So, I guess I wasn’t completely right…SHOCKER.

I was so wrong that I wasn’t even correct on my own intentions when it came to the election, since I ended up voting. You know you have failed miserably when you can’t even correctly predict what you yourself will do. Who did I vote for? That can wait, and will appear later in this post of predictions. That’s right, predictions! What better to do when you fail completely and utterly at predictions than to simply make more, right? YEAH!

So, I guess the first thing to do is to go party by party…right after this break!

Liberals – First off, I don’t want to hear one more fucking word like the nonsense Bob Rae was blathering on the TV screen not that long ago. Stop blaming voters for switching over to the NDP…they wouldn’t have done so if your party had offered ANYTHING that any meaningful percentage of voters was interested in. You lost because you offered absolutely nothing of substance. It’s time for a rebuild, boys.

First it was Stephane ‘Sacrificial Lamb’ Dion, and he was only the choice because Bob Rae and Michael Ignatieff supporters both agreed he was a generally average, non-threatening leadership candidate. Shocking that under THAT banner of support, and with seemingly the strength and backbone of an invertebrate, he didn’t do well. Then it was Ignatieff. I think he’s still trying to figure out what exactly he stands for or against, sadly not realizing that it’s just a little bit late. If after that double barrelled failure this party chooses Rae, they are completely hopeless and fully deserve to vanish from the political landscape. It’s time to start over from the foundation up. And do NOT think that picking Justin Trudeau on the basis of his last name counts for that!

The constant shots across the PC bow marking them as ‘the Party of Fear’ clearly didn’t work. Not only did they fail to work, they also made absolutely no fucking sense. If you’re constantly telling voters that they need to fear what another party will do, they aren’t the Party of Fear…you are. Please try to remember that next time, whoever ends up in the new Liberal Party. And please actually clean house. I like having effective parties that are viable options for people to vote for.

Bloc Quebecois – I think my thoughts here can best be expressed through visual media

On behalf of the rest of the country, good riddance. The fact that you were EVER a Federal party is an absolute embarrassment. Now you aren’t even an official party anymore. You’re the political equivalent of a few vagrants hanging out on a street corner, warming your hands over a barrel of burning garbage.

The honest truth is that you did what you were elected to. Still, sayonara.

Green Party – Well, at least they actually have a seat this time. And really, that probably puts Elizabeth May in the next debate. Good for her. Frankly if she couldn’t win in a handpicked riding, the whole party may as well have packed it up and surrendered. We won’t know for a short while how the voter percentages broke down, but perhaps the Greens have seen a bit of an uptake. And maybe now you could actually find a real Deputy Leader rather than airlifting in a washed up hockey enforcer to fill the role.  Honestly, do you now get how much damage that did to every other candidate you had running? It immediately created the question “Wait…so not one of the other people running for an MP spot was qualified for that job? Why would I possibly vote for them, then?” in the minds of a lot of voters.

It was actually a really nice moment watching Elizabeth May get that seat, because it was an expression of pure joy. So that is an accomplishment…now it’s time to take the training wheels off and shoot for something more ambitious than “Our leader gets to sit in the House of Commons with the other big boys!” You can either grow from here or you can fade in to irrelevance as a short time blip on the radar of the Canadian political landscape.

NDP – I cannot stand Jack Layton, but congratulations to his party nonetheless. The truth is, they ran a great campaign. While everyone else was focused on bogeyman style campaigning rife with “Here’s why you shouldn’t vote for them”, the NDP actually offered a platform. A shockingly expensive, money drips from rainbows platform, but at least they were actually FOR something more than they were AGAINST something. That’s something I’d like to see the rest of the parties learn for next time!

I also have you to thank for essentially taking the Bloc out behind the woodshed and giving them the Old Yeller treatment. So good on ya there, too.

Now it’s time to step up. You have a chance to be a voice. Even with a majority government in place, you pretty much ARE the opposition, what with your rivals being completely and utterly crushed. You really made a push to appeal to voters in the East…well, they listened. You’d better deliver. This is the first time that the pressure is on you guys to stand up and be counted. Time to see if you’re up for it. You have 4 years.

Conservatives – Well, I sure as fuck didn’t see this coming! Congrats to you as well, again despite my strong dislike for your robotic leader.

The immediate fear mongering nonsense in the wake of this result amuses me. Going by the ridiculous rhetoric I keep reading online, I fully expect Canada will be a Christian hegemonic police state living by the word of the Bible, with jackboot wearing thugs smashing any non-white they see on the streets in the face with a hammer by this time next week. Can we please stop with this ridiculous, overheated rhetoric comparing them to the hard core right wingers of the Bush years? This Conservative party would have been railroaded as pinko commies if they were in the States in 2004, for fuck’s sake. Grow up and gain a little bit of perspective, please.

Here’s why I don’t think this ‘Big, scary hardcore right wing monster’ is going to happen…it would absolutely guarantee that the Conservative governance of Canada would end in 4 years. They would essentially be making themselves a one term government, and would pretty much set off an atom bomb on their future chances of ever, EVER being elected again. Since I don’t suspect that this is the desired path of the Conservatives, I don’t see them turning in to a fire breathing beast overnight.

Now, are there aspects of their platform that worry me? Yeah. I certainly have no confidence in whatever their platform ends up being on digital rights, but then I could say pretty much the same thing about their rivals as well. While we do need a reasonable program of prison expansion (Sorry, but a system where the norm is for convicted felons to get parole after they’ve served 60% of their sentence thanks to overcrowding isn’t working), I don’t want to see us start heading off to the land of ‘3 Strikes, You’re Out’ kind of sentencing or anything along those lines. So I need some convincing that they do have some sensible ideas of what to do. And I guess we’ll see if they can back up their repeated claims that it was minority governments holding them back from doing stuff.

General Stuff – I really think it’s time that we sit down and figure out what we want to be. Seriously, where is this country going? Right now, there is no distinct overall direction in any way, shape or form. It’s about time we do something to rectify that.

-We need a new Defence White Paper. For way too long, from the mid 80’s up until recently, no new military equipment was purchased while existing gear became outdated and worn out. So now the need for replacements are coming due for everything at once, which is basically a procurement nightmare scenario. What do we need and what do we want, and what order are we prioritizing things in? What sort of objectives do we need to be able to meet (and REAL objectives, not this politicized bullshit where  we pretend things like peacekeeping can apparently be done with flowers and hugs) and what do we need to put in place to meet them?

-We need the healthcare equivalent of the same. For too long, the answer to any issue with the Canadian healthcare system has been “Uhhh…here’s some money!” That isn’t an answer. Again, we need a PLAN. What’s working and what isn’t working? What needs to happen to make the unworkable operate in a reasonably efficient manner? Where does the focus need to be? Obviously, this one is going to be a lot messier since healthcare spending is a provincial concern, but it’s a national issue. Bring the provinces to the table and let’s actually have a discussion.

-What is our International identity? Sure, this is partly a military question, but we also need to make some decisions when it comes to international aid funding and diplomacy. What are our requirements for a nation to warrant development funds? How do we want to distribute those funds? How are we handling foreign diplomacy in terms of everything from embassy and ambassadorial locations to what sort of objectives we actually have overseas?

-What are our REALISTIC goals for pollution reduction and what is a REALISTIC plan to meet them? I don’t give a fuck what the rest of the world wants…what do WE want as a nation and how can WE reach that? We need to start seriously talking about this and coming up with ideas. Kyoto is done…there is no way in Hell that was ever going to happen because neither the Liberals or Conservatives were ever anything resembling serious about figuring out how to do it. Time to move forward and come up with a plan.

Not to sound too much like some horrible school film, but what do we want Canada to be?

Yeah…that…that was pretty awful. My apologies.

Oh, who did I vote for? James Rajotte, the Conservative. Simply put, it was a foregone conclusion that he would win in a landslide, and he did. If you added the votes for the other 3 candidates together, they manage to get a little over half as many as he did. So, I voted for him in the hopes that a big finish will maybe, MAYBE get him a seat at the grown ups table.

And finally, enough with this ‘Let’s merge all of the guys on the left!’ talk. I like having options for votes. I don’t want us to become another country with 2 choices to vote for. If everyone would actually develop a sufficient platform of their own, they’d be fine.