We’re all still coming to terms with what Canadians said at the ballot box earlier this week, in what was one of the more bizarre elections in our country’s history.
Let’s recap.
Two leaders lost their seats: Pierre Poilievre in Ottawa and Jagmeet Singh in British Columbia. It’s not unprecedented, but it sure is rare.
The Liberals, left for dead a few months ago, staged a remarkable comeback under Mark Carney. And yet many Liberals were left strangely disappointed, because the party came up just short of winning a majority government.
The NDP was mostly abandoned by Canadians and completely deserted by Ontarians. The party won zero seats in our province.
The vagaries of our first-past-the-post system were truly on display, much to the chagrin of the Conservatives. In 2011, Stephen Harper won a majority government for the party with 39.6 per cent of the total vote. And yet, Poilievre’s 41.3 per cent this week was good enough for only second place.
All of that would have made for a strange night. But there was more.
Jamil Jivani, the winning Conservative candidate in Bowmanville—Oshawa North, unleashed the most astonishing interview of the night. Jivani let loose a screed, not against his opponent, but against the Progressive Conservative premier of Ontario Doug Ford and his “goons,” whom Jivani suggested torpedoed the federal party’s chances by making unwanted criticisms about the Conservative campaign. If you were afraid of dozing off late on election night, that surely woke you up.
And finally, for those who say the “progressive parties” should cooperate more by withdrawing candidates from ridings in which they have no chance of winning to stop Conservatives, that theory got plunked on its ear. As many NDP voters abandoned their party, they might not have given their votes to the Liberals, but rather to the Conservatives. That would help explain why, in places like Windsor and Sudbury, New Democrats were defeated by Tories — and why so many suburban Toronto seats flipped from red to blue.
Having said all of this, there was one story that’s been dramatically underreported this week, and I’m thrilled about that. The fact that you’ve read, seen, and heard almost nothing about this story speaks so well for our democracy.
Have you noticed that none of the leaders of the major political parties allege that our election was rigged? Did you hear during the speeches in the wee small hours of Tuesday morning any claims that the process was unfair, or that election officials put their thumb on the scale for one party over another?
No, you didn’t.
In the era of Trump, we don’t need any more examples of how our country and the United States are different. But you can surely add our elections to the list. Yes, mischievous players used deepfakes or artificial intelligence to create fake news stories or clips for social media.
But no Canadian leader or candidate got caught making a surreptitious phone call to anyone at Elections Canada, urging them to “find” thousands of extra votes in hopes of illegally stuffing ballot boxes and “fixing” the result. Everyone accepted that the election was overwhelmingly fairly and professionally organized by people who staffed thousands of polling stations across the country.
In fact, during the entire writ period, I heard only one incident in which an Elections Canada official behaved inappropriately. It was in York Region, where someone was apparently trying to convince people to vote for the local Conservative candidate at the advanced polls. What was the response? The worker was immediately removed. Problem solved.
Normally, this wouldn’t be news. But in this day and age, when Trumpists falsely scream about rigged elections and fake news, we should take a tremendous amount of satisfaction in seeing that Canadians can still be an example to the rest of the world of how to do elections successfully.
Yes, it was annoying that the Elections Canada website was down for much of election night. But if that’s the worst thing we have to complain about, I say, mission accomplished.
Well done, Canadian democracy. America, take note