Swept away by the "Orange Crush"

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

As everyone in Canada now knows, the New Democratic Party won 102 seats in the federal election, and they are now, for the first time in their history, the official Opposition.

But before anyone gets carried away by the “Orange Crush,” let’s “drill down” on this.

Almost 60 of these seats were won in Quebec. But in that province, other than in a few ridings in and around Montreal, no one was actually voting for NDP candidates, or even for the party’s platform and policies.

They were simply voting for “none of the above,” which this time around included the Bloc Québécois as well as the two old-line federalist parties. Most of these are seats where the NDP polled less than 10 percent in past elections.

Remember, this is a party that, until last Monday, had one seat in Quebec! And had never won more than one in any previous federal election.

It’s not as if the party has a loyal base in the province. This was no hard-fought victory. In effect, it was the result of a tidal wave sweeping away the debris of the other parties.

That’s why the caucus now includes university students who have in effect won the lottery – one of them is 19 years old. The sacrificial lambs have escaped their usual fate.

Outside of Quebec, the NDP won 44 seats, which is just an increase of eight over their pre-2011 caucus of 36 from the rest of Canada. This is no big surge.

The NDP is lucky that it now has four years to turn this bunch of “accidental MPs” into a real political machine.

It’s a good thing Jack Layton has a PhD in political science and used to be a university professor. He’ll be giving lectures on Canadian parliamentary procedure.

But remember, the Quebec tail now wags the Canadian dog.

And many of these newly elected members will take Layton at his word when he talked about bringing Quebec back into the Canadian family.

Can anyone spell Meech Lake/Charlottetown?

Quebecers have done this kind of thing before: in 1984 they voted en masse for Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives, ending decades of Liberal Party domination.

By 1990 the Québécois nationalists in the party would doom it to extinction.

In the 1960s, many in the province voted for a weird offshoot of the old right-wing Social Credit Party, which had been western-based under the leadership of Robert Thompson. In 1962, the Quebec wing, known as the Ralliement des créditistes, won 26 seats in Quebec, while only four Social Credit MPs were elected in the rest of Canada.

Under the leadership of Réal Caouette, they were impossible to control and helped destroy the entire party.

Always be careful what you wish for.