Everyone lost this election

Can’t the Liberals and Conservatives both lose? Andrew Coyne asked plaintively last week. And just answered: “As it turned out, they both did.” But they were not alone. Just about everybody lost this election.

OK, the PPC lost only one seat. But for the Greens, Canada’s “climate election” was a strategic and tactical disaster. Instead of holding the balance of power even with Liberals and NDP aligned, they got just three lousy seats more than the PPC and red and orange together have a majority.

The Bloc won, sort of. But what did they win? With 32 seats (as of Tuesday morning) they can’t say “Oh well, we tried” and go do something else with their lives. Instead they have to hang around Ottawa annoying people without achieving anything including independence. (Except generous pensions … for those who make it through the next election.)

Tuesday’s National Post front-page cartoon showed both Justin Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh declaring jubilantly “I WON!” But the NDP did not. John Ivison already pointedly recalled the 1972 NDP “breakthrough” where they held the Liberals to a plurality, propped them up for two years, then got bushwhacked in 1974 by a cunningly aggressive Big Red Machine that took all the credit and stuck them with all the blame. And at least in 1972 they were riding up a wave to a record 31 seats, not down a tunnel from 103 to 44 to 24.

It gets worse. The francophone fellow social democrats who apparently finally embraced them in 2011 (59 seats) just dumped all but one. In Ontario, industrial heartland of their union wing, they got six. In Saskatchewan, Prairie heartland of their CCF wing, bupkis. Without B.C. they’d be a stub, and there they’re squeezed between rural Tories and progressive Greens. If this election were a fish, pace Dan Rather in 1984, the NDP would throw it back.

Obviously the Tories lost, too. Filled with righteous anger at that wretched Justin Trudeau, they ran a cunningly inoffensive campaign and gained a feeble 22 seats over 2015’s unhappy showing. And bombed from Thunder Bay to St. John’s, with four Atlantic seats, 10 in Quebec and, bouncing off the 905 wall, 36 in Ontario. They were immediately bombarded with advice finally to abandon their hard-right base-pandering to appeal, as Coyne put it, “to younger voters, to the university-educated, to women.” Apparently the ticket is to endorse a carbon tax, since they already promised to run deficits, ignored defence, declared social issues closed, promised handouts for all and face-planted, even losing Red Tory deputy leader Lisa Raitt’s seat in Milton, Ont.

It might surprise Saskatchewan women to learn that Conservatives appeal only to ignorant old men. But I’ll leave the fatuity of sauntering to victory as a fifth left-wing party for another day (Oct. 16, when I already said it) and examine the Liberal defeat.

That shattered promises and muffled scandals got them a plurality invites a Bob Dole “Where’s the outrage?” whine. But in fact the Grits lost everything but their base. Including their majority and the popular vote. Their 33 per cent vote share is the lowest ever for what the Post called a “winning party.” Worse, they are increasingly a regional party in two ways ominous for them and us.

The obvious one is geographic. They won most of Atlantic Canada but it’s older, less educated and has just 32 seats. In Quebec they got fewer than half the seats, as in every election but 2015 since Trudeau Sr. repatriated the Constitution, and despite Trudeau Jr.’s impassioned plea to Quebecers to stop the awful Anglos of Alberta and Ontario.

Ontarians being dedicated federal-provincial vote-splitters they swallowed the insult and contributed more than half the Grit caucus. But then the Liberals ran out of gas, winning just four seats from Manitoba through Alberta, barely a quarter of B.C.’s 42, and two of three in the north.

Again, it gets worse. The even more troubling Liberal regionalism is that west of New Brunswick they are a big-city party. Pundits may chortle that hip young urbanites are the future. But I see defeat for all of us in this polarized electoral map. (Hence the upcoming Economic Education Association of Alberta conference on meeting the challenge of Western separatism, which just got more urgent.)

Where once major parties contended across the land, with regional twists, we now see an increasingly blue hinterland (two currently unfriendly shades) and a red urban core. Only the NDP seems to straddle the divide, representing dispossessed Northerners and downtown hipsters from Toronto to Vancouver. And they’re in free-fall.

In this increasingly tribal picture, from the Bloc’s “Le Québec, c’est nous” to Trudeau’s perplexity that partisan ruthlessness and personal cluelessness about the rural Other divided the nation to all-blue Prairies, I worry about what comes next. Including another election we could all again lose.

FOR THE GREENS, CANADA’S ‘CLIMATE ELECTION’ WAS A STRATEGIC AND TACTICAL

DISASTER.