Solomon's vote
Ask me again and I'll tell you the same: Canadians sentence Liberals and Conservatives to one another's company
The Liberals won. Mark Carney returns as prime minister. He’ll get to name another cabinet, meet Parliament for the first time, govern if he can. But the result forecloses cheap gloating in ways I find satisfying. Canada is a country that wishes things were easy. Maybe they aren’t meant to be easy.
As I write this, Tuesday morning, late returns have moved a few more seats from the Conservatives to the Liberals, but both parties made substantial gains. The Conservatives won a greater share of the popular vote than the Harper Conservatives or the Trudeau Liberals did when they won their majorities in 2011 and 2015. The Liberals won still more.
Pierre Poilievre also lost his riding, convincingly. The prospect of his victory provoked a flight of NDP, Green and to a lesser extent Bloc voters to the Liberals that cancelled much of the effect of the Conservatives’ growth.
The voters’ rebuke of Poilievre in Carleton was personal and richly earned. He was their MP for most of his adult life. Yet he refused to use the time they gave him to learn basic lessons about what a parliament is for. He persuaded himself that those thousands of good people working within 10 blocks of his desk in the Commons were extras in his little Instagram dramas. Perhaps, in his search for easier markers elsewhere, he will pause in a carefully isolated corner somewhere to think about that.
The voters are not always right, but they are usually trying to make a point. Throughout its length this campaign seemed to be about which of the big parties would get away with something. Would the Liberals really get away with subbing-in a rookie to lead a substantially unrepentant party of incumbents? Would Poilievre really get away with using everything near him as a prop? No and no.