Aftermath Reflections

The Canadian Dominion Election of 2019 is now over. Since disappointment consists of hopeful expectations being shattered I suppose my response to the results is one of disgust rather than disappointment. As I said in My Druthers prior to the election I did not expect it would turn out in the way in which I wanted.

The Grits, led by Captain Airhead, survived the election. They no longer have an absolute majority. They won 157 seats in the House of Commons, which is twenty less than they had when the last Parliament was dissolved and twenty seven less than they received in the last Dominion election. Most of the mainstream media are hailing this as a victory for Airhead. Andrew Coyne of the National Post, who is often more perceptive than the average MSM commentator, has argued to the contrary, that the Liberals “didn’t win the 2019 federal election, they just lost less than the Conservatives.” This is an interesting perspective, but I doubt that Captain Airhead himself sees it that way. Others have said that this reduction from majority to minority status will be a humbling experience for the Prime Minister. I think it is safe to say that it will be nothing of the sort. Trudeau has never shown the slightest capacity for learning from his mistakes. Having won the most seats, even after the Kokanee Grope, SNC-Lavalin, and blackface scandals, among his other huge embarrassments, he will be more insufferably smug and cocky than ever, and will treat his minority mandate as a blank cheque to do whatever he wants.

The ancient Greeks had a word that describes Trudeau’s attitude perfectly - ὕβρις. Hubris was an intense, overweening, pride, in defiance of the limitations of divine law, especially, at least as Aristotle describes it, by humiliating those one sees as his inferiors for his own pleasure. In Greek thought, hubris inevitably led to the destruction of those who practiced it. Nemesis, the dread daughter of Nyx, goddess of the night, was the figure whom their mythology assigned the task of wreaking divine vengeance upon the proud and arrogant. This concept was not limited to the pagan Greeks. In the Book of Proverbs it says “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall” and the falls of both Satan and man illustrate the point. It may not have come this election, but eventually Trudeau’s arrogance will be his own undoing.

Of the three major parties, the biggest loss in this election was that of the New Democrats. They won only 24 seats, fifteen less than they had at dissolution and twenty less than they received four years ago. This is despite the fact that around the time of the blackface scandal the progressive media dumped Trudeau and threw all their resources into promoting the NDP and their leader Jagmeet Singh. Indeed, they even tried to make the blackface scandal all about Singh, as if Captain Airhead somehow owed Singh a personal apology for his clownish antics. There was, of course, no demand that he apologize to those whom he truly owed an apology, id est, all those whom he has himself labelled “racist” for disagreeing with his hyper-progressive, “woke” agenda. From this point on it was almost impossible to turn to any of the major news networks on television and not find Singh either giving an interview or speaking at some rally. Polling companies began reporting that Singh’s popularity was on the rise, and even the neo-conservative press got in on the action regurgitating the progressive talking point about how “likeable” Singh was, which, frankly, I never understood as I find the man to be quite unbearable. Despite all of this, the NDP ended up going down almost four percentage points in the popular vote which translated into a significant seat loss for them. I am not sorry to see this happen, even though it contributes to the Grits winning the plurality. It shows that the progressive media cartel’s ability to mold Canadian public opinion is not as infallible as is often assumed. It is also nice to see a man who has displayed contempt for the constitutional monarchy of the country he wants to lead and contempt for the customs and protocols of its Parliament fall flat on his face.

I have mentioned that the NDP went down almost four percentage points in the popular vote. The Grits went down almost six and a half percentage points. The Conservatives went up by two and a half points and, in fact, came out of the election with the largest percentage of the popular vote. Had Captain Airhead kept his 2015 election promise and brought in proportional representation the Conservatives, rather than the Liberals, would have won the plurality. This notwithstanding, I still support the traditional first-past-the-post, for the reasons I have given in the past. The principle of having Members of Parliament represent the actual realities of particular locations (first-past-the-post) rather than the fictional construct of partisan percentages (proportional representation) outweighs, for me, my preferences with regards to the outcome of elections.

Andrew Scheer and the leadership of the Conservative Party are undoubtedly now asking themselves how they failed to defeat an incumbent Prime Minister who seemed to be hell-bent on self-destruction. They will be hearing an awful lot of misguided, foolish, and downright wrong answers to this question from the mainstream media. For what it may be worth, the following is my answer to the same question.

First, in this election the Conservatives relied far too much on the hope that other parties – the NDP, Greens, and the Bloc – would draw votes and seats away from the Liberals instead of focusing on presenting a superior alternative to the Liberals and thus increasing their own percentage of the vote. This is a bad strategy, and in the end the “orange wave” did not materialize, the Greens gained only one seat, and the revival of the Bloc was not large enough.

Second, the Conservatives attempted to sell their leader, Andrew Scheer, to the public as a fiscally responsible, average Canadian husband and father, who would be a more reliable alternative than the irresponsible, privileged and cosmopolitan Trudeau. Their efforts to do so were undermined because Scheer contradicted the image they were trying to present with his own evasiveness. Consider the way he answered questions about his views on abortion and same-sex marriage. I have seen several commentators suggest that Scheer’s answers hurt him because he failed to dispel the fears of those with liberal opinions on these subjects that he was secretly pining to turn Canada into the kind of theocratic caricature that can be found in the pages of a bad Margaret Atwood novel. This is nonsense. His answers hurt him, not because the electorate was afraid of someone whose opinions deviate from the politically correct party line of the Liberals but because they were evasive rather than straightforward. Evasiveness is not a quality that suggests trustworthiness but rather the opposite. This is why all of the scandals the progressive media raised over Scheer – his insurance broker career before politics, his dual citizenship, the bizarre last minute allegations that he hired Warren Kinsella to wage a smear campaign against Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party – hurt him more than the sexual harassment, corruption, and racism scandals hurt Trudeau. They struck at the very quality on which the Conservatives were trying to sell Scheer to the public. Worse, they did so in a way that turned the Canadian public’s conservative instincts, which the Conservatives needed in order to win, against Scheer. Trudeau may be the devil, but as the old adage and the Kylie Minogue song say “better the devil you know.” Scheer could not afford an image of anything less than 100% straightforward honesty.

Every time that the Conservative Party has lost an election in the past, it has been beset with counsellors offering the advice that their platform was too right-wing and that they needed to move to the centre. Their having listened to this bad advice so often in the past is one of the reasons that the centre has moved so far to the left. This time these advisors will be pointing to the People’s Party and saying “see, they ran on a platform considerably to the right, and failed to win a single seat, lost even the seat of their leader Maxime Bernier, and won a mere 1.6% of the popular vote.” The exact opposite of this is true. The Conservative Party cannot win elections by moving further to the centre and helping move the centre further to the left. The only message this sends is that the Conservatives have nothing to offer that is different from the Liberals and the other progressive parties. Canadians have no good reason to vote for a Conservative party that offers only centrist, progressive, liberal, and leftist policies. The fact that Maxime Bernier was unable to sell the public on a more right-of-centre set of policies does not mean that the Conservatives would similarly fail. They will never be able to sell right-of-centre policies to the Canadian public, however, if they do not try, and certainly not if they continue to undermine themselves by wasting their resources in the sponsorship of progressive, anti-racist, attacks on those further to the right.

One thing that the outcome of this election shows is the foolishness of the proposal that the CBC seemed to be seriously pondering last Friday, namely the lowering of the voting age to 16. What we ought to be considering is the opposite of this – raising the voting age. Wisdom is the most desirable quality in an electorate, enthusiasm and idealism are the least desirable qualities. As a general rule, the former increases with greater maturity while the latter decreases. This same point can also be demonstrated by noting the most obvious example of foreign interference in the election, the way the wealthy foreigners, probably mostly American, who wish to sabotage Western Canada’s energy industry, brought an ignorant teenage twit over from Sweden and sent her and her crowds of adulating youthful fans, even more clueless than her, on a celebrity tour that not-coincidentally coincided with the election.

Things are looking extremely grim for the Western energy industry now as Rex Murphy has superbly explained in his post-election remarks in the National Post. The talk of Alberta or even Western separatism – “Wexit” – began pretty much the moment the outcome was declared. This talk of separation disgusts me as much as the election results that provoked it and reminds me of nothing so much as the way Hollywood liberals respond every time the Democrats lose the White House. As much as I admired the late Doug Christie in his role as a crusader for freedom of thought and speech I never had any use for his Western Canada Concept and all of this talk of breaking up Confederation and forming a – ugh – republic, makes me want to puke. The blame for the revival of Western separatism, however, belongs entirely to that smug, arrogant, filius canis, who is willing to sacrifice the economy of an entire region of the Dominion in order to win the accolades of eco-socialists around the world.

God save the Queen – including from Her Prime Minister – and Heaven Bless the Maple Leaf forever!