Election night can be brutal. All that organization and
enthusiasm coalesces into one jittery evening. If the race is
close, volunteers linger into the pre-dawn hours at campaign
headquarters, hoping that some last minute outlying cluster of
votes will swing the election their way. Even before the verdict is
rendered, the second-guessing begins: What could we have done
differently? What would have put us over the top? What if we hadn’t
made those missteps along the way? What if we’d been able to scrape
together a few more campaign dollars? What if…? Like I said,
brutal.
I know whereof I speak. I’ve been on the losing end of only two
elections that I gave a toss about, but they were doozies. The
first was Bill Clinton’s election in 1992. I was only in middle
school but I’d gotten so into the contest that I refused to go to
school the next day. I imagine the note from my mother read
“Jeremy…was not feeling well.”
The second was in ‘96. Washington state congressman Randy Tate
was one of the young conservative firebrands who helped take
Congress in ‘94 and he had really refused to back down or
temporize. His staff, including this intern, was unrepentantly
right wing. We wanted to roll back government, cut taxes, and stop
another runway from being installed at a local airport. Per usual,
all the papers editorialized against us, but it was not a
Republican year. Tate lost narrowly.
These losses finished off any visceral interest I had in
electoral politics. But I sure wouldn’t blame most of my Canadian
friends for crying into their beers over the piss poor performance
of the newly formed Conservative Party of Canada. At press time,
Conservatives won between 90 and 100 ridings vs. about 160 seats
for the center left Liberals and their likely coalition partner,
the stridently left-wing NDP. Conservatives even did poorly in
Alberta and B.C. The only party that really stung the Liberals was
the French separatist Bloc Québécois, and, trust me
on this, an alliance between the now very Western Conservatives and
the pea soup eaters isn’t going to happen.
Liberals will now form a minority government, but on the most
favorable possible terms. They’ve weathered a series of scandals
that would have sunk any other government and come up smelling
like, well, wet rats, but rats that the people sent back into
office. Last night, they managed to keep the Conservatives from
making meaningful headway in Ontario, which, to my mind, made the
recent merger of the Western, activist conservative Canadian
Alliance and the used-to-be-sort-of-conservative-really-honest
Progressive Conservatives into a wasted gesture.
The argument for the merger was that in many ridings in Ontario
— the country’s most populous province — the combined vote totals
of the Tories and the Alliance would beat the Libs. Combine the two
and you have a winner. Voices such as the Globe &
Mail’s Jeffrey Simpson rose to argue that this was poppycock.
Ask PC voters who their second choice would be and they said they’d
vote Liberal before they’d vote for those Western rednecks. (Don’t
take it from me; in his acceptance speech, PC cum Liberal MP Scott
Brison snorted that “There’s not a lot of room for Red Tories in a
party with a lot of red necks.”) These concerns were brushed aside
in the rush to “unite the right,” but Eastern prejudice appears to
have won out.
For his part, I think Conservative leader Stephen Harper wanted
to lose this one. He looked at the problem of forming a minority
government either with the NDP or the BQ and thought better of it.
The idea was to lose narrowly and watch the Liberals and the
coalition partners tear each other to shreds. Not a bad strategy
but the problem is that this wasn’t a narrow loss. The Grits won
this election through demagoguery and misdirection, but they won it
fair and square.
