Post Election Thoughts

Well I’ve been saying since the last election that the NDP surge in Quebec was a protest vote against the three other options and that seems to have been borne out by events last night. The NDP is back to where they always have been, as are the Liberals and Conservatives. But I worry that the majority means that there is just more trouble ahead for Canada’s left. It will be nice to have four solid years of a government it’s likely I’ll mostly agree with, but I wonder what opportunities have been lost because it’s a majority.

First, there will be no merger of the parties of the left. The Liberals have no interest in that now. I also wonder if the majority situation will end the prospect of a move towards proportional representation before the next election. If it had been a minority Liberal government, or especially a minority Conservative one that was toppled by the second and third place parties, I think the prospect of a move to proportional representation would have been greater. There would have been a much stronger desire to entrench the left wing majority, and the best way to do that would have been to change the system. Now that the Liberals got a large majority with only 40% of the vote, it doesn’t really seem like it’s in their interest to switch to a system that would give them only 40% of the seats. In fact it would probably be less in reality as many people who voted Liberal this election would be more inclined to vote NDP or Green in a proportional representation situation.

If I thought that the Liberal support would be consistent in the next election, I might not be so worried. 8 years is a long time to make positive changes and see them borne out. But I think so much of the Liberal support this election came from people who rallied to them simply in order to oust Harper. That isn’t going to be a factor in the next election and 4 years of actual governing can do a lot of damage to people’s dreams. Long enough to start change, not long enough to see it through.