With several votes still to count, and possibly a small change in seat distribution, we wanted to offer some initial thoughts on Monday's general elections in Canada and provide some key takeaways from this election and the results.

Plus ça change

Nothing changes — the Trudeau Liberals called an election to improve their seat count in Parliament to propel them out of a minority into a majority government.  It didn’t.  At this point, they may have picked up one seat.

The role of the PPC

The Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) was undermined by the kooky Peoples’ Party of Canada (PPC) — the right-wing version of the Rhinoceros Party. In enough constituencies, the PPC took votes from CPC robbing it of seats that would have possibly put them in a minority governing position.

The role of strategic voting

Strategic voting cost the New Democratic Party (NDP) seats, even though they made a gain, possibly a few seats. They did gain a seat from a CPC incumbent in Alberta because of the vote split with PPC.

This was a $610 Million election about nothing that returned almost the same result as 2019.

When you hear Prime Minister Trudeau say that the people have given him a mandate and that this is a win for the Liberal party, don’t believe it.  It’s a win because a week ago it looked like the Liberals were losing.  Mandate?  There was no significant raison d’être for these elections, no core policy or issue that drove people to the polls.  In fact, it appears that fewer people voted this time than did in 2019.

Trudeau’s gamble for a majority government didn’t pay off.  His party and all the rest are pretty much where they were when the Parliament was dissolved several weeks ago.  And this cost the Canadian taxpayers $610 Million, during a pandemic when economic recovery will continue to be the core concern for Canadians in the weeks and months ahead.

$610 Million, in context, is about 31 million doses of Pfizer vaccine.  It would pay the salary of 8,000 nurses for one year, it would provide 32,000 childcare spaces for Canadian families.  It would supplement social insurance, unemployment, it would allow care homes to retrofit and plan for the next pandemic so that seniors would not die in the numbers they did with Covid.

So why the election?  So Justin Trudeau could win a majority government?  WTF?

author: Carlo Binda, Vice-President of BCI