It’s the 22nd of October and yesterday, of course, was Election Day. And of course, I stayed up until about 02:00 watching the results come in.
Long story short, it was clear very early in the evening that the Liberals would stay the government, but that they would lose their majority. It was a very tight race… and one which seemed to follow regional lines quite closely. For my part, I was mostly interested in how strong the Liberal minority would be, and seeing whether the NDP or the BQ would garner enough seats that they could make a deal propping up Trudeau. Both parties have enough seats that they can individually support the Liberals; it will be interesting to see whether the middle-of-the-road Liberals ally with the centre-left-progressive NDP or the progressive-but-separatist Bloc Quebecois. (My money’s on the NDP: openly allying with the BQ wouldn’t do much for the Lib’s popularity outside of Quebec.)
I doubt very much there’ll be a formal coalition, though. The Liberals are strong enough — and can play the NDP and BQ against each other in negotiations — that no formal agreement is likely to happen. There will simply be an understanding between Trudeau and Singh; neither party wants to risk another election anytime soon, and the NDP is damn near broke.
That’s for the future, though. It’s a quiet, rainy October morning, and the pundit class in Canada is probably nursing hangovers and sleeping in late. (Not me, surprisingly, after a weekend in which both my soccer teams were eliminated in their respective playoffs, I decided I needed to be a good boy and give my liver a chance to recover.) It’ll take a few days or even weeks to see how the fallout from this election settles: The talking heads on the CBC were openly discussing how quickly a leadership challenge would come to oust Andrew Scheer from the Conservatives; interestingly, despite their loss of seats there was no equivalent discussion of the same happening to Jagmeet Singh.
I’m especially interested in the difference in the NDP reaction from four years ago. Back in 2015 there was, briefly, the chance that the NDP could potentially form a minority government and progressives got extremely excited. Tom Mulcair pivoted to the centre in order to win more centrist voter… and Trudeau jinked left around him in an attempt to win over the progressive vote. Trudeau succeeded and Mulcair failed, and the NDP gave Mulcair his walking papers almost immediately. Of course, it quickly became clear Trudeau had no intention of keeping his 2015 progressive promises and that was an albatross that Trudeau dragged into the 2019 election, possibly costing him his majority.
But Jagmeet Singh’s situation is not the same as Tom Mulcair’s. From an objective standpoint, Singh’s NDP has actually fared worse than Mulcair’s NDP four years ago: Fewer seats, a smaller percentage of the vote, fourth party status. If the knives came out for Mulcair in 2015, one would figure they’d come out for Singh in 2019, right?
Wrong.
From an emotional standpoint, it’s a completely different game. Mulcair’s centre-pivot gamble was deeply unpopular with the NDP’s progressive base; fairly or not, he was seen as just another cynical politician trying just another cynical ploy to get elected. Singh’s popularity with the party’s progressive base is greater than ever, and ironically the NDP’s poorer performance has bolstered it; Singh was seen as having refused to compromise his ideals even if it cost him votes. For the kind of person who votes NDP, that sort of integrity matters. Singh will continue to lead the NDP until at least the next election… although I’m curious to see whether that popularity will survive the kinds of compromises necessary in a minority situation.
My prediction for the new Parliament: The Liberals will work with the NDP on an “issue by issue basis” — political speak for “unofficial coalition” — proceeding very cautiously in order not to trigger a premature vote of no confidence. The BQ will be nipping at their heels demanding concessions for Quebec, and the Conservatives, in their status as Official Opposition, will spend several ineffective months while their higher-profile members knife each other for the dubious privilege of taking over Scheer’s job.
And the PPC, gratifyingly, didn’t win a single seat. Not a single one. Even Bernier lost the seat he’d been elected to as a Conservative, and that was their best shot at a presence in Parliament. According to Wikipedia, the so-called People’s Party of Canada garnered 1.6% of the popular vote, or 291,743 votes across the entire country. By contrast, the Climate Strike march, a month ago, had an estimated 500,000 people turn out in Montreal alone.
Those numbers are both concerning and comforting. For comfort, we can be satisfied that only 1.6% of the country supported the PPC, a party which embraced overt racism, xenophobia and which has ties to white supremacist and fascist groups.
On the other hand, 291,743 Canadian voters support a party which embraces overt racism, xenophobia and which has ties to white supremacist and fascist groups.
Which, to put it mildly, should worry us.
The PPC is an extreme-right fringe party which should never have gotten the kind of media attention that it received. That media attention only emboldened racists, fascists and right-wing scumbags of all stripes. And while the PPC suffered a truly ignominious defeat last night and will fade into deserved obscurity, the groups with which it allied with and who were therefore empowered — the Soldiers of Odin, the Proud Boys and Yellow Vests Canada, to name a few — are already declaring the election to have been “stolen” by the millions of “illegals” (read: Brown People) who are apparently running around Canada getting voter cards.
These extreme-right supporters — nearly 300,000 of them, if you add in the handful of folks who voted for the openly neo-Nazi Canadian Nationalist Party and various other extreme-fringe fascistic far right parties — represent a pool of deeply ignorant and sullenly resentful chuds who may be further radicalized further into the far-right, up to and including committing acts of violence. If there’s anything this election has proved, it’s that the far-right is a growing threat to this country… and that Canada’s white supremacy problem isn’t just a phenomenon limited to a handful of dangerous misfits.
This is all stuff that is going to continue to need work. The election is over but for those of us who are resisting the spread of these fascistic groups, ultimately nothing has changed. The fascist scumbags will continue to come out to Hamilton City Hall and other venues to abuse and attack people. PEGIDA will continue to harass Muslims in Toronto. Homophobic “street preachers” will continue to target the LGBTQ+ community, including violence like that which we saw at Hamilton Pride this past summer.
And sadly, the police will continue to do nothing to protect the victims and will in fact continue to arrest and brutalize the victims themselves.
This election has highlighted the deep divisions in our country, it has empowered the very worst in our national character, and it has revealed a viscous undercurrent of resentment and hostility towards the very ideals — inclusion, diversity and acceptance — which are all that serve to defray Canada’s troubled history of racism and ongoing colonialism.
There’s plenty of work ahead of us.
