(no subject)

[felis_ultharus]

I won't pretend I was hoping for a better result for the NDP, but we did do well. We took a fair bit of Liberal heartland in Ontario away from them, lost only one seat and took an additional eight.

In a net eleven ridings where we'd finished third or worse before, we finished second. In Quebec, we boosted our share of the vote 60%, and Mulcair kept his seat. In our riding, we went from 9% to 16%. We did well.

And the Liberals were well and truly spanked for having voted for Harper's retrograde legislation 43 times, for having supported his nasty budgets, and so on. This country is polarized, and there's no place in government for a party that neither supports nor opposes Harper. They're just taking up space.

(Maybe now that they're feeling the crunch of the math -- and getting fewer seats than they deserve on the basis of popular vote -- that they'll actually give proportional representation some serious consideration.)

As for the Conservatives, if you're wondering why you're waking up with an extra seventeen in the House of Commons, look no further than the 42% of adult citizens in this country who didn't even bother to cast a ballot. That's our worst ever, and a depressing statement on the electorate.

The Conservatives got their people out -- passed the word through prayer halls and churches, and brought in people who think there on a sacred mission from God to support the party, most of whose MPs are evangelical Christians.

Because the other parties couldn't convince their voters to get to the polls, the Cons got about 5% more than the polls said they should have, and they poll high -- and they poll high, so they should have been even lower. That 5% or more made a major difference, as tiny numbers do in Canadian elections.

Yeah, there's always a small number who couldn't for legitimate reasons -- family emergency or serious accident on polling day, or a lack of real ID in spite of how easy they've made it. I know someone in the last category. For the most part, though, it's just the worst form of human laziness, and I suspect the country as a whole is going to suffer gravely for it.

Comments

[greekcub.livejournal.com]

The results were sickening last night, I was hoping for a minority with less conservative seats, not more. Let's hope proportional representation happens soon

[metawidget]

That would've been nice -- and Peter Turncoat MacKay, Minister of War, kept his seat (again), which I was hoping wouldn't happen.

Still, the Cons should be on notice that 62.4% of the people who turned out to vote turned out against them. Not that that'll deter them if the past Parliament has been any indication.

I'd love to see a Single Transferable Vote solution, giving people permission to vote with their heart first and Liberal second :)

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

It would be nice. The problem is that the Conservative party, the Liberal Party, and increasingly the Bloc are leaning on the first-past-the-post system as a cornerstone of their strategy. It's really only us in the NDP and the Greens who want it.

That's part if the reason I'm so down on strategic voting. It returns parties to power who have a vested interest in keeping back proportional representation.

Worse, the lack of proportional representation lends itself to some really dishonest campaigning. Liberals encourage people to vote Liberal to stop the Cons -- even in ridings where the Cons have no chance, and in ridings where the Libs have no chance. The Bloc tried that in our riding, where the Cons finished a distant fourth.

The worst was that VoteForEnvironment site, which was just a Liberal shill site masquerading as non-partisan. Its goal was to elect Liberals in tight ridings, and push the green shift as equal to other systems -- both the firm cap-and-trade system, and May's much stronger carbon tax.

That's why I try to discourage strategic voting at every turn. If enough people do it, things can't change. The Liberals need the Conservatives as a bogeyman to stay in power.

[maidenofirisa.livejournal.com]

I'm glad to hear Mulcair got in. By the time I went to bed last night it looked like the liberals might get elected in Outremont.

I voted before work yesterday and when I got to work a few of us were asking around if others had voted. I was surprised by the amount who said they wouldn't... In most cases trying to convince them didn't work either.

I didn't stay up to see the whole thing last night but I'll admit I was a bit down when I went to bed. Things actually look a bit better now than they did last night...

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

What's your riding these days?

And I'm really happy for Mulcair, too :)

[maidenofirisa.livejournal.com]

Right now I'm in Lasalle-Émard.

[jenjoou.livejournal.com]

I stayed up all night yesterday watching the results with increasing dread. I was happy with the Outremont results (sad that Marois didn't even get 3rd place in my riding even though it looked like he might for a while).

But the turnout (or lack thereof) was truly shocking. They've made it so easy to vote. You have 12 hours, it's usually about 2 blocks away and they take a lot of different kinds of ID. I do think it's laziness (I heard one woman look at the line -which was actually remarkably quick and well managed - and decide that it wasn't worth the bother). But people also don't seem to care, which I can't understand. How can you not care that that... man is running our country?

That's another thing that was disturbing watching the results on TV. No one had anything bad to say about Harper. I would have thought that by now he would have put the press on his bad side but... *sigh*

The really awkward way he hugged his family for the camera was also kind of creepy. But that's not politics, just my personal dislike of the man. On a similar vein, I admit to a bit of pleasure when he got confetti-ed in the face at the end of his speech.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

I didn't see the TV results.

And I find it creepy when politics parade their family around. It's full of coded messages, it distracts from policy, and it hints at fascism, in which ordinary people are supoposed to relate to their leader as a father-figure.

[infinitecomplex.livejournal.com]

This worked out pretty much as I expected. I'm disappointed by the Conservative gains, completely unsurprised by the Liberal losses, and pleased to see the NDP continuing to make steady progress.

I think it could go one of two ways now: either the Liberals will finally grow some teeth (I saw an interesting interview with Ujjal Dosanjh where he said he would absolutely not support any more Harper legislation - he obviously had a bad taste in his mouth from party policy in recent months) and attempt to convince everyone that they can actually be an opposition party this time around, or the NDP will effectively position themselves as the real opposition regardless of seat numbers. It may be too late for the Liberals to turn themselves around even if they decide to go that route, given how long they supported the last parliament. (It was kind of funny watching Stephane Dion finally grow some balls and take on that CTV reporter, though.)

The one ray of light is that as CBC pointed out, these were as ideal circumstances as Harper could have hoped for: an unelectable opposition leader with a party that chose to prop up bills it shouldn't have supported, polarization on the green shift, an economist at the helm in a time of economic crisis, an election called at exactly the time he chose...and even so he couldn't get the majority that he wanted. Their conclusion was that a majority Harper government is unelectable. I hope they're right.

I'm really disappointed by the voter turnout. I understand that this is an election that should never have been called and that nobody wanted, and that a lot of people are at the point of election burnout. But as someone currently without the right to vote in Canada, I find it so hard to watch people treat their vote like it doesn't matter.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

Harper shot himself in the foot -- anglophone politicians just never click with how important culture is in Quebec. He kept pushing it suicidally, too, because he didn't want to admit a mistake. You don't mess with culture in Quebec.

Nothing's impossible in politics, and the Liberals have pulled off last-minute miracles before -- hell, I half expected this to be their last election as a serious party.

But what's in the future? A bitterly divisive race. The front runners are Bob Rae and Michael Ignatieff.

Rae's got some street cred on social issues -- he's been pro-LGBTQ equality since long before that was cool in Canadian politics. But he's also a jerk, and most famous as the man who crashed Ontario's economy.

Ignatieff's known as an arrogant ivory-tower professor who's obsessed with the US, supports torture, and wanted Canada to join the US in Iraq long after even Harper gave it up.

The Liberals have some interesting people in the wings. Dosanjh is one of them, but my opinion of him has dropped a lot this parliament. Angry about it or not, Dosanjh lent his voice to some very evil laws. This isn't a chess game -- those affect real people's lives, and should never be used as pawns in a game of strategy.

I do think Scott Brison would make a good leader. He's an honest, principled fiscal conservative. Problem is, the Liberals are a fiscally conservative party that play-act at being social democrats every election, and Brison would probably be too honest to play that game.

[kurosakihisoka.livejournal.com]

ID isn't fully even necessary though as you could be sworn in at the polls, so I don't really consider that an excuse. I was wondering what the voter turn out was though, so thanks!

(By the way, I added you because you seem very cool. Someone that likes Yami no Matsuei and Canadian politics? Very interesting in my books!)

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

No problem. Welcome to my journal ^_^

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

And I sometimes feel like the only gay man in the world who actually likes YAOI of any kind. When I went to the YAOI-con its first time in San Francisco, people stared at me. When I went to the one in Anime North, people asked if I was in the wrong room. They couldn't understand what a man was doing there.

[jenjoou.livejournal.com]

I don't know about you being the only one. ^_^ I keep encountering others at Astro.

And the last con I was in, they were tricking and coersing men to come into the yaoi talk so they could make them kiss for donuts. Not the most academic panel at the con. :P

They really do hate it in Japan though. The argument being that it does not accurately represent their life experiences, which I'll admit is probably true with a lot though not all of it. A while back though, I was reading up on Bara which is basically yaoi by gay men for gay men. Definitely more stories about sex and less just about romance (although perhaps my sample was skewed), and less of a focus on pretty guys. I didn't dislike it but since I do like my guys pretty and I enjoy a good romance (and I'm not holding my breath waiting for an American company to license bara), I'll probably stick to BL. ^_^