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mcbride -> RE: Conservatives win majority in Canada (5/4/2011 11:53:02 AM)
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It's not status quo, it's a huge change, for two reasons. A majority government is far different from a minority, because it can pass any legislation it damn likes, and it's good for at least four years. And ideologically, Harper's party is far to the right of previous Conservative governments. This guy makes Brian Mulroney look like Leon Trotsky, so the fact that the cage has been unlocked is major.
And there's very good news for those American HMOs and corporations who hated having a public, universal health care system just next door getting consistently better results for far less money.
Our boy Harper spent several years heading a national lobby group that was founded specifically to kill Medicare. Since he returned to politics, he's been very quiet on the subject, since Canadians are overwhelming supportive of Medicare and its results. He'll get his chance in 2014 when the agreement between the federal government and the provinces must be re-negotiated.
Sadly, the fact that Liberal leader Ignatieff spent years teaching at Harvard was the focus of a long series of Conservative attack ads immediately before the election campaign, when there are no limits on spending. They outspent the Liberals 15 to 1 on ads. Ironic, though, that the expensive barrage of dire warnings about a guy living in the US should come from conservatives. (This, incidentally, is the strong-on-defense Conservative government that bought F-35s, but, um, didn't buy engines for them.)
Alas, Iggy didn't have much instinct for politics, with the result that the opposition parties split the vote, allowing large numbers of conservative candidates to win with only very small increases. or no increases, in their own vote counts.
For the NDP leader, Jack Layton, it may turn out to be a case of "be careful what you pray for". More than half of his caucus will come from Quebec, where the party couldn't even get arrested in the past 50 years. It had one MP in Quebec until Monday night, an ex-Liberal. Until about two weeks ago, the Bloc Quebecois easily topped the polls in Quebec, as it has since it was founded, and until about two weeks, the NDP was barely a blip, in fourth place. The astonishing turnaround utterly destroyed the separatist Bloc -- all to the good -- but there's a problem.
When no one knows your party exists, you'll take any warm body as a local candidate, because there's no danger of them being elected. Whoops. One of them, an assistant manager at a bar, spent most of the campaign on vacation in Las Vegas. Another became a member of the party three weeks before the election. A number of them live far from the ridings they represent, and had no connection to the ridings. One ran for the Communist Party in 1997. Two are university students, one of them just 19. All of these people are now Members of Parliament.
And a sizable number are either separatist or "soft nationalist". With Layton's brand new Quebec MPs making up more than half of his entire caucus, his new gig as the leader of the Official Opposition, the new head of Canada's "shadow government", should be entertaining. No wonder Stephen Harper is grinning.
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