While U.S. news coverage has been overwhelmed by wall to wall Osama Bin Laden coverage, the people of Canada had a Federal Parlimentary Election yesterday.
The clear overall winner was Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who had been governing the Parliment for years with a plurality of seats, depending on votes from other parties to pass his legislation. This election his party won a clear majority for the first time under his watch. This will give him legislative carte blanche in the new government.
This is far from the result the main opposition parties, The Liberal Party and the seperatist Bloc Quebecois wanted. Both of those parties pretty much got routed actually, with the surprise rise of the formerly minor New Democratic Party, led by quirky and charismatic Jack Layton. "Good Jack" had the most success of any NDP leader in history, and bouyed by his strong performance in the national leaders debate, his party moved into 2nd place as the Official Opposition in Parliment.
It is the first time in Canadian history that the Liberal Party is not in the Government lead or in Opposition. While these are dark days for the Liberals, they will certainly lick their wounds and regroup. The Bloc Quebecois may not get such a chance. In the 1990s the group came close to its goal of a making the French speaking Province of Quebec a seperate nation from the rest of Canada. Since then, Canada has further integrated and unified all its peoples and the movement lost its steam. The 2011 election may be the seismec shift that eliminates the Bloc as a major player on the national stage. It would seem that the people in the Province rejected the seperatists as an ineffective path moving forward and shifted in a major way to the NDP.
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