We all know how I feel about the election we just had. TLDR: we didn’t want it and we didn’t need it. If you want to argue that point with me, don’t bother. Just look at this and see where $600 million or whatever it is that we ultimately spent on this thing got us.
Justin Trudeau’s Liberals emerged from the election with a second minority government, having won 159 seats, a gain of two over their 2019 result.
However, the winner in one of them — Kevin Vuong in Toronto’s Spadina-Fort York — will sit as an independent after failing to disclose to the party a past sexual assault charge, which was later dropped.
Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives finished with 119 seats, down two from 2019. The Bloc Quebecois finished with 33 seats (up one), the NDP with 25 (up one), and the Greens with two (down one).
The Conservatives won slightly more of the popular vote — 33.7 per cent to the Liberals’ 32.6 per cent — as they did in 2019. But because their vote was heavily concentrated in Alberta and Saskatchewan, they won fewer seats.
The NDP’s share of the vote was up almost two points over 2019, to 17.8 per cent. The Bloc’s share was down slightly to 32.1 per cent in Quebec.
The Greens won just 2.3 per cent of the vote, less than half their share in 2019 and behind the extremist fringe People’s Party of Canada, which took five per cent of the vote although it won no seats.
The only real story to come out of this for me is the 5% of people who voted PPC. That’s way too high. I say that in all seriousness. Not everyone shares my values. That’s cool. But what’s not so cool is that the number of people willing to park their support with the racist anti-vaccers is steadily growing. Five percent doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you consider that their share of the vote in 2019 was 1.6% and they trounced the Green Party in only their second election, it’s something worth paying attention to. Will they ever be a serious threat? Who knows. But the mere fact that their message is gaining traction at a pace like this is concerning to me. Canada clearly isn’t a perfect country for all kinds of reasons, but I still want to believe it’s damn well better than this.
