Tories are a PC, NDP are a Mac, Bloc’s a RIM. Are Liberals a Kodak?
By Francis Moran
The morning after the election that wouldn’t change anything, the political landscape in Canada has been radically, perhaps permanently, altered.
The Conservative Party of Canada, led by prime minister Stephen Harper on his fifth stab at power, finally grabbed the brass ring, winning 167 seats and a decisive majority. That he did it with just a handful of seats in Québec defied all conventional wisdom that said Canada can’t be won without Quebec. Certainly, no Tory predecessor has managed to take the country with so few seats in Québec.
The Liberal Party of Canada, long nicknamed the Natural Governing Party for its historic hold on the broad political centre of the country, went down to its greatest defeat in history. First-time campaigner Michael Ignatieff, better known in Washington and London as a globe-trotting journalist and intellectual before returning to Canada several years ago, did what no Liberal Party leader, not even John Turner with his epic 1984 loss that yielded a scant 44 seats, has managed to do before — reduce the once-dominant Liberals to third-party status for the first time since Canada was born.
