Voters Would Welcome Majority   

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
On the very day the election was called, I predicted a Conservative majority, without bothering to see how the campaign would develop. Why?

First of all, Canadians are tired of minority government, which turns Parliament into a circus and makes for an American-style “permanent campaign.”

This is our fourth election since 2004. And the mud-slinging, from all sides, has been endless, with manufactured outrages an almost daily occurrence.

So, the voters asked themselves, how to put a stop to this? Which party is closest to a majority?

Obviously, that would be the Conservatives. At the dissolution of the House of Commons, they held 143 seats. They just need another dozen to cross the “finish line” to govern without worrying their government will fall.

The Liberals, at 77, would have to double their total. Unlikely.

Secondly, Stephen Harper has successfully convinced the voters that, one way or another, Michael Ignatieff, who can’t win a majority on his own, will, if the Tories fail to secure one, form some sort of working arrangement (let's call it that) with the New Democrats and Bloc Québécois, because the Liberals and NDP will, together, probably still fall short of the 154 seats needed to govern.

It's not just that Canadians are uncomfortable with the notion of a coalition, it’s having the NDP and Bloc as part of it, even if informally.

This will lead, they fear, to “extortion” on the part of both these parties, as the Liberals will need to placate them to stay in power.

For many in the rest of Canada, it would be particularly galling to see the Bloc having its cake and eating it too.

The emergence of the Bloc (and the Reform Party in the West) destroyed the old Mulroney Progressive Conservative party, which was decimated in 1993 and never recovered.

However, the Bloc has done just as much damage to the Liberals.

The party used to “own” Quebec, winning virtually all of its 75 seats in the days before Mulroney’s victory in 1984, which included the Quebec nationalists that would later form the Bloc.

Since that time, the Liberals have consistently won fewer seats in Quebec than Gilles Duceppe’s party. Without their Quebec base, they are no longer Canada’s “natural governing party.”

These days, the Bloc has become the hegemonic force in francophone Quebec and Harper’s Conservatives keep making gains in the rest of Canada.

Outside of anglophone Montreal, Atlantic Canada, and metropolitan areas of Toronto and Vancouver, the Liberals are hardly competitive. One of these days, even the NDP might surpass them in many of these ridings.