Blue, Baby, Blue

Stephen Harper Got the Job Done

As Canadians wake up to the reality of a Conservative majority government in Ottawa, the same old question as always looms. When will the next election be?

Only the answer is different: not until 2015.

With just shy of 40% of the popular vote -- eerily similar to the Nik Nanos numbers from before the election -- the Harper Conservatives were able to lay claim to 54% of the seats.

This will, of course, spark the same predictable responses from those who smugly lectured Canadians that the only thing they get to directly vote for in a Canadian election is our local Member of Parliament -- so had Jack Layton and Michael Ignatieff moved to form a coalition government after having lost the election, that would have been just hunky-dory -- will have an entirely different civics lecture for the rest of us.

That lecture will be that the "first past the post" system delivers unjustly skewed results, and allows the party that gathers the support of a minority of Canadians -- a large minority of Canadians, but a minority nonethesss -- can thus govern with a domineering majority.

Naturally, their own previous civics lesson will be lost entirely on them.

The left -- and especially the far-left -- did everything they could to try to avert this Harper majority. They've tried organized vote-swapping, left-wing youth vote mobs, and outright lying to the Canadian people. All was for naught.

Despite all their efforts, Stephen Harper got the job done. He convinced the Canadian people to give his party the largest caucus of individual representatives; one larger than all the others combined.

Naturally, they will tell us that things should be different: that perhaps a left-wing coalition should be governing in its stead, despite the fact that the only thing they could really agree on is "not Harper".

Suffice to say, "not Harper" is not even nearly sufficient as a basis on which to form a government. Fortunately, in the 2011 federal election, Canadians would have none of it.

In winning this majority, Stephen Harper has now entirely eclipsed Lester Pearson as the most successful minority Prime Minister in Canadian history. Pearson tried as hard as he could to win a majority, and never got one.

Harper has now chaulked up not only the longest-serving minority government in Canadian history (2008-2011), but has now won a majority.

He got the job done.