Sound and fury, signifying nothing

Those words from Macbeth seem like the perfect way to sum up Canada's Federal election, which took place on Monday. After a clamorous 35-day campaign, the outcome is a House of Commons eerily similar in composition to the one it replaces. The Liberals were about a dozen seats short of a majority before the vote; subject to any last minute corrections, they will be about a dozen seats short of a majority in the new Parliament. The Conservatives, despite again winning more votes than the Liberals, will again be about forty seats behind them. The NDP and Bloc Quebecois, both with around thirty seats previously, will again each have about thirty seats.

Evidently $ 600 million, which is what this election is estimated to have cost, doesn't get you what it used to.  It's hard to pick out any winners here, unless you count the manufacturer of the millions of stubby pencils handed out to voters at polling stations as a COVID precaution. Plenty of losers, though. Let's look down the list, starting with....

Erin O'Toole, the Conservative leader, had little public profile ahead of the election campaign. He seems likeable enough, unlike some of his caucus, but he failed to capitalize on a variety of issues that could have been used to bring down the Liberals -- the sheer pointlessness of the election, Justin Trudeau's perceived lack of gravitas, the mounting cost of COVID benefit schemes that may no longer be needed. Unlike his feckless predecessor, Andrew Scheer, he is unlikely to be ditched as a punishment for failure, but his party will not be merciful in a year or two if he is unable to make an impact in  Parliament.  

Jagmeet Singh, leader of the ever-so-slightly leftist NDP, is widely admired for his intelligence, even by  those who would never vote for him. The NDP is often described as "Liberals in a hurry"; in the last Parliament they regularly propped up Trudeau's government in the House of Commons, getting precious little in return and, as the vote count suggests, doing nothing to build on their support base. Singh's smart nice guy act may start to pall if the party continues to keep Trudeau afloat in the new Parliament.

Canada -- yes, the whole country -- is a clear loser here, and not just because of that wasted 600 mil'.  There's some small consolation to be had in the fact that the perfectly odious People's Party of Canada (populist, nativist) failed to elect anyone to Parliament. But this election served yet again to underline the deep divisions within the country.  The Liberals were elected by the country's poorest region (the Atlantic Provinces) and its three most cosmopolitan cities, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. The prairie provinces and most of Ontario were solidly Tory, while the Bloc Quebecois continues its hold on most of Quebec.  In their six years in office, the Trudeau Liberals have done nothing to bring the country together.

And lastly, we come to Justin Trudeau himself, probably the biggest loser of all. The election was his gamble and it failed to net him a majority government. His flimsy rationale for having an election at all centered on the fact that the House of Commons was hard to manage -- evidently he has not spent much time studying how things go in the US Congress or the UK House of Commons, let alone the Israeli Knesset.  Ottawa is a bastion of politeness and tranquility by comparison. He is unlikely to find things any easier now.

Many years ago Trudeau's father, Pierre, famously took a walk in an Ottawa snowstorm and decided to resign the Prime Ministership. Justin may soon start hearing subtle hints that it's time for him to strap on his snowshoes and take a walk of his own. His Deputy (and Finance Minister) Chrystia Freeland has been doing most of the top job for the past couple of years anyway, and is almost embarrassingly keen to take over. If that happens, it won't be long before she sees the need to obtain a personal mandate from the people, in the form of yet another election. Better put another $ 600 million aside -- we may be needing it soon.