Which leads to my analysis: What in bloody hell just happened? It's as if Ke$ha announced that she was recording a children's album: No one could have predicted it even a month ago, and many people are still very uncertain about how they feel about the whole thing. Since all this mindscrew can't be shoehorned into one post, I would like to announce the beginning of a new limited series on Maple Glaze, entitled "WTF 2011".
In this inaugural post, I'm going to go down the list, party by party, and give an overview of what happened to each party during this campaign. However, in an effort to do something different from every other political blog out there, I'm going to do so with music, giving a theme song to each party and explaining how it is pertinent. Future posts in this series will deal with more overarching topics, such as the paradox of leadership politics in Canada and what makes some scandals stick and others not.
With that, let the music begin.
Stephen Harper's Conservatives
Theme song: "Surrender" by k.d. lang (Tomorrow Never Dies [film soundtrack], 1997)
Those of you who have followed this blog over time will likely not be surprised that a song sung from the perspective of a literal James Bond villain has been selected as the theme song of Stephen Harper in this campaign. But beyond the obvious dig at the Conservative Party, the comparison can almost be taken as a compliment.
As much as I hate to say anything positive about Stephen Harper, he was clearly in control at the beginning of the campaign, and managed to stay in control straight through to the end, even when his grip started to loosen in the face of a surging NDP. Like the villainous media magnate Elliot Carver in Tomorrow Never Dies, Harper displayed an impressive hold on the press, as this list of newspaper endorsements in the 2011 election shows. (For those who don't care to click, it's two endorsements for the NDP, one for the Bloc, zero for the Liberals, and a number I don't care to count for the Conservatives.) Even The Economist saw fit to wade into the quagmire and declare Harper to be the "least bad option".
I will not make any jokes about the misspelled sign in this picture. For all anyone knows, the guy's name could be Andrew Horray. He's clearly 4 Harper. (Image source: The front page of Tory Nation.)Perhaps The Economist's take on the election is the most pertinent one, as many endorsements of the Conservatives shared the opinion that he was the best of a bad bunch. But it wasn't hard for Harper to occupy that territory; having just barely fallen short of majority territory in the 2008 election, he didn't need to play to win so much as simply consolidate his power, just as any Bond villain worth his Mao suit and cat would. His first goal in this strategy has always been to weaken the Liberals so that they would no longer pose a threat to him — and it looks like he got his wish. With the party now reduced to the rump status so long held by the NDP, Harper has apparently, in the words of k.d. lang, "taken care of yesterday".
And like any good strategist, Harper likely also realized that the easiest way to hold onto power is not to try to win people to yourself, but to turn your enemies against each other. I am definitely not giving him credit for the NDP surge — that was primarily caused by Jack Layton's popularity combined with the Liberals' continuing fall. But I have no doubt that the Conservatives were happy to sit back and watch the battle happen once it started, stepping in only when it started to look like the NDP would deny them their majority.
I firmly believe that had the Liberals become resurgent instead of the NDP, there was no way that the Conservatives could have won a majority. They ran a very consistent campaign, but one that was more focused on retaining the support of their base than growing out towards the centre. There was very little in their platform to draw the support of left-leaning Liberals, let alone NDP supporters, and instead a lot to make sure their core supporters showed up to vote. This gave the Conservatives a more solid floor than any other party in this campaign, but it also meant that they didn't have a lot of room to grow.
Instead, the swing ridings in Ontario, which ultimately decided the outcome, tell the story of the majority was won. Many formerly Liberal ridings, including Michael Ignatieff's own Etobicoke—Lakeshore, saw the NDP take more support than ever before, splitting the vote and allowing the consistent Conservatives to suddenly come up the middle. The old Liberal campaign tactic of encouraging NDP voters to vote strategically for them to stop the Conservatives was proven valid in this election, although, as I will say below, the strategy also backfired for them in this campaign.
Either way, Harper now has his majority. The news is not that Harper is in control, but rather that the final impediments to his power have finally been removed, at least for the next four years. And so we'll have new fighter jets, more prisons and more prisoners, the per-vote subsidy for political parties will soon be gone, and the country could end up looking quite different from how it did before. The legacy of the last Conservative majority government is NAFTA, so only time will tell what Harper will be remembered for.
Michael Ignatieff's Liberals
Theme song: "Too Little Too Late" by Barenaked Ladies (Maroon, 2000)
Early in the campaign, Ignatieff had a campaign stop where I live. I really wanted to go, but it was the busiest time of the year for university students like me, and I had several papers to write — including, ironically, a paper about Ignatieff (which I would go on to title "Gettin' Iggy Wit It", and still manage to get an A+ on it somehow). I did, however, get to see part of it on CPAC, and I vividly remember it, because it suddenly hit me that Ignatieff was finally sounding like a seasoned politician. I proclaimed to my dad at the time that whoever coached him prior to this campaign deserved a medal.
Ignatieff had always been held back by being cast, not totally unfairly, as an ivory-tower intellectual type comparatively lacking in populist appeal. His past, as I wrote about in my essay, held him back, with Harper's smears managing to turn something that should have been a personal advantage — wide-ranging experience from around the globe — into a negative, and his former opinions on the Iraq War, the use of torture, and the proper methods of conducting wars attracting much criticism.
This time around, however, Ignatieff seemed to be an entirely reinvented man: still extremely intelligent, but now with an approach more palatable to the average person. He had charisma that I'd never seen in him before, certainly more than Harper. He championed the protection of Canada's democracy from the manipulative Conservatives, and did so passionately and believably. I spent the first couple of weeks of the campaign just waiting for his poll numbers to rise — after all, with that kind of transformation, how could they not?
Those were the days... (Image source: Own photo.)One thing I forgot: Most Canadians don't watch CPAC. First impressions are powerful in politics, and Ignatieff hadn't made a very good one. With a track record of being somewhat uninspiring, people just didn't listen when he finally changed his tune. I was admittedly biased by being a longtime supporter of his; ironically, it was Ignatieff's failed leadership campaign in 2006 that tempted me to move to the federal Liberals from Jack Layton's NDP in the first place, because I was convinced that he would make a stellar prime minister. I spent the entire length of Dion's tenure waiting for Dion to fail so that Iggy could come in as a virtual red Moses to lead the Grits out of Egypt.
Which, as it happens, has been the other major problem within the Liberal Party for many years now: disunity. The party has been fractured since the end of the Trudeau era, and it never really recovered from the Chrétien-Martin factional split. Instead, it just kind of held itself together enough to not lose to the Western protest party that was Reform/Alliance or their utterly destroyed former rivals the Progressive Conservatives. When the right was finally united, the structural faults began to show, beginning the party's slow collapse. The Chrétien-Martin split gave way to a Dion-Ignatieff-Rae split, shaking the party's roots to the point that the damage was irreparable even after Dion resigned and Bob Rae stood down. Ignatieff never received the full support of his party, so while he accepted all responsibility for the loss in his concession speech, which was certainly a classy way to go, much of the blame rests on the people who were supposed to have his back.
The final nail in the coffin for the Liberals was ironically the strategy that had kept them afloat in the last couple of elections: encouraging NDP supporters to vote strategically for them to stop the Conservatives. While it may have been slightly more effective earlier in the campaign, those calls fell on deaf ears when the NDP's numbers surged ahead of the Liberals and positioned themselves as the likely future Opposition. Near the end of the campaign, when Ignatieff still continued to repeat that the NDP has never formed government and likely never would, doubtlessly egged on by campaign strategists that really should have known better, he came off as more arrogant than realistic, almost like he was trying to question the veracity of the poll numbers.
As far as the theme song I have assigned to him goes, the title alone is enough to encapsulate Ignatieff's campaign within the greater narrative of the Liberal Party. Nevertheless, the lyrics of the song are so fitting as to almost be prophetic: "And I can be good, and I would — if I knew I was understood / And it'll be great, just wait — Or is it too little too late?" The video is equally Nostradamic (yes, I just made that word up): it features lead singer Steven Page quitting the band, just as he would for real several years later, but which can also be taken as symbolism for Ignatieff stepping down as leader the day after the election. At least the lyrics also provide some measure of solace to the embattled professor: "One day, this embarrassment will fade behind me / And that day, I could think of things that won't remind me."
Ironic bonus: Ignatieff's fall came hand-in-hand with the rise of Jack Layton's NDP. And guess what band has long been one of the NDP's most notable groups of celebrity supporters, performing several concerts at party rallies and conventions?
So how do the Liberals come back? One way would be to find a new leader who can inspire the unity that the party so desperately needs. Justin Trudeau is the first to come to my mind, given that he is the scion of arguably the most prominent prime minister from any party in the 20th century. Former NDP premier of Ontario and former Liberal leadership candidate Bob Rae could potentially also be a very effective choice, given that his own lost faith in the NDP could become a symbol for a move back to the Liberals nationally, but he also comes with a lot of baggage and has seemed in interviews to tentatively support a Liberal-NDP merger.
Which brings me to option number two: A Liberal-NDP merger, or perhaps more appropriately an NDP-Liberal merger. With the success of the former Unite the Right movement on display in Harper's majority victory, it seems like a no-brainer to Unite the Left. However, this is an unpalatable option on both sides. For the Liberals, a merger with the power balance as it currently stands would mean having their historically powerful party almost absorbed by the NDP, like the Progressive Conservatives were absorbed by Stephen Harper's Canadian Alliance. The Liberals have traditionally cast themselves as the centrist alternative to the NDP and the Conservatives, meaning that in the event of a merger, many centrists — especially right-leaning ones — would jump ship to the Conservatives, just as many Red Tories like Scott Brison crossed the floor to the Liberals in the wake of the right-wing merger. Meanwhile, the prospect of a merger could be equally undesirable for the NDP, because an increase in the stability of their gains could be offset by inheriting the disunity and infighting seemingly inherent in the Liberal Party, which would only be made worse if it was Jack Layton or Thomas Mulcair trying to give the ex-Liberals direction.
The next four years could very well determine the entire future of the Liberal Party, meaning that there will still be a lot of very interesting political news before the next election on October 19, 2015. (Remember that fixed election date law that the Conservatives passed back in 2006? The one that never applied because elections kept being triggered by non-confidence votes? Now that there's a majority in Ottawa again, there's no reason for this bill not to take effect.)
Jack Layton's New Democrats
Theme song: "Loser Like Me" by the cast of Glee (Glee: The Music, Volume 5, 2011)
Hoo boy. While the NDP got off to a kind of slow start, ceding ground to Ignatieff's Liberals and looking like they would suffer a slow death of a thousand cuts, they suddenly and unexpectedly took off sometime after the debates like a rocket being propelled by a controlled supernova.
Jack Layton has always been a popular leader, repeatedly being voted the leader Canadians would most like to have a beer with, but this had never translated into significant poll numbers for his party until now. The NDP's wildfire success has been the big story of this election, and no one can deny the accomplishment deserves its accolades. He's being credited with the return of a federalist party to mainstream relevance in Quebec. His party is now being touted as a possible future government.
This election is the culmination of years of hard work by Jack Layton and his team, who have stayed united while the Liberals allowed themselves to crumble like the Berlin Wall. Like Glee's New Directions, they weathered much criticism and the claims of naysayers that they would never make it this far, and came back stronger than ever. With such feelings of pride and joy and even ecstasy rising through the party, who wouldn't want to be a loser like them?
More proof that absolutely everything is prophetic: The cover of the album that features "Loser Like Me" is orange. Nothing is ever just a coincidence, people. (Image source.)That statement mentions one thing that could still pose a big problem for the NDP moving forward: despite all their accomplishments, they still lost. And not only did they not form government, but the NDP surge, as mentioned earlier, is responsible for the Conservatives winning a majority, which was the last result any left-leaning voter in Canada wanted to see. The importance of strategic voting, long the bane of the NDP's existence, was validated in this election, meaning that to retain current levels of support, the NDP will have to convince Liberal supporters to vote strategically for them, as many surely did, rather than the other way around. To do so, they must prove themselves able to form a government and worthy of doing so, which should be their number-one task in the next four years.
It's going to be an uphill battle. Layton's campaign really wasn't all that different from his prior campaigns in the last couple of elections. His rivals changed more than he did, and that is arguably the key to his success more than anything he himself did differently, which means that a different set of more effective rivals could spell trouble for the orange tide.
To wit: In Quebec, where the surge started, Gilles Duceppe has been the dominant leader at the federal level for over a decade, but that inertia began started to wear off sometime in the last while. Quebecers flirted with the Conservatives as a federalist alternative, but their shine wore off pretty quickly, and the Liberals still haven't rebuilt themselves in the province since the sponsorship scandal. But a weak Liberal Party allowed a former safe seat of theirs, Outremont, to fall to NDP candidate Thomas Mulcair in a by-election in 2007, giving the New Democrats their only seat in the province, but also showing that the party was indeed a legitimate choice for Quebec voters. The momentum did not hold through the 2008 election, but there is no doubt that Mulcair's continued hold on Outremont has played a role in making the current surge possible.
The NDP seems like a natural fit for Quebec, considering their policies, aside from the federalist-separatist divide, mirror the Bloc's quite nicely, and the NDP has enhanced its appeal by including some tidbits for soft nationalists, like applying Quebec language law to federal public services operating in the province. But I would give this warning to anyone expecting them to be the new reigning power in Quebec: Remember the ADQ. In 2007's provincial election in Quebec, the same year Thomas Mulcair took Outremont, longtime third-party leader Mario Dumont led his Action Démocratique du Québec to a surprise second-place finish, seemingly indicating the beginning of the end of the Parti Québécois, in third for the first time in its history. Jean Charest's minority was unstable, however, and another election was held in just a year... in which the ADQ was virtually annihilated, fading back into obscurity as the PQ revitalized itself with a vastly more popular leader.
Considering the NDP's current surge involves a charismatic longtime third- or fourth-place leader challenging a fading separatist leader, the potential is there for history to repeat itself should the Bloc replace Gilles Duceppe with a more competitive head. This is especially true once one examines the NDP's Quebec caucus in detail. It largely consists of candidates who never expected to win, including several university students, such as a 19-year-old just months older than I am who is now Canada's youngest-ever MP (and of whom I'm kind of jealous). Most jaw-droppingly, Ruth Ellen Brosseau, an Ottawa pub owner with barely passable French who never even visited her almost entirely francophone riding during the campaign, instead spending much of it on vacation in Las Vegas, will now represent Berthier—Maskinongé in Parliament. The NDP and its Quebec lieutenant, Thomas Mulcair, will need discipline and focus worthy of Mr. Miyagi in order to whip this rookie caucus into shape, so they should be glad that they have four years to get it right.
With Quebecers apparently willing to support federal parties en masse once again, the NDP's more traditional rivals, in particular a renewed and reunified Liberal Party, could also spell the end of its success within the province and throughout the country. Personally, I will not call this election result a fundamental realignment of our political system unless the NDP manage to hold onto Official Opposition, or even do better, in the next election — or they merge with the Liberals, which, as mentioned earlier, seems somewhat undesirable for both sides.
Gilles Duceppe's Bloc Québécois
Theme song: "Misery" by Maroon 5 (Hands All Over, 2010)
The lyrics of the theme song I've chosen for the Bloc apply less than the music video, which you can click the link above to watch. In it, the singer's lover (played by lead singer Adam Levine's real-life girlfriend) starts off seemingly in love, and then gradually grows more and more physically abusive, until she gets up to completely cartoonish levels of violence that the singer is lucky to survive. At the end of the video, he finally falls and lies motionless on the ground as his lover walks away.
This is the most pertinent metaphor I can find for the defeat that the Bloc suffered in this election. The Bloc had a long-standing love affair with Quebecers, and it seemed to everyone concerned that it was destined to last. And then, suddenly, not only did the affair end, it ended so badly that the 47-member Bloc caucus was beaten to within an inch of its life, reduced to a mere 4 seats and losing party status.
Um, what are you doing with that rocket launcher? Oh, merde! (Image source: The video for "Misery".)What happened? As I described in my analysis of the NDP's success, Quebecers were just experiencing a bad case of the 20-year itch. Gilles Duceppe's leadership was becoming tired, and the many years of voting for the Bloc really hadn't improved Quebec's standing within the Canadian federation. The Bloc's desperate move back to an openly separatist agenda later in the campaign, even bringing now 80-year-old Jacques Parizeau out of retirement to campaign by their side, reminded Quebecers of tough and uncertain times that they really didn't feel like reliving, hurting the Bloc even more. The NDP surge was unstoppable, and it seems that there's only room for one dominant party in Quebec, meaning the Bloc was all but doomed.
Is this the end of separatism in Quebec? It's far too early to say that. Having a federal party represent Quebec in Ottawa certainly can't hurt, but support for separatism has been rather stable, albeit not enough for a successful referendum, for many years. The Parti Québécois is still a force in provincial politics, and seems to be the government-in-waiting, even if only because voters are as fatigued with Jean Charest as they were with Gilles Duceppe. The Bloc itself could rise again with a new leader, especially if the NDP's caucus of surprise winners cannot hold itself together, but it could just as easily fall from relevance entirely as Quebec once again becomes a crucial federal battlefield province. The loss of official party status for the Bloc will make any comeback extra difficult, however, considering it eliminates their guaranteed time to ask questions in Question Period and denies them the ability to apply for House of Commons money for research and staffing purposes.
Elizabeth May's Green Party
Theme song: "Boring" by the The Arrogant Worms (Torpid, 2008) (Not available on YouTube, so you can either listen to the full song on The Arrogant Worms' website at the link provided, or watch this Compaq advertisement from the 1980s featuring John Cleese instead, which features similar sentiments.)
At the beginning of the song, the protagonist says that he likes to talk about the weather because it's the most interesting thing he knows. He also likes to talk about science and what he's read in the paper.
The Green Party definitely brings important messages to the table and is an important voice for the environmental movement in Canada, and many have anxiously awaited the election of its first MP (aside from that one guy who crossed the floor and then lost his seat in 2008). It seems like just another kick in the pants for the Greens that when it finally happened, it was the least interesting electoral event of the night.
The Green Party's entire campaign machine across the country was geared towards getting Elizabeth May elected in her riding. Even other Green candidates interviewed on CPAC admitted that. She won sympathy from voters after being shut out of the leaders' debates. Sure, she was running against a Conservative cabinet minister, but he was only Minister of State (Sport), and considering that she put up a strong fight against the Minister of Defence last time, it would have been completely depressing if she hadn't won. Call it an upset if you want: I call it the least surprising shift of the night.
May will no doubt ally herself with the Opposition NDP to make herself a bit more audible in Parliament, but she still doesn't have time for herself in Question Period, and any private member's bills she tries to pass are doomed to fail with a Conservative majority. If the party can build on her victory in the next election, which they just might considering it will be hard to leave May out of the debates a second time now that the Greens have almost as many seats as the Bloc, then we might have a story. But for now, until something new comes up, May gets a smile, thumbs-up, and a suppressed yawn from me.
So that's how I saw the 2011 election overall. Tune in whenever I get time to write more posts to read my take on political scandals in Canada and why local MPs simultaneously don't matter and yet mean everything to voters.
