Yesterday’s election in Canada will leave Justin Trudeau and the Liberal party about where they were when they started:
Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau has won enough seats in this 44th general election to form another minority government — with voters signalling Monday they trust the incumbent to lead Canada through the next phase of the pandemic fight by handing him a third mandate with a strong plurality.
After a 36-day campaign and a $600-million election, the final seat tally doesn’t look very different from the composition of the House of Commons when it was dissolved in early August — prompting even more questions about why a vote was called during a fourth wave of the pandemic in the first place.
As of 2:30 a.m. ET, Liberal candidates were leading or elected in 157 ridings, the exact same number of seats that party won in the 2019 contest.
It’s a reversal of fortunes for Trudeau. He launched this campaign with a sizeable lead in the polls — only to see his support crater days later as many voters expressed anger with his decision to call an election during this health crisis. Two middling debate performances by Trudeau and renewed questions about past scandals also put a Liberal victory in question.
Two members of the Liberal cabinet lost their ridings, as did the leader of the Greens. Other than that, the NDP made almost no gains, and the Conservative’s attempt to cast themselves as kinder, gentler moderates didn’t do them much good. The nutcase anti-vax, anti-mask, climate-change-denying People’s Party repeated their last election goose egg results.
In Justin’s defense, he’s not as smart as his dad, and the high quality graphic below shows that the day he called the election, COVID appeared to be under control:
PPCLI
In Justin’s defense, he’s not as smart as his dad
That’s putting it mildly. I’m glad that the Liberals won and all, since I expect that the Conservatives will resume Harper’s policies of actively subverting democracy whenever they get the reins of power. But the guy really must be the dimmest Prime Minister since Diefenbaker.
Splitting Image
It’s a bit of a surprise hearing that the Conservatives were attempting to cast themselves as kinder, gentler moderates. The slogan they printed on their campaign signs (“Secure the future”) was taken from a well-known Nazi phrase, and their leader was openly telling his voters to “take back their country”, which still sounds better in the original German. (I still miss Molly Ivins.)
The thing about the Canadian electorate is that the Conservatives’ base is rock solid and non-elastic. They’ve gotten roughly the same number of total votes every election for the past ten years. The differences between 2015, 2019 and this election are almost entirely about the rest of the electorate’s turnout. 2015 was a historically high turnout, and the Liberals won a bunch of ridings that they had no chance of holding. Turnout in 2019 reverted to the mean, and held steady this year. Barring a big surge or drop in turnout, yesterday’s results were probably written in stone.
Ken
I keep re-reading the phrase “36-day campaign” and wishing it could happen in the US.
WereBear
Is it our Confederacy vote-rigging (electoral college, lagging House, etc) that keeps us always fighting the Red Menace?
Canada has their dumbest party get no votes? I wish!
Matt McIrvin
August 15 was late enough that anyone looking carefully at Delta cases would have known North America was heading for exponential growth. I certainly knew it by then. But if you’re a politician and you just see the low absolute number you might think differently.
Splitting Image
@PPCLI:
Trudeau may be a dimwit, but he’s a dimwit who decriminalized marajuana and made the Liberal party explicitly pro-choice after decades of dithering on the issue.
Just One More Canuck
@PPCLI: Kim Campbell was no rocket surgeon, but she was also torpedoed by Mulroney both before and after he stepped down.
As for Trudeau, he should have waited at least until next year, and made the mistake of assuming that Conservative premiers like Kenney, Ford and Moe didn’t want to kill off their own supporters
rikyrah
Go Canada. Doing the right thing.
Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix
@Splitting Image:
You don’t have to be a genius to be a decent politician – in fact, being too smart is probably a negative. Justin, from what I can tell, is decent.
Unfortunately for JT, one of the most common traits of politicians is irrational optimism — why else would anyone run for election? I’m sure he looked at those COVID numbers and thought that they would continue.
SiubhanDuinne
This is an open thread. Should we use it to comment on Biden’s UN speech, or will there be a dedicated thread? (He just started a couple of minutes ago.)
Mike in NC
@SiubhanDuinne: Remember the time Dumbass Donnie went to the UN and started bragging about what a genius he was? He was almost laughed off the stage.
SiubhanDuinne
@Mike in NC:
I do! Whatever Joe says, at least we know we’ll be spared that!
(Speech is pretty standard stuff, but good, and well delivered. I hope it begins to reassure our skittish allies.)
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Maybe he looked at Canada’s vaccination rate assumed that the remainder weren’t stupid enough like Americans to refuse the vaccination and would get sick just to fuck things up because that’s what ‘tards do. Taking the Cal Recall for example the voter restlessness with the Liberals on the pandemic is from Liberal politicians letting the plague rats run amok.
NeenerNeener
Rumor has it that JTs dad is actually Fidel Castro, because his parents partied with Castro a lot. The point that JT is not as good a politician as his father holds, regardless.
PPCLI
@Splitting Image: His ethics-challenged, bungled handling of the SNC-Lavalin case drove one of the most promising young politicians in the party, and the most promising First Nations politician of my lifetime, into the political wilderness.
NorthLeft12
I was a poll supervisor yesterday in this election. My day started at 0700 and I did not get home until 0330 this morning. There is a ton of work that goes into this process, something I never realized before. This was my first time working an election.
Normally Canadian elections are line up free, but due to Covid-19 precautions, lack of suitable polling stations, and shortage of poll workers led to long line ups and some unhappy voters. People were generally good about it although a few complained pretty loudly blaming the “old folks” working at the polling station. Said we needed to get young people to man the polls. This was one of those times when the professional side of my personality won out and I deferred from engaging with the loudmouth.
I was also a little disappointed in the number of comments regarding “outsiders” running this polling station. Only two of the eight people working this poll were locals, the rest of us were at least twenty minutes drive away. I was specifically asked to work there because they were having trouble getting people to work in this rural outlying village.
Bottom line; I am exhausted today and am venting to anyone who will get within earshot, but I would definitely do it again.
PPCLI
@NorthLeft12: Thanks. It’s a thankless job. (Except for the thanks I’m giving here.) But Canadian democracy depends on such things.
NorthLeft12
NorthLeft12
@PPCLI: Thanks for the encouragement. I disagree with your take on Trudeau and especially the faux scandal that was SNLC, but I am really too tired to get into it now.
My dog is whining for his walk and I think I need it more than him.
PPCLI
@NorthLeft12: No worries. Since I regard a Liberal victory as the best outcome I’m glad lots of people disagree with me about Trudeau
Ramalama
@NorthLeft12: I am marvelling at how well Canadians do when it comes to (MANY THINGS LIKE) handling the voting esp mail-in ballots and checking for duplicates (did they mail it in and go to the polls?), in such a short amount of time. As a new Canadian resident, the new car smell still lingers. Impressive. Kudos to you.
Ramalama
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
There are 2 people I know who haven’t been fully vaccinated. Some weren’t going to get vaccinated at all until my partner and I bullied them (ok 3 people). Our little town had a protest march against forced vaccinations but it was small.
What if Trudeau saw the low numbers and thought, not optimistically, that Delta was going to spike in the near future in Canada, and that any new shutdowns would cause people to blame him, thereby causing him to lose an election later?
This would mean that he was being pessimistic, but that he could not talk about since that might mean he was being opportunistic. This is just my idea. No one on the news has speculated about this, so I am likely just bored and came up with an idea to entertain myself.
Jay
“Everybody”, (the ppl in power), thought were were going to have a “normal summer”. After all, high vaxx rates, low case count.
Corporate staffed us as it it was going to be a regular August. Everybody in the Lower Rainland away on vacay before school. Forest fires and Delta messed that up.
There is a disconnect between the “ppl in power” and reality. When they lifted mask mandates for the fully vaxxed here, at ground level, I saw a shit load of unmasked, unvaxxed people, so I bought more and better masks for the fall and winter. Delta was still a US thing.
so Trudeau called the election for what was supposed to be the downslope of Covid, not the Delta surge.
Ramalama
@Jay:
OK. So he wanted mad props for opening Canada back up.
Also, long ago you mentioned Balderson’s for good cheddar in Canada. One store only carried the basic utilitarian version of theirs. But other stores carry more aged blocks of Balderson, and it’s so so good. So, a delayed thanks for the heads up on My Cheddar Dilemma.
Also my partner calls that cheese Balderdash, and had people in one shop scrambling to locate “Balderdash.” In French.
They were all out of Baldersons.
dr. luba
@NorthLeft12: Re: outsiders. Did you suggest to those complaining that they sign up to work the next election?
Obvious Russian Troll
@NeenerNeener:
You misspelled “right-wing conspiracy bullshit.” Snopes has a pretty thorough rundown. The gist of it is that the Trudeaus didn’t officially *meet* Castro until several years after Justin was born.
I think the whole thing is based on the fact that Fidel and Justin have full heads of hair and Pierre did not.
Anyway, my riding went to the Liberals again, with the NDP getting about a quarter of the vote and the Conservatives about 20%. For the first time since I became a citizen I had to wait in line to vote.
Just One More Canuck
@NorthLeft12: I was a poll worker in the 2019 election – too busy with work to do it this time. When I did it I worked with a partner handling people for one polling area. When I voted (early) this time, one person was doing both jobs, and having to look up people in multiple polling areas. It was a lot of work for two people – I can’t imagine how exhausting it would have been this time around. Thank you
Roger Moore
@Jay:
This gets to the single biggest problem with so many of our public health responses to the pandemic: they neglected to consider that they were dealing with people. We made strict social distancing rules and neglected to consider that many people wouldn’t be willing to go without contact with people outside their household. We made rules about mask wearing that were too complicated for people to understand, so they ignored them. We said vaccinated people could go without masks without considering that nobody was checking vaccination status, so unvaccinated people were going to ditch their masks, too. We’ve made these same basic mistakes again and again. It’s time to start taking human behavior into account when designing our pandemic response.
NorthLeft12
@dr. luba: Regarding your question about asking them to apply for these election jobs……Ha! I did not trust myself to say it without a heavy dose of sceptical sarcasm.
Frankly, those that made those comments would make awful election workers, IMO.
ed_finnerty
There was a lot of ‘Seinfeld’ election talk. I.E. an election about nothing.
but it was about JT getting a majority for two reasons (without commenting on which was his priority)
NorthLeft12
@ed_finnerty: At the end of the day, JT is a politician, and just like pretty much all of them, he wants power and the ability to exercise it fairly freely. They are all opportunists, and will use any events to their advantage. He thought he could benefit from our kinda success with the pandemic, but that did not work out for him, or Canada.
I joked at the poll with my other workers about seeing them again in six months or so, but I believe the next election won’t be for about four years or so.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
In Justin’s defense, the Canadian media attacked him day and night during the campaign. All elections cost money. But the media turned cost of this election into their version of “but her emails”
Jay
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch:
Justin’s “our Hillary” to the usual suspects and has been since he first ran for office. Hate for his father was transferred on to him.
Thor Heyerdahl
The government minority was becoming dysfunctional with committees getting stalled. There’s a strong chance that the opposition would have forced an election in the spring (really, who wants to campaign in a Canadian winter). Justin called their bluff, hit the reset button and at least we should have some semblance of functional government to get us through the Greek alphabet.
A side benefit was Alberta expanding their non-conservative seat count in Edmonton and Calgary (including one in Edmonton that is down to mail-in ballot counting on Wednesday). The premier of Alberta is quickly becoming dead man walking. Justin also has had the largest 2 seat wins by Liberals in British Columbia since the 1950s – something his dad wasn’t able to do.