Tuesday, October 22, 2019
Well, We Repelled All Boarders
Our community, Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands, denied the barbarians even a toehold last night. Not one seat was to be had by Liberal or Conservative.
The Tory 'home on the range,' the oil and gas areas of central and eastern BC grew a bit. Vancouver and BC's Lower Mainland is still Liberal territory of a sort. They lost seven seats including the crown jewel, Vancouver-Granville, that went to Jody Wilson-Raybould. The NDP dominates the coast from Washington to Alaska.
The big losers last night were the Trudeau Liberals and the Singh New Dems. The Libs dropped 20 seats but the NDP dropped a proportionately far greater 15-20 seats from 44 in 2015 to 39 at dissolution to just 24 today.
How did the Green Wave that was predicted to sweep Vancouver Island become an Orange Crush? My family contributed towards our Green candidate's 450 votes, but our TO riding went predictably red by a huge margin.
ReplyDeleteI'm really enjoying the Schadenfreude of watching the Cons whine about winning the popular vote after they fought so hard against electoral reform. Thoughts and prayers, Andy.
Cap
What happened to the Green wave? May was inconsistent in her campaigning and style of leadership. Why on earth was she campaigning for JWR when the Greens had their own candidate in Vancouver - Granville. I think JWR will find it lonely as an Independent. She has made her point. Will she hang around?
ReplyDeleteOnly a 1 seat increase for the Greens? And, in Fredericton, of all places. Did anyone see that coming? No federal Green seats on PEI. No additional seats on Vancouver Island.
I think Elizabeth May is done. I suspect she's tired. Is there a federal Green Party without her? Remains to be seen.
UU
When I got up this morning, the pundits were all talking about how poorly the Liberals did west of Ontario: 13 seats. What they ignored was how poorly the Conservatives die east of Quebec: 14 seats. Since there are more citizens east than west, the cons had a poorer showing than the libs. It ain't all Alberta all the time.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteHistorically we've used seats won/lost as the measure of electoral success. This year, it seems, we found a more convenient/less embarrassing metric.
Trudeau's fan boys prefer it rather than accepting the loss of 20 seats and the false majority. The NDP claim a grand success when they too lost 20 seats from their 2015 tally. It sounds like those blue ribbon 'participation' awards they hand out to all the primary school kids on faux track day.
My guess is that the best thing Justin Trudeau had going for him and the only factor that spared him even greater humiliation was Andrew Scheer.
It was a "hold your nose" stinker of an election, the sort of thing that begins to put people off politics. Younger people, the under 50s, might not notice but those a bit older remember the calibre of politicians we used to get in all parties in Canada. We know that federal politics has turned into a shitshow.
Meanwhile the great problems of the day, including the truly existential threat, will go unaddressed as the clock runs down.
Justin's supporters have to be sublimely stupid to believe you can have a massive new pipeline to flood world markets with ever more hazmat bitumen and it'll be good for the environment. That's Trump Gullibilly-grade stupid.
I'm with Suzuki and Stephen Lewis. There's no point looking for solutions from the political caste. They have neither the courage nor the vision to tackle what threatens us. We have to find our own ways to take this down.
Balance of power?
ReplyDeleteLibs will get Bloc support on SNC-bypass, Con support for TMX and NDP support for welfare-state tinkering.
Yawn
On the other hand, Hollywood will save millions making dystopian epics in/of the future.
ReplyDeleteI fear you may be right, NPoV.
On environmental issues the Bloc are going to prove interesting friends or foes!
ReplyDeleteTB
I was sad to see so few seats for the green party---once again, with climate change so on our doorstep, I wanted a surge of voters to respond with a green wave!
ReplyDeleteMy take away---were devolving as a population---as Scheer got over 6million votes.
and of 27 million eligible voters ---the biggest block--9 million stayed at home--why?
Were in dire straits, this planet is dying, and still people lack intellect to reason this out, and even with the media posting news about it--
9million people stayed at home--
and 6million decided its not that big of a deal!
Sad, scary and totally frustrating for the logical voters left in this country.