Schadenfrustration

There is something deeply dissatisfying about the results of our federal election last week. Oh, it isn’t that after more than two months of plugging away at my 78 Tory Wrongs series I suddenly fell silent. It also isn’t that the party I wanted to win didn’t, and actually lost ground.

No, the thing that frustrated me the most is the manner in which our almost-former Prime Minister vacated the stage. He stood up on election night and delivered his final address to his supporters in the room in Calgary and to the country via the live TV coverage, but he didn’t say that thing many of us were waiting to hear. He didn’t announce his resignation, but instead sent that in a letter to a Conservative Party official. A whimper if there ever was one.

At least (grasping for straws) the Conservatives just missed out on triple digit representation, with just 99 MPs elected.

Now I’m not so petty as to have only that reaction to the election results. I still have a healthy skepticism about the progressiveness of the Liberal Party, which has a lot of historical baggage to overcome, including a fair amount of running as progressives and governing from the right, but I am willing to give them a chance to follow through in their promises, or at least the ones I feel okay about. After all, anyone would look left wing next to Darth Vader and a pack of parroting storm troopers, right?

I will admit that I am rather disappointed in the outcome in Québec, with more Tories and more Bloc MPs elected, largely on a wave of intolerance on the issue of the niqab. Not since Bernard Landry made his famous remark about the federal branding on everything to which it had contributed — « les petits bouts de chiffon rouge » — has a small piece of cloth that is relatively rare to find covering an actual face had such political repercussions. It was probably a smaller vote shift than it might have been a couple of weeks earlier, but that plus the fact that so many of the races were three- or four-way contests led to the defeat of a number of those Orange Wave NDP MPs from 2011.

So what about the NDP? Yes, going from 103 seats in 2011 to 44 in 2015 is quite a blow. I would point out a couple of things about that 44 number (neither of them having anything to do with Chinese superstitions about the number 4). First, that’s ten more seats than the Liberals had after the 2011 election. Second, that’s the second best result ever for the NDP. Little consolation, I know, but let me add the fact that the NDP candidates in Québec won in 16 ridings and came second in 32 ridings, third in 29 ridings and fourth only in one, while the first, second, third and fourth numbers for the Conservatives were 12, 5, 11 and 50 and for the Bloc were 10, 11, 30 and 25. The Bloc also came fifth in two ridings. Not bad for a party that had only one MP from Québec before 2011.

And here comes that schadenfreude again — the Conservative candidate in my riding barely squeaked into fourth place with a whopping 4.1% of the vote.