The magnitude of Monday night’s election victory by Justin Trudeau and the Liberals was unimaginable only days earlier.
Canadians from coast to coast to coast delivered a decisive win to the Liberals, solidly rejecting the Conservative attack line that “Justin is just not ready, but he has nice hair though.”
In large part it was a result of the almost flawless campaign Trudeau and his team ran, that quickly disproved the attack ads, leaving Conservative credibility in shatters.
While Trudeau criticized his opponents’ policies, he mostly kept to the high road, preaching hope while Conservative Leader Stephen Harper did his best to whip up fears.
Although Trudeau proved to be the most electable force of change, his win was largely fueled by Canadians’ weariness with Harper, his divisiveness and wedge politics.
Only weeks earlier, voters appeared willing to anoint Tom Mulcair and the NDP as the agents of change, perhaps giving him a majority, if not for some strategic blunders by the NDP and the cynical Harper wedge issue of the niqab, which started the NDP downfall in Quebec.
Aside from a few mainly rural pockets of Canada that remained loyal to the Conservatives, notably in the Prairies and rural parts of B.C., Ontario and Quebec, Canadians were desperate for change and were willing, above all else, to vote the best way they could to remove Harper.
Because of our unrepresentative, first-past-the-post, winner-take-all electoral system, many Canadians correctly identified that splitting the local vote between Liberal and NDP candidates might allow a Conservative to sail up the middle and win a riding.
Ironically, it was vote splitting in the 1997 and 2000 elections between the old Progressive Conservatives and the Reform/Alliance that led to the merger of those parties in 2003.
The result this time was that many people engaged in strategic voting in their bid to be rid of Harper. Beyond the imprecise calculation of which candidate was stronger at the local level, many voters simply voted for the national party they saw as the agent of change.
As a result many excellent MPs lost their seats, especially among the NDP. Parliament will be worse off without such hardworking MPs as Peter Stoffer, Jack Harris, Megan Leslie and Paul Dewar, to name just a few.
Neither the Liberals nor the NDP want their parties to merge, so the solution to vote splitting adopted by the right-wing parties in 2003 is unlikely to be adopted by the centre-left parties.
Yet strategic voting can become a destructive force, encouraging people to vote against a party rather than for their ideals.
The Trudeau Liberals promised that this election would be the last one to use the first-past-the-post system. This is one promise we hope they keep.
This doesn’t necessarily mean adopting a form of proportional representation based on party lists, which would make party discipline even more pervasive and could lead to the kind of instability seen in countries such as Israel and previously in Italy, where extremist fringe parties can hold moderates to ransom.
But there are other options besides the convoluted single-transferable vote system rejected at the provincial level.
Whatever new system is adopted, the process of choosing it must be transparent, non-partisan and involve the input of Canadians.
For now, the new Trudeau-led Liberal government begins the formidable task of reuniting Canadians and restoring pride in Canada.
Trudeau wisely reached out an olive branch to the many Conservatives who will be disappointed in Monday’s result, reminding his supporters that Conservatives are not enemies, but rather are neighbours and family.
Let’s hope this spirit of generosity carries forward into the coming months and years.
