Moderate Conservatives Lost an Opportunity

The CPC needed to be humiliated in the last election. That was the only way for moderate conservatives to regain their voice in Canadian politics. They lost it to populist conservatives, who took over the Conservative Party of Canada, when Stephen Harper was elected leader of the CPC.

As a result the CPC has been drifting further and further to the right until they can now be truthfully called Maple MAGA. 

The last election was a golden opportunity to change that. All moderate conservatives had to do what to hold their nose, for this one election, and vote Liberal. If the CPC would have been reduced to less than 100 seats then the grip of Maple MAGA could have been broken. The irony is by doing so moderate conservatives would have been voting for one of their own. Make no mistake, Mark Carney would not have been out of place in Brian Mulroney's cabinet and he would have blended into a Joe Clark cabinet very well.

However, moderate conservatives just could not bring themselves to do that, at least not in large enough numbers to make a difference. The end result is the CPC lost but not badly enough for them to believe that they actually need to change and renew their party. Pierre Poilievre will win his by-election and he will continue to rule his party much like he did before the election.

Or, he could still lose his grip on the party but his replacement will not be any different from him. Maple MAGA has been emboldened by the increase in the CPC seat count so no matter who winds up leading them into the next election their differences from Mr. Poilievre will be nothing more than differences in packaging and style. They will still be Maple MAGA.

Moderate conservatives forfeited their voice in Canadians Federal politics for at least a decade and probably longer.

Election Assessment: NDP

The NDP find themselves in an existential crisis because their latest election campaign was the culmination of more than a decade of bad political decisions. The way they were going it was just a matter of time before they suffered the fate they suffered on April 28.

I cannot really say anything specific about their campaign except that it was apparent early on that they realized they had no chance and just phoned it in. 

All of this started with Jack Layton. I know that he has been deified by NDP partisans because he managed to take the perennial third party and make it the Official Opposition against a majority government. The problem is he did so by making the NDP just another political party and one that has never learned how to win at the federal level.

Before Jack Layton, the NDP had the reputation of being the conscience of Parliament. They always pursued principled positions and they used that to keep the other parties honest, even when those parties lead majority governments. Jack Layton, decided to move away from that and help the Conservatives in their attempt to eliminate the Liberal Party of Canada. His two successors continued that pursuit. The only problem with that is they were unsuccessful and the result of April 28 was inevitable. It was only a matter of time.

That result is a repeat of the 1993 election. After that election they no longer had official party status because they won around 7 seats. At the time everybody who followed politics was upset by this. We all thought they deserved better. They were just caught up in the wave of revulsion Canadians had towards the Mulroney Tories, who were reduced to two seats in that election and would eventually be swallowed by the Reform Party. This time, I do not know anybody who cares about what happened to the NDP, except for the most partisan of NDP partisans. I know I do not care and as far as I am concerned they can be completely eliminated and I would not shed a tear.

So what happens now?

In the short term they will support the Liberals in everything because they will not want an election any time soon. So as long as all of the recounts currently taking place do not reduce the Liberals to under 165 seats the Liberals will be able to govern as if they have a majority for the foreseeable future.

As for the NDP that will be up to them. What they need to do is rebuild their party from the ground up. That is what they did after 1993. It took them almost a decade, and two leaders, to come back to respectability but they did it. However, what I expect will happen is they will try to go for the quick fix. They will try to get back into the game by the next election. If they succeed then that would be good on them but there is a very real risk that they will fail and failure will mean the destruction of the NDP as a political force at the Federal level. 

We will have to see how their leadership election progresses to see what approach they will decide to follow.