News of the Restless

Hi again, everybody, and welcome back…or please welcome ME back, I know I’ve been remiss/tardy/Bog-only-knows-what-all-else here. Pardon my dust (cough cough), but at least I’m still alive. And this blog is still live, too.

Yes, we’ve had another election, and yes, the not-so-good guys won, the no-good-very-bad guys lost (HA ha!), and the pretty-good-but-never-catch-a-break guys came up disappointingly short again for the umpteenth time.

Which is to say, yes, we have another Liberal gummint up here. YAY!?

Y’okay.

What we have now is a Liberal minority government, as distinct from the Liberal majority we had last time ’round, in 2015. What does that all mean?

Well, in boring political-analyst-on-CBC terms, it means that the Liberals, who took the largest number of seats (157) but failed to dominate the House of Commons (338 seats) because they took fewer than half the seats (rounded off to 170), will need support from other Members of Parliament if they are to pass legislation. And that means relying on them for advice and input as well. Since the official opposition is once again the Conservatives (121 seats), the balance of that minority power will be held by the Bloc Québécois (32), the New Democratic Party (24), the Green Party (3), and one lone independent, a former Liberal name of Jody Wilson-Raybould (whom some of you may remember as one of the Trudizzle’s star cabinet ministers, before she refused to roll over about some boring-ass legal kerfuffle known as SNC-Lavalin.) These lesser parties, also known as “kingmakers”, can choose to prop up the Liberals, or not, as they see fit during the next legislative session. If they don’t see fit, there might be a non-confidence vote, the government might fall, and we might well have to do this whole miserable thing over again and elect a new, and with any luck, better (or at least more stable) new federal government.

In the case of a majority, there wouldn’t be any need to court the kingmakers. The Liberals could pass any legislation they liked, control the debates, yadda yadda. They had that before, but they pissed it away, so now we have…THIS.

And what is THIS?

Well, in not-so-boring terms (because I’m not a political analyst on CBC, but just a lowly little prog-blogger out here in the 905-area boonies of Southern Ontario), what we had yesterday was not a definitive rout of the Liberal louts, but a very definite spanking. A few Liberal heads rolled. A number of seats flipped from red to blue (including, ugh, my very small-c conservative riding out here in said boonies.) In short, the voters voted to punish the Libs, but not swap them out altogether for the Cons, whom most of us were capable of acknowledging to be far and away the worse of the two major parties. Less secure power = less arrogance in power, seems to be the equation here.

Meanwhile, Québec was feeling a bit of its own spite, since they went almost entirely separatist/nationalist robin’s-egg Bloc-head, while much of the North, as well as the blue-collar industrial zones, and a goodly slice of BC and the eastern Prairies, went NDP orange. Three ridings went Green, one grey, and the rest (especially in Alberta) Tory blue. Like said: Punishment for the Libs, wherever people were in a position to wield the ol’ stick. The only thing that varied was the regional flavor thereof.

Anyhow:

The Trudeau II Libs weren’t the only ones to take a sound thrashing in this election. There was another government getting an unspoken bit of chastening here. Yes, I’m talking about our provincial supposiTories under Doug Ford.

Dougie, after some initial bombast about carbon taxation, was apparently advised to lie low and pretend he didn’t know Yankee Boy Andy Scheer so as not to spoil his chances, and so he did. It didn’t work. All of Toronto’s ridings went bright Liberal red, in clear rebuke of a certain flaxen-headed bull in the china shop. Dougie, you may recall, was pissy at not being elected mayor-dictator of Toronto like his late brother Robbo, so he jumped up a level and went over city council’s heads to gerrymander the city to his own liking, as premier. Toronto’s red electoral map was just their way of giving him the finger for that. It was also their way of forcing him to behave himself when liaising with the feds, and Lord knows he needed a good lesson in manners, so big thanks to TO for that. We do appreciate it.

Long story short: This is not the throw-the-bums-out sweep that we had in 2015, when Justin Trudeau led an unopposed triumphal march to Parliament Hill, and followed it up with a loud fanfare of gender parity and multi-ethnic flourishes in his cabinet picks. It’s been a term full of scandals, setbacks, attack ads, and seething public outrage, with occasional blasts of impolite racism and straight-up fascism just to make things extra ugly. It has been our most “American” election season in living memory.

It’s probably not all behind us yet; I imagine there will be more than a few tussles going forward, and I dare say they will be even more rancorous than what we’ve had up to now.

In short, it’s gonna be fun. But not as much fun as knowing that there was one last itty-bitty bit of punishment meted out, and it was to this guy:

…who did not get to be PM, and did not get to carry forward Harpo’s agenda, and didn’t turn Canada into USA North, and won’t be licking Donnie’s jackboots on our grudging behalf, and didn’t get to take the raging bumblefuckery that is “Ford Nation” federal, and will not EVER do so if Canada has anything to say about it.

HA, ha.