Conservative Bid for Majority Government Fails
Canada's Conservatives Win Minority in Recent Federal Election
Nov 21, 2008
It has been over a month since the results of the Canadian federal election. It appears that $300 million later, Canadian voters are no further ahead with their re-elected government than they were when the election was called. At the end of the day, according to Elections Canada, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives won 143 seats, Stephane Dion’s Liberals won 76 seats, Jack Layton’s NDP won 37 seats and the Bloc Quebecois (which only runs candidates in the province of Quebec) won 50 seats, as well as two unaffiliated candidates.
When the election was called, the Conservative Party had a minority government with the Liberal Party as the Official Opposition. It turned out this is in fact the same situation, although both the Conservatives and the NDP picked up seats from the beleaguered Liberals under the much attacked leadership of Stephane Dion.
Political pundits and reporters have attempted to analyze the results. The truth is that once Stephane Dion won the Liberal Party's leadership race last year, the Conservatives immediately designed attack ads to discredit him. Further, Dion and his party did not help matters when they developed the “Green Shift” platform or the “carbon tax”, something people don’t want to hear about on the brink of a recession – new taxes.
Further, the Liberals started the election in a poor financial position, while the Conservatives had more than enough money to fight this election. Even before the day the writs were dropped, the Conservatives spawned a number of attack ads against Stephane Dion, citing how he was “not a leader”. The NDP later attacked them from the other side on how during the two-year reign of the prior Conservative minority term, the Liberals have not once voted against the government on a confidence bill.
Towards the end of the election, it began to look like the Conservatives could possibly win a majority government with up to 41% of the vote, according to some pollsters. However, as the economy continued to tank in Ontario with thousands of well-paid manufacturing jobs disappearing in this country’s heartland, Ontario voters turned their votes away from the Conservatives, particularly recalling a statement made by then Finance Minister Jim Flaherty citing that Ontario was a bad place to do business (because Ontario did not do as Flaherty thought they should – lower corporate taxes).
It was only at the very end of the election that the Conservatives picked up on the failing economy by attempting to address a staged program for dealing with the situation, including a key meeting with Canada’s major banks. Unfortunately, their eleventh hour rescue attempt failed to attract enough votes in Ontario to take them into majority territory.
Many Canadians wonder if the $300 million spent on this election could have been spent on something else, such as badly needed health care services or infrastructure investment. Further, only 59% of eligible voters turned up the polls this time, lower than the last election when over 64% of voters voted.
