…I got shit supreme from some federal Grit friends when this column came out.  Reading it now, I guess it wasn’t so far off the mark.  (I completely missed the NDP surge, however.  I am comforted by the fact that I wasn’t alone in that regard.)

Wish I had been wrong.

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Demand the long form death certificate.

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He’s a liar.

He was on the record for years – he wanted to gut human rights in Ontario. Now, he says he didn’t mean any of that.

This one reminds of Stockwell Day’s flat tax. Said he favoured one, for ages. Then, as an election loomed – as the consequences of his mistake became evident – Day reversed himself. Didn’t mean it, he said.

It didn’t fool anyone. It allowed us to argue he had a hidden agenda. And it said as much about his character as it did about his policies.

John Tory reversed himself on funding for private religious schools at the eleventh hour, too. It didn’t help the PCs much, as I recall.

Tim Hudak is one of the biggest phonies in Canadian political life. With this, he hasn’t fooled anyone – and he’s alienated the very people who propelled him into the leader’s chair. They’re not happy, now.

You know, at least with Hudak’s predecessors, you knew where you stood.

Not this guy. He’s a liar.

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If Elections Canada allows this one to stand, they have officially become a joke:

“…signatures backing the NDP election winner that may have been forged, of people that may not live in the riding or who weren’t clear what it was they were being asked to support.

It’s just the latest problem to emerge as the media and political parties scratch beneath the surface of Ruth Ellen Brosseau, a single mother who lives in Gatineau, Que., but won the race 300 kilometres away by nearly 7,000 votes.

Midway through the campaign, Brosseau was found to have taken a vacation in Las Vegas. When she returned to Canada, she was leading the race in a riding near Trois-Rivieres, Que., propelled by NDP Leader Jack Layton’s popularity in the province.”

 

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Advisory:Kill SCOC elections story; there was no ruling in this case; item is erroneous (Tories-In-Out)
Source: The Canadian Press
May 5, 2011 10:56

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OTTAWA – EDITORS: KILL Ottawa-placelined Tories-In-Out moved at 09:54 with writethru at 10:05 ET. Story is erroneous. There was no decision in this matter. There will be a substitute story with different content on another court case.

INDEX: NATIONAL JUSTICE POLITICS

 

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In yesterday’s morning after the morning after post, I posted a fun email I received from my Ontario Liberal war room pal Bob Lopinski. It struck a chord with a lot of people; it was Twittered, hither and yon, famous Canadian columnists emailed me approvingly about it, and a bunch of you commented. Here it is again:

“I do really wish there was more science in political science.

This is what I have gleaned from the early analysis:

1. Voters are moving left, unless they are moving right.
2. Incumbency is bad, unless you were re-elected.
3. Voters want change AND even more of the same.
4. On-the-ground organization and sophisticated micro-targeting work, unless you are a bar-maid canvassing in Las Vegas.
5. The separatists are preparing to ramp up their campaigns, and as a first step have left the Canadian House of Commons.”

Bob’s point – which political pros like him often make, pre-, post-, and during elections – is that there is no single meaning you can apply to the outcome. Sometimes, it’s just a bunch of things happening, some good for your team, some bad.

The discussion has arisen because, partly, Michael Ignatieff campaigned way better than Stephen Harper – but the latter still beat the stuffing out of the former on E Day. Don’t “campaigns matter” anymore? Well, yes, goes The Lopinski Theorem, except when, you know, campaigns don’t matter.

Pollsters were off; pundits scratched their tall foreheads. In the Open Election Prediction Thread, I offered swell prizes for the person who accurately picked the exact seat outcome. Out of more than 200 entries, on here and Facebook, no one did. In this morning-after entry – which attracted a wk.com record of almost 400 comments – theories abounded, but no consensus was reached.

Ditto the commentariat: Harper won because he’s an evil genius; Ignatieff lost because he had a lousy platform and Canadians didn’t like him; Harper won and Ignatieff lost because the progressive side of the spectrum is divided. And that’s just the first three columnists highlighted over on the invaluable National Newswatch this morning. There’s more discordant stuff out there to read, if you have the patience for it.

I’ve penned my own take in a coming issue of The Walrus – concluded on the morning after all the results rolled in – and I go at it for nearly 4,000 words. I won’t give away what I have to say (the magazine asked me not to), but suffice to say that, after believeing for a lifetime that “campaigns matter,” now I’m not so sure anymore. (But – here I go contradicting myself again – I think a big Conservative federal win means a big Conservative provincial win in Ontario is now gone, baby, gone. Take that, Timmy.)

Thus, The Lopinski Theorem: shit happens, good and bad. People will assign whatever meaning to the results that is consistent with their own biases and prejudices. In a country as big and as diverse as this one, it’s truly dumb to say one thing explains everything, isn’t it?

I’m a Catholic: I believe in divine mysteries. I like that there are some things I can’t explain, that they are ineffable. I draw comfort from the fact that there are some things which aren’t known facts, and that there art many, many things beyond the ken of my puny brain. I don’t need (or want) everything explained to me all the time.

Election 2011, per the theorem. Don’t try and explain it to me. Whatever you come up with will be wrong, and/or right.

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Okay, folks, some 200 of you participated in the Open Election Prediction thread.  As you may have heard, The Fascists won 167 seats, The Bolsheviks 102, those of us in The Rudderless Third Party 34, the Traitors 4, and the Green Lady 1.

So who came closest to that final result?  (Certainly not me; I didn’t think a majority would happen, and nor did I see the Bloc-heads falling as far as they did.)

Nothing after polls closed counts, naturally.  That would be cheating, and cheating isn’t permitted in Stephen Harper’s Canada, except and unless you are a member of his cabinet or caucus.

Do we have a winner?

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Walkom, writing the column every progressive should read:

“…any talk of cooperation will not be easy. Liberal activists are used to fighting the NDP and vice versa. In parts of the West, the word “Liberal” is viewed as a curse word by NDP voters. In parts of southern Ontario, the reverse holds.

More important, the NDP is riding high on its election triumph. It’s the official opposition. It has seats in Quebec. Old dreams of squeezing out the Liberals and turning Canada into a two-party, left-right state have been revived.

This euphoria cannot last. NDP voters will soon realize that, even as leader of the official opposition, Layton has no influence over a Harper majority government. He will also be hard-pressed to navigate between a party that is traditionally centralist and a new Quebec voting base that is anything but.

As well, the Liberals are not a spent force. What happened Monday was not a repeat of the 1993 tsunami that left the old Progressive Conservatives with just two seats in the Commons. The Liberals still have MPs from every province except Alberta.

Eventually, both parties will be forced to face the mathematics of the situation. Each wants to be the one to defeat the Harper Conservatives. Neither can do it alone.”

 

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• I spent a lot of yesterday talking to Liberal friends. Most of them were quite fine, thank you very much – and a surprising number were upbeat, because they said that the long-overdue revamping of the Liberal Party of Canada can now begin in earnest, with new blood, new ideas, new approaches. Personally, I feel the same: unless the Lord takes me home, I want to be part of the rebuilding process, and take a shot at running again. I’m an Alberta Liberal: I don’t freak out when my party gets hammered, you know?  Anyway, columns like this and this are premature/off the mark, to say the least. Lots of obituaries were written when the Conservative Party was reduced to two seats in November 1993, and they ended up doing not badly in 2006 and beyond.
• Cognitive dissonance is right. Maher, per always, nails it here. Let’s perform my little test again: do you know the name of the president of the Conservative Party of Canada? Recall anything he/she has ever said? Exactly. Party presidents should raise money, and leave the talking to the elected people. This party president in particular. (And, by the by: why doesn’t he do what his leader did, yesterday? Liberals are asking that, too.)
• Speaking of resignations: Ignatieff did the honourable thing, yesterday; he didn’t mince words, he took responsibility, and he quit.  As noted, Apps should, too, for his role in this fiasco.  And, if the voters hadn’t resolved the question first, quite a few of us would be today demanding changes for Ignatieff’s Chief of Staff (who was ultimately responsible for the maladroit strategy that got us here); his so-called “Chief Operating Officer” (who was supposed to ensure we had election/organizational readiness, and didn’t); his policy director (who put together the platform that nobody, Liberals included, found either compelling or saleable); and his unilingual and comms-inexperienced Director of Communications (who should have never, ever been made Director of Communications).  I wish all of them the best of luck, however, in their future political endeavours.
• Alternation? Chris’ column today is worth a read, as always, but the provincial Grits I know – unlike their cousins – are very, very (very) ready for the October 2011 election. What’s more, there is a simple political reality that is always at play in Canadian politics, one the Ontario Progressive Conservatives need to heed: Ontarians don’t like one party running the whole show. Thus, Chretien begat Harris, Mulroney begat Peterson, and so on and so on. Here’s the elevator conversation, one you’ll be hearing lots of times in Ontario in coming months: “The Cons run the GTA, and the country. Do you want the same party running Ontario, too?”
• Case in point: Health care, again the number one issue in Ontario and the nation. Harper talked about the coming health care battle in his election night speech, and with reporters afterwards. Ballot-type question: “Who do you want protecting health care at the bargaining table with Harper? McGuinty? Or Timmy Hudak, who shut down nearly 30 hospitals, fired thousands of nurses, and last month cancelled his policy convention – where his health care plan was supposed to be revealed – to accommodate his federal boss?”
• Lopinski’s Observations: My Ontario Liberal war room colleague Bob Lopinski came up with a brilliant assessment of the post-election coverage, yesterday. Like him, I found that (a) no pundit or pollster really saw it coming and (b) they’re all sort-of making it up as they go along. Thus, Bob’s take, which you can clip and save:

“I do really wish there was more science in political science.  

This is what I have gleaned from the early analysis:

1. Voters are moving left, unless they are moving right.
2. Incumbency is bad, unless you were re-elected.
3. Voters want change AND even more of the same.
4. On-the-ground organization and sophisticated micro-targeting work, unless you are a bar-maid canvassing in Las Vegas.
5. The separatists are preparing to ramp up their campaigns, and as a first step have left the Canadian House of Commons.”

UPDATE: And Gardner, on the same subject, here.

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Michael Ignatieff has to go.

There is no other option. He ran a good campaign, he did better on the hustings than anyone expected, he impressed Liberals from coast to coast.

But Canadians weren’t impressed, at any point. From the start, they were unenthusiastic about the former Harvard professor. Liberal lefties thought he was too right wing; Liberal veterans thought he wasn’t ever a politician.

And Canadians didn’t like him.

The multimillion-dollar Conservative attack-ad campaigns didn’t help matters, of course. Those ads were designed to define the new Liberal leader before he could define himself, and they worked. (If there is any comfort for dispirited Libs this morning, it is that the main beneficiary of those attack ads wasn’t the Conservative leader who approved them — it was the NDP leader.)

So, are any Liberals in shock this morning? Not all of us.

Despite what you may read elsewhere, take it from this chastened Grit: The reality of the Liberal Party’s humiliating defeat didn’t actually become known last night, after the polls closed.

Among many Liberals, it was known the party was heading for a crushing loss for about three weeks. In the past week, however, the bad news got even worse. It came into sharp focus when I got a call from a senior member of Ignatieff’s team of advisors.

“We’ve got a lot of rebuilding to do, but I don’t think it will involve Ignatieff,” this Grit said. “The leader is going to lose his seat.”

And he did. Politics is a cruel business, and Ignatieff knew that when he sought the top job. So that’s that.

But Ignatieff’s departure alone won’t solve the Liberal Party’s many problems. It is unfair to blame Ignatieff for everything that went wrong. The Liberal caucus needs new blood. In many cases, Grit MPs have represented their ridings (well) for decades. But we need new blood. We need new ideas, new passions, new people.

We need to get much better at raising money — after all, it was a Liberal government that ushered in the changes to the way federal political fundraising was done. And that’s not all: The Liberal Party itself needs to become a true federation, and not just a loose coalition of regional fiefdoms.

Better election readiness. Better policy-making. Better unity. And — most of all — a better understanding of all of modern Canada, and not just the urban enclaves where the party still has some strength. All of those things are needed if the Liberal Party of Canada is ever again to be relevant to Canadians.

As I watched Michael Ignatieff from the Sun News TV studio Monday night, I felt sad for him. He isn’t a bad guy. He isn’t what those Conservative ads said he was. In the brief period I worked for him, I thought he was a smart man, one with lots of ideas, and a drive to serve his country.

But none of that came across on TV. And Canadians, as I say, never felt comfortable with him.

I wish him luck in whatever he does next. Liberals, too, I wish luck. We have a big, big job ahead of us.

I’m confident we’re going to get that job done.

 

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