Watched the election last night, in disbelief, as the Liberals pulled it off again. In our riding we sent David Pratt packing, and replaced him with a young Conservative named Pierre Poilievre. Apparently, throughout the rest of Ontario, voters didn’t have the guts, and returned to the Liberals in droves.
This morning’s Globe and Mail online tabulated the vote as follows…
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I scratched my head a couple of times, and got out my calculator, because at first I thought the Globe had done the math incorrectly. I didn’t realize that there were 308 seats in the commons now, which is an even number.
So, Liberal+NDP means 154 seats, and Conservative+Bloc means 153 seats. The Independent is Chuck Cadman from BC who lost the Conservative nomination, but ran anyway. Perhaps he would vote with the Conservatives as well.
The election of a speaker by the house will mean that some party is going to have to give up a seat, since the speaker only votes to break ties. To me, it looks as if the Liberal/NDP coalition is a non-starter. The Liberals are going to have to deal with the Bloc in order to stay in power.
This should send the good folks at the Globe scrambling. The print edition is already out of date, and they’re going to have to rewrite all the online stories they published last night with titles like "NDP: The Kingmakers".
