Hmmm... well, the United Kingdom had some local and regional elections this past week but Canada teed up for the whole she-bang, one, big, sexy Federal Election and it produced an interesting result. The final breakdown looks like this:
Conservative-167 seats-39.62%
NDP-102 seats-30.62%
Liberal- 34 seats- 18.91%
Bloc Quebecois- 4 seats- 6.05%
Green- 1 seat-3.91%
Independent-0 seats- 0.43%
So it looks like Steven Harper gets to stay on as Prime Minister- this time with an absolute majority. The Green Party picked up a seat in British Columbia, putting them on the scoreboard for the first time but two things are surprising: first, the Liberal Party cratered hard. Leader Michael Ignatieff apparently didn't get the job done and I've seen some Canadian commentary indicating that he rubbed people the wrong way by being a little too eager for the job, but I'm not sure if that was a major issue in it. For sure, something didn't work for the Liberals in a pretty major way.
In Quebec, the Bloc Quebecois was wiped off the map, hard and came away with 4 seats.
But the real story was the NDP or New Democrats which vaulted over the Liberal Party into second place and looks to be at least one more electoral cycle away from cementing a political re-alignment and eclipsing the Liberals as the many opposition party in Canada. It may be a little too soon to say that for certain yet, but the next few years are going to be very interesting and it'll be interesting to see if the Liberals swing left in an attempt to fill the space of the Left that they vacated in a move towards the center and that was filled by the NDP.
All in all, an interesting Canadian election...
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