witness

But, fortunately, it's not quite as bad as that.

Some thoughts on the election.

1. The Conservatives have shown themselves to be strikingly unpopular - in spite of winning. Afterall, think of the many factors that were in their favour:

The media made things as easy for the Conservatives as possible, repeatedly showing Steven Harper as humane, friendly, warm, etc. and leaving out the uncomfortable truths of his Parliamentary voting record, his public speaking record, and his party's policies. Meanwhile the media gave full berth to demonize Paul Martin and the Liberals - not a difficult (or unjust) task - and scrupulously avoiding mentioning the NDP until the final week of the 8 week campaign.

The Liberals had been in power for 13 years, and people wanted a change in government.

The Liberals provided the Conservatives with several scandals, a poorly run campaign, a visibly discomfitted leader who stumbled and mumbled his way through defensive speaches, apologies, awkward attempts at statesmanship, and a platform stolen from the NDP.

The Bloc Québecois, having coasted through the first half of the campaign and certain to increase their number of seats, suddenly decided to raise the spectre of Separatism, thereby dropping in the polls and supplying the Conservatives with the unanticipated prospect of gaining seats in Québec for the first time in a decade.

The Conservatives ran a tight campaign, with Harper effectively muzzling his equally extremist, but usually less-disciplined colleagues so as not to alienate the electorate. [The first signs that this discipline might be breaking down only came in the final days of the election.] Similarly, the US Ambassador kept his mouth shut.

And yet, for all these advantages (plus lots of filthy lucre to back them up) the Conservatives not only merely won a minority gvernment, but they actually ended up with fewer seats than the Liberals won in 2004. Now that's no way to win an election.

2. Only one party could rightly be said to have won this election. Not the Conservatives, who had much higher hopes and ended up with an embarrassing sort of victory - hardly an endorsement of their policies or image. Not the Liberals, who only got their 103 seats because the Conservatives are too frightening and unappealing to have kept them to even fewer. Not the Bloc Québecois, who expected to increase their numbers and actually lost 3 seats. The winner was the NDP, who finally managed respectable numbers at 29 seats (far short of the number they should have based on their share of the vote, but that's a topic for another occasion).