The Liberals devastated, although nowhere near as bad as the Progressive Conservatives were in 1993. The Bloc almost wiped out. A single Green, finally and deservedly, elected. And the Conservatives and NDP on top for the next 4-5 years.

What will a Harper majority bring? Will the worst fears of the ABC’s (Anything but Conservatives) be realised? Certainly Mr. Harper now has free rein to spend billions on prisons and fighter jets.

I suspect that public funding for political parties will be chopped, and soon. The NDP stand to get a great deal more in public funding than they ever have – triple the amount they received last election – and with that kind of money they can challenge the Conservatives in a serious way. By cutting public funding, the Conservatives can hobble all their opponents seriously.

That said, cutting public funding risks a backlash; there could be an outpouring of support for the other parties, especially the NDP. Mr. Harper will make this worse if he does something like privatize CBC.

But this is minor. Mr Harper has been dreaming of a majority for a long time, and  you can bet he has some plans to make use of his new power. At the same time, he is somewhat constrained by claims of being fiscally conservative. He has promised to balance the budget within a few years, and at the same time he loves to slash taxes/government revenue. All of that combined with a sluggish economy is not going to provide a lot of money for shiny toys.

Of course, that might mean that Mr. Harper focuses on the social engineering parts of his agenda, as at least initially they cost less. By this I mean he may well order a crackdown on pot, may implement ‘mandatory minimum’ sentences for more crimes, and will likely cut budgets for things he believes should be privatized (education, aspects of health care, for example) or that speak inconvenient truths (all government science departments, for example). U.S-style copyright enforcement is coming. There will be lots of corporate-friendly deals, from ‘free’ trade to special subsidies and tax breaks.

Will Mr. Harper push further? Probably, but how? He will be constrained by budget, and the provinces are expecting to negotiate a new deal on health care. He has already committed billions for fighter jets and prisons, though was sketchy on where the money would come from.

Quebec

Quebec is now a more complicated situation, if that is possible. Quebecers went NDP in a  big way, and the impression around the net community is that many are disappointed that the rest of Canada did not do the same. That is, Quebecers did their part as Canadians to bring in a progressive government, and the rest of us did not hold up our end. Some are pointing to this as evidence that Quebecers do indeed see the world in a different way.

I think there is some truth to this; Quebecers showed courage voting for change the way they did. It reminds me of a key difference between the respective hockey teams: When the Canadiens have a poor team, the fans stay home and management gets the message. When the Leafs have a bad team, the fans still fill the stadiums and buy the merchandise, and so management produces the worst team the fans will accept. Quebecers take action when the situation is not acceptable; the rest of us need to learn that lesson from them.

I think a resurgence of separatism is quite possible, and will be reflected in the next provincial election. The federal NDP would be wise to fight tooth-and-nail to advance Quebec’s progressive agenda; the rest of Canada would benefit, too.

Ontario

Ontario, or really the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) is who shafted Quebec by sending many new Conservative MPs to Ottawa. However – did they really? If you look at the individual riding results, in many cases the Conservatives benefited from vote splitting. Next time, Toronto, get it together and agree on who you’re going with.

There is an Ontario provincial election in October. Historically, Ontario has elected the party opposite to the one in power in Ottawa; given what just happened in Ottawa, the Ontario Liberals would be favoured to win this fall. However, the Liberals have been in power since 2003, numerous suspicious deeds have come to light, and Ontarians may well feel a desire to change them.

But to whom? The Ontario Conservatives are not particularly liked and of course Ontarians just sent plenty of Conservatives to Ottawa. It could be time for Ontario to give the NDP and Greens a shot again.

BC

BC also has an election…sometime. Premier Christy Clark has no seat in the Legislature, as she won the Liberal leadership after Gordon Campbell resigned. She could call an election at any time, as it looks bad if the Premier is unelected. She could also run in a by-election, assuming a safe seat can be found. Currently, the only open seat is not a sure thing, and it would look really bad if the Premier continued to govern after failing to win a seat.

A provincial election is no sure thing for the BC Liberals, either. They’ve been in power awhile and are starting to smell, now there’s a Conservative federal government, so BC voters might just decide to put the NDP and some Greens in charge for a bit. (If public sentiment tips this way, I think there is a real chance that some Greens would be elected.)

Overall

It seems likely to me that the harder Mr. Harper pushes his social engineering agenda, the more likely he is to face unfriendly governments in various provinces (Saskatchewan, which has had a budget-balancing NDP government recently, has an election this year, too). Not that he won’t do some of it anyway; I’m just pointing out the likely backlash.

He is safe cutting taxes and spending money, but squaring this with his alleged fiscal conservatism will be difficult. He will have to at least appear to be on track to balancing the budget or he’ll lose his ‘steady hand on the economy’ reputation.

There are also new expectations that come with majority; for example, Mr. Harper no longer has an excuse for not attempting to reform the Senate, or scrapping the gun registry, or implementing some of the other measures blocked by the Opposition under the previous minority.

Mr. Layton and the NDP have 4-5 years to broaden their base, and they should not waste a minute. There is a very good chance that Canadians will be looking for a change after a long majority Harper government, and the NDP want to be that change. They also want to get building while they’re still getting the per-vote subsidy, which Mr. Harper committed to ending if he gained a majority.

The NDP could do a better job of presenting their values and vision, and then reinforcing these through their platform. Much of what the NDP wants to do is along the German/Nordic model and would be quite popular with many more Canadians than normally vote NDP. Mr. Layton and his new, expanded team need to focus on getting their vision and values to Canadians over the next several years so that next election, the choice is clear.

The Liberals are not out, but they may be reduced for the foreseeable future to something like their current size; it depends how well the NDP do at communicating their vision and values. If the NDP do well, the Liberals are in big trouble and should get used to being on the outside for awhile. Which is not necessarily bad; the Liberals need to decide what they stand for and then stand for it.

The Greens finally have an elected MP, and it’s their leader, Elizabeth May. She will be a strong voice, and her election embarrasses those who kept her out of the leader’s debates. Will she be a breakthrough winner that opens the door to many other Green seats? If the NDP does well, then no.

The next election is the NDP’s to lose. I think Mr. Harper cannot help but push too far, as he has done repeatedly in the past, and enough Canadians will have had enough of him that a credible alternative will win. The NDP must use this time to show how they are that credible alternative.

OBL has been reported dead. This leads me to three possibilities:

1. He really is recently deceased, meaning prior rumours were wrong. If so, points 2 and 3 hold for the US/World generally and Canada specifically.
2. US: There goes a big part of the justification for being in Afghanistan. Americans are sick of being at war, no matter what Bill O’Reilly and the CEO of Halliburton want to think. This is the perfect opportuinty for Mr. Obama to say Afghanistan should become a UN peacekeeping mission – of which the US is not a part - or simply to annouce a timetable for withdrawal. Either way, everyone is relieved. If the Afghanis really do not want to be dominated by the Taliban, then they need to prepare to stand up and destroy them. As the uprisings in the Middle East have shown, only if the people unite against an oppressor can they have a chance to be free.
3. Canada – There goes a large part of Stephen Harper’s fear-based agenda. Not that the whole thing was based on fear of OBL and Al-Queada by a long shot, but OBL was the foundation upon which the War on Terror was built. Canadians are sick of this war and would like to go back to peacekeeping. The only fella tha’s likely to do that is Jack Layton. The official death of OBL can only hurt Harper and boost the NDP. The timing could not be worse for Harper.
4. The fourth possibility is this: It is possible that previous reports of Mr. Bin Laden’s death were correct, and it is just now being officially reported by the United States. If so, points 2 and 3 still stand. The only danger is that Americans somehow discover that Mr. OBL had been dead for some time and their government knew it.

UPDATE: While I have no reason to doubt the official U.S. version, it is awfully convenient that bin Laden was buried at sea.

For the vast majority of pop drinkers, if the restaurant doesn’t have Coke, Pepsi will do just fine. And to many Canadians, the difference between the Liberals and Conservatives is like that between Coke and Pepsi: not worth worrying about.

I believe this explains a big part of the ‘NDP surge’ that has pushed the NDP well past the Liberals in the polls. Canadians can see that Ignatieff’s Liberals are not much different than the Conservatives, as much as they try to make out like they are worlds apart. Both Ignatieff and Harper would have put our troops in Iraq, both love the tar sands, neither has any sort of plan to meet environmental commitments like CO2 reduction or to ‘green’ our economy the way prosperous economies like Germany, Norway, Denmark, and even China and Brazil are doing.

In short, both Ignatieff and Harper will continue to follow the United States, even as the U.S. economy continues to stagnate and American moral authority continues its decline.

The Liberals are well known for ‘campaigning from the left and governing from the right,’ and I think Canadians just decided it was time to vote for the real thing. Too many broken promises by the Liberals over the years have eroded trust in their ‘brand.’

Coke and Pepsi spend billions on marketing to get you to buy their products, but ultimately there’s not much difference. Looks like Canadians have decided it’s time for a switch.

With all due respect to Jean Chretien, he is a big part of the reason that many Canadians no longer trust the Liberal Party. It wasn’t just Adscam, during which Mr. Chretien was the:

Prime Minister of Canada at the time the Sponsorship Program was established and operated. The Gomery Commission, First Phase Report which assigned blame for the Sponsorship scandal cast most of the indemnity for misspent public funds, fraud on Chrétien and his Prime Minister’s Office staff, though it cleared Chrétien himself of direct wrongdoing.

That was bad enough. But for many of us, there is a long history of big talk and little action. To give three prime examples:

1. The Liberals campaigned against NAFTA – but then embraced it once elected
2. The Liberals campaigned against the GST – but then embraced it once elected
3. The Liberals signed Kyoto – but then did less than nothing to meet that commitment

Tell me again why we should trust Liberal promises?

For me, the Kyoto betrayal offers a particularly compelling reason to not vote for the Liberals. Had Mr. Chretien’s government redirected oil and tar mining subsidies to green energy – say solar thermal, wind, and geothermal – then today there would be thousands of clean and green jobs in these fields in Alberta and Saskatchewan. The prairies would be an ‘energy superpower,’ but in clean energy and high-tech jobs, the way Denmark and Germany are today.

Subsidies to tar mining amounted to approximately $1.5 billion taxpayer dollars per year in 2010. Multiply that by the number of years since Kyoto was signed in 1998 and you get a heck of a lot of money: $19.5B in today’s dollars. That’s also a lot of jobs:

• Siemens plans to build a CDN$ 120M wind turbine factory in the UK, anticipated to create ~2,200 jobs
• GE plans to build a CDN$ 160M wind turbine factory in the UK, anticipated to create more than 2,000 jobs
• The Pembina Institute estimates that “for every million dollars invested, an average 36.3 jobs are created in the energy efficiency sector, 12.2 jobs in the renewable energy sector, and only 7.3 jobs in the development of conventional energy.”

That was an opportunity squandered and an international commitment broken. Using the Pembina Institute’s figures, Jean Chretien’s Liberals could have put us on the path to creating 237,900 jobs in the prairies just from the subsidies alone.

The Liberals campaign from the left and govern from the right, and it looks like Canadians have finally had enough and are going to elect the real deal.