Canada’s 2021 election: everybody’s a loser

gregfelton.com
(September 23, 2021)

Well, that was a waste of time! Prime Minister Justin Trudeau thought he could score a majority government at the expense of a divided “conservative” party and a weak NDP, but ended up with another minority government, albeit marginally stronger, which is more than I expected. At best I figured he would lose a few seats because of voter anger at his hypocrisy on electoral reform and the environment and his forcing an election after only two years. I felt this would be the best scenario because it would give the Liberal Party cause to wake up from its somnambulistic torpor to call a leadership convention. Instead, voters shrugged, kept the same voting pattern and went back to bed. Anyone who thinks the Liberals won this election is sadly mistaken. Even though each major party leader won his riding, they (and the country) are all losers.

Election Results for the Major National Parties
Party	2011	% change	2015	% change	2019	% change	2021*
Conservative	166	–40	99	+22.2	121	–1.65	119
Liberal	34	+441.2	184	–15.8	155	+1.94	158
NDP	103	–57.3	44	–45.5	24	+4.16	25
The 2015 Liberal landslide was a widespread voter revolt against 10 years of neo-fascist rule. However, the reduction of Liberal seats four years later, which turned a majority government into a minority, showed that a return to Conservative misrule was possible. The 2015 and 2019 results also showed the great NDP breakthrough was a mirage. The recent 2021 election showed that the electorate is polarized and stagnated. * Preliminaary results

Justin Trudeau: loser

The three extra seats his Liberals won (as of the latest, unofficial count) does not come close to justifying this unnecessary election. The Liberals lost the popular vote 32.5 to 33.8%, and four female cabinet ministers went down: so much for Trudeau’s dream of a fresh mandate to continue his COVID-19 tyranny. The sad fact is, a great many voters do not like Trudeau, as the violence that dogged him on the campaign trail proved. He survived only because the alternative in the minds of many voters was worse.

Erin O’Toole: loser

For a man who had visions of forming a government and had a Liberal party ripe for thumping, his party lost seats, including three Alberta incumbents: two in Edmonton and one in Calgary. Clearly, O’Toole’s kinder, gentler brand of unenlightened economic self-interest did not make a dent outside of the true believers. The party was so lost during then campaign that holding the Liberals to another minority was deemed a success. As in the U.S., the right-wing party was crushed in urban ridings: Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver went heavily Liberal with some NDP. The Cons did well in the rest of the Greater Toronto Area and in the southwestern Ontario triangle, but that was to be expected. The lesson for O’Toole, is that the Cons. still do not appeal to the educated, urban middle class, which means that the Libs have a hammerlock on government for the foreseeable future.

Jagmeet Singh: loser

Of the three major parties, the NDP had the best improvement: 4.16%, so why is its party leader a loser? The improvement was only one seat. The NDP fancies itself as a centre-left party that speaks to the non-moneyed classes who have strong, reformist, environmental sensitivities, but Jagmeet Singh did not offer voters a clear alternative to the Liberals. When push came to vote, anti-Con voters fell back on the Liberals for fear of vote-splitting. To be fair, though, the NDP will forever be an also-ran party fighting for broad voter legitimacy so long as Canada has an archaic, undemocratic, first-past-the-post electoral system. Based upon a purely proportional result, the NDP with 17.8% of the popular vote would have ended up with 60 seats, the Libs. 109, and the Cons. 114. Neither the Libs nor the Cons has in interest in genuinely democratic elections.

Canada is polarized between two equally toxic oligarchic entities: the Libs with their pandering populism and tyrannical behaviourism and the Cons with their anti-intellectualism and unenlightened economics. The longer the Canadian sheeple believe they have genujine elcetoral choice, the faster civil liberties will disappear.