[Oranjestad, Aruba] - May 2 was Election Day (always with capital letters) in Canada.

 

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government fell in a vote of non-confidence five weeks ago and we all headed to the polls. Harper himself griped about this, because if there’s one thing this bugger won’t tolerate, it’s opposition to his royal decrees. The election was unnecessary, he said – as if voting were somehow anti-democratic. He projects an image of a soft and fuzzy dictator, but the facts are that he is a bully and a right-wing tyrant wannabe.

 

Historically, we have had more Liberal governments than any other kind but in this election they sunk to their poorest showing since, well, since forever.

 

For those unfamiliar with Canada’s bizarre democracy, the province of Québec – which is mostly French-speaking – has been in the hands of parties who advocate as their major goal the breakup of Canada so they can be their own sovereign country. We even had a short period where they were the second party in Canada and, thus, officially ‘Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition’.

 

[Yes, I know, what kind of idiots are we for still having anything to do with the Queen of England. Don’t get me started.]

 

At the beginning of the election campaign (which at least has the virtue of being mercifully short rather than those two-year long affairs in the United States), Harper’s party – the Conservative Party of Canada – was comfortably in the lead, projected possibly to capture the majority of seats that has eluded them since 2005. And that’s the way it turned out. He got his majority, with a degree of comfort, so now he’ll be free to exercise his full far-right agenda, unimpeded by morals or good sense. That will allow us to look much more like the lunatic fringe in the US. Oh boy.

 

Drifting aimlessly in second place was the Liberal Party of Canada [for you Americans, these guys are not what you think of as ‘liberals’ – they are on the right, but not nearly so far to the right as the Conservatives]. Their seats were cut by more than half, which will surely trigger calls from the party faithful for a leadership contest. The present leader, Michael Ignatieff – former Harvard professor – failed to connect with the people and, for the most part, even with his own party. And he failed even to win his own seat.

 

Far back in third place, with not a hope in hell of presenting a decent showing in the election, was the New Democratic Party (NDP). The NDP is ostensibly the party of the left, although they long ago gave up leftist politics in favour of centrism. They are nowhere near far enough to the left for my tastes; still, they are the closest thing Canada has to a socialist party. They are often referred to derisively as Commie-lite.

 

The NDP are the folks who brought the first socialized medical insurance plan to North America. Canadians overwhelmingly voted a couple of years ago that the man who made that happen – Tommy Douglas, grandfather of actor Kiefer Sutherland – was the greatest Canadian in our history.

 

The NDP has always appealed to a broad spectrum of Canadians, coast to coast to coast – they’ve simply never been able to translate that into sufficient seats in Parliament to form a government. They have managed to win power in a few provinces, but not nationally.

 

And once again, they failed to win a government yesterday. What they did succeed in doing, though, is to rewrite Canada’s electoral landscape.

 

Many of the NDP gains came at the expense of the Liberals. But most intriguing is that so much of their upswing – they almost tripled their seats from 36 to 102 – came at the expense of the separatist party in Québec, the Bloc Québecois. The Bloc was reduced from 47 seats to 4, including losing their leader to the NDP candidate in his riding. This suggests that regardless of the sovereigntist ambitions of many Québeckers, they are far more interested in social policy than independence.

 

So while the NDP under leader Jack Layton is now Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, a Harper majority will ensure that all their good social ideas will be met with closed minds. What we are going to see now is a government run rampant with a right-wing agenda. While some of our neighbours to the south will be pleased by this, Canadians will soon learn they’ve made a huge mistake. And we’ll have five years of this crap, after which it might be hard to recognize Canada.

 

The country is now clearly delineated hard-right and soft-socialist, with very little in between, and there is not much hope of any meaningful compromise**. Mostly because Stephen Harper is genetically hardwired not to play well with the other kids.

 

Still, what yesterday’s election does show is that there remains a strong socialist bent in Canada. Those of us with a sense of community can only hope that the next five years of a Stephen Harper majority will cause the rest of Canadians to realize what they have wrought.

 

 

** For American readers: “Compromise"  [noun]: a middle state between conflicting opinions or actions reached by mutual concession or modification

 

 

 

Paul Richard Harris is an Axis of Logic editor and columnist, based in Canada. He can be reached at paul@axisoflogic.com

Read the Biography and additional articles by Axis Columnist, Paul Richard Harris