow, but steady progress against the Liberals in every subsequent election it ran.
In the face of this ascendant right, the Bloc fell from second to third, leaving an overall Lib-Con-Bloc-NDP pecking order that no one seemed to view as particularly threatened. Indeed, if anything, during the late '90s and early 2000s it was fashionable to say that Canada's political order was perhaps
too stable, and the Liberals
too entrenched in first place. The phrase "one party state" was certainly bandied about with alarming frequency after Jean Chretien's third majority victory in 2000. It was certainly not something any of the authors who wrote entire books on the subject expected to feel embarrassed about anytime soon.
Even after the Conservatives won a narrow minority government victory in 2006, the general thesis of Canadian politics didn't really change much in the minds of most people who make a career out of studying such things. Prime Minister Harper was said to be a flash in the plan, a short-lived reaction to a Liberal corruption scandal that would be promptly corrected by the fundamentally liberal Canadian populace at the earliest opportunity. But Harper stayed in power for one year, then two, then three, then five. But still the flash in the pan theory lingered on. Certainly he would never win another term. Certainly he would never win a
majority government, at least.
It seems bizarre now, but one of the most seriously debated issues of this particular election cycle was whether or not the Liberal Party would be justified in forming a coalition government with the NDP to push the Conservatives out. As the race began, it was just assumed that the Liberals would almost certainly win enough seats to make this scenario plausible, and it's now quite darkly amusing to realize how much time was wasted debating a theoretical that now has absolutely no chance of happening. Michael Ignatieff, once touted as the great foreign savior of the Libs has now become their single worst disappointment, not only leading the party to its first-ever third place showing in the House of Commons, but losing his own seat in the process — an exceedingly rare occurrence for a party boss in a parliamentary system.
So what happened on Monday? How did things swing so wildly?
As is so often the case in Canadian politics, the path leads back to Quebec.
From my perspective as a western Canadian, some 5,000 kilometers from Montreal, attempting to understand the internal politics of Quebec frequently feels as intimidating and hopeless as trying to follow the politics of Hungary. There is a barrier of "foreigness" that can seem almost impenetrable, even among pundits far more worldly than myself. I note this just as a prelude to the fact that very few analysts in Canada seem to have a firm and coherent theory as to why Quebec voted the way it did in this election, unseating all but four of its 58 separatist Bloc Quebecois MPs in favor of a major swing to the NDP, a traditionally Anglo party with absolutely no history or roots in the French province.
All we can really state definitively at this point is that Quebec's overnight switch to the NDP was one of the most uncritically partisan, reactionary episodes in modern Canadian politics. Knowing full well that the party's Quebec delegation was loaded with
paper candidates and placeholders, voters in that province have nevertheless sent a motley assortment of supremely unqualified and unambitious men and women to Ottawa, including candidates who were literally on vacation during the campaign, four undergrad students, teenagers, a former Communist, several people who can't speak French, and a candidate or two who may not even exist at all. In all, well over 50% of the new NDP opposition is composed of Quebec MPs, meaning the party has become the latest French political vehicle of choice in Canada, a bouncing designation previously enjoyed by the Mulroney Progressive Conservatives, the Trudeau-Chretien Liberals, and the separatist Bloc.
But never the Harper Conservatives, which leads to another weirdity. Though Harper increased his seat count all over the country on Monday — even in historically left-wing Toronto — the one notable exception was again Quebec, where his party actually
lost five of the 11 seats it won in 2008. This makes Harper the first prime minister in 80 years to win a majority government without also winning a majority of Quebec's seats, meaning the inside-outside polarization of power between Quebec and English Canada is starker than it's been in generations. In such a context, the idea that the NDP could, in turn, evolve into some sort of cyrpto-separatist group has been seriously flouted by more than a few analysts. Indeed, to the extent the NDP actually put any conscious effort into reaching out to Quebec in this election, it was by making so-called "soft nationalist" appeals to the idea that Quebec should have maximum autonomy over its own affairs, including the ability to opt-out of as many federal programs as it wanted.
But all this still doesn't explain the epic fall of the Liberal Party, who failed to pick up a single seat anywhere in Canada, and could only hold 34 incumbents, a success ratio well below the average 80-something percent reelection rate most parties effortlessly enjoy. Speaking to reporters on Tuesday morning, as he announced his resignation, Michael Ignatieff could only sadly opine that all the Conservative attack ads against him must have worked, since all the polls seemed to indicate that it was Iggy himself who was his party's most radioactive asset. At best, I suppose the Conservatives incessant and crassly populist efforts to discredit and defame Mr. Ignatieff's career, background, education, style, and personal history at every turn prove that personal attacks, and appeals to reactionary "culture war" forces such as anti-Americanism, xenophobia, and anti-intellectualism can indeed yield massive political dividends in this supposedly "nice" country.
Whew. So there were a few other stories as well.
Unlike Ignatieff and Mr. Duceppe — who also lost his own seat in the NDP wave — the Green Party of Canada finally won its first seat in the federal parliament, though a more pyrrhic victory would be hard to imagine. For a supposed "national" leader Elizabeth May ran a campaign of unparalleled personal opportunism, funnelling the combined forces of her party machine into a single riding — her own — in a desperate, clock-ticking game of political sudden death.
And she won, but her party clearly lost in the process, its popular vote plummeting three points from their record 7% in 2008, and hemorrhaging over 700,000 ballots. Green fortunes were already set to decline, but May did everything in her power to ensure the captain did
not go down with the ship, and as such will enter parliament as little more than a glorified independent.
Of the Liberals who did win, it's likewise interesting to note that the much beleaguered Stephane Dion managed to retain his seat, which could possibly give him a second-round of national relevance. Ignatieff's two most eager hier apparents, former Ontario premier Robert Rae and prime ministerial son Justin Trudeau, have both been increasingly looked down upon recently, as unserious candidates for a party in a very serious state. Could this be the perfect opportunity to give Dion a second kick at the leadership can?
Stranger things, needless to say, have happened.
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Now can you do an X-rated version with Layton portrayed as superhero "Jerkoff Jack" using his 'super 
![[huh]](./images/smilies/icon_scratch.gif "huh?"){kind=icon}
