Voters punished all leaders but speeches told a different story

The four national party leaders talk a good game. They all claim to have won something from Monday’s election. In reality, they all lost.

To listen to the opposition leaders’ concession speeches early Tuesday morning was to be caught up in a weird alternate reality. Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer treated the Liberal minority win as if it had never happened.

He made no mention of the fact that his party had failed to oust Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government. Instead, he treated the election as a way station on the road to an inevitable Conservative victory sometime in the future.

There was no talk from Scheer on how to make a minority Parliament work. Rather, he suggested that any attempt to do so would be somehow illegitimate, noting that his party won marginally more of the popular vote than the victorious Liberals.

Referring to his Conservatives as the government in waiting, he said that his work would not be over until he demolished the Trudeau regime.

Canada was built on Conservative values, he said, and Conservative values would allow Canadians to rid themselves of the meddlesome Liberals.

It was not a humble speech. But then neither was Trudeau’s election night victory speech.

In it, the prime minister made no explicit reference to the fact that Canadians had deprived him of his parliamentary majority. Instead, he insisted that voters had given him a mandate to continue governing as he had before.

His only concession to the reality of his new situation came in two brief references. He told Quebecers who had switched their votes from the Liberals to the Bloc Québécois that he had heard their message. He said to voters in Alberta and Saskatchewan, who on Monday booted the few would-be Liberal MPs still extant in those provinces, that he understood their frustration.

Like Scheer, he seemed to treat Monday’s election results as a minor interruption. He said he will continue doing what he has done — although he did note that it is always possible to do better.

If hubris and hostility marked the election-night speeches of the two front runners, unreality characterized those of New Democratic Party Leader Jagmeet Singh and Green supremo Elizabeth May.

An excited Singh treated the election as a huge victory for the NDP. In fact, the party suffered devastating results. It was wiped out in Saskatchewan and almost wiped out in Quebec.

It won no seats in Toronto or the socalled 905 suburban belt around the city. In Ontario, it went from eight seats at dissolution to six. Nationally, its seat total went from 39 to 24.

There was no NDP resurgence in British Columbia. In fact, the party ended up in that province with one seat fewer than it held going in.

Nor is the Liberal minority government dependent on NDP support to get bills passed in the Commons. It can also look to the Bloc, which at 32 seats displaces the NDP as the third-largest party in the House and which has indicated it is willing to back the Liberals — as long as they provide goodies for Quebec.

Still, Singh was ecstatic. So was Green Leader May. Indeed, with a win in New Brunswick, the Greens did increase their seat total from two to three. But the party’s hoped-for breakthrough never took place. Across the country, the Greens netted only 6.5 per cent of the popular vote.

How does all of this bode for the new hung parliament? Minority governments can be productive. A minority Liberal government backed by the NDP gave Canada medicare.

But to work effectively, hung parliaments have two requirements. First, a minority government must remember that voters did not give it carte blanche. It cannot be arrogant.

Second, the opposition parties — including the official Opposition — must be flexible enough to allow the minority parliament to work. They cannot assume they have a monopoly on virtue.

In the aftermath of Monday’s election, it is not clear that either condition holds.