Canada’s forty-first election was supposed to be about nothing. Unnecessary, unwanted, unimportant: a $300 million exercise in futility destined to produce another minority Parliament with a configuration similar to the last.
Instead, this election has profoundly changed both the composition of the House of Commons and the politics of our country. For the next four to five years Canadians will be governed by a Conservative majority government; not a Progressive Conservative government, the last of which we saw in 1993, but that of a party that consciously dropped the “p word” when it reunited its warring factions in 2003. It will also be a government which got its majority without Quebec, while facing an official opposition which draws over half its caucus from that province.
