Post-Mortem

A good night for the NDP.

A very BAD night for Canada.

It is the government we deserve.

We deserve it for tolerating our first-past-the-post electoral system which has allowed a deluded and ignorant 40% of the population to give stephen harper dictatorial powers over the rest of us, ... the MAJORITY of us.

We deserve it for having two main English Canadian opposition parties who could not work together to defeat a man they both acknowledge has contempt for parliamentary democracy.

I shudder to think of the level of petulant, self-righteous whining that some of the Liberal bloggers on "Progressive Bloggers." ("There is a red door and a blue door" indeed!) Look people; BOTH parties were equally self-interested. They wanted the sun and the moon. Now they can have their starless sky.

What though, does it matter if we have the NDP as the official opposition in a harpercon majority? Look at how he treated Parliament when he had a minority! We're in for a terrible five years of brutality, of arrogance, of misery, or rising poverty, of ecological destruction.

What can we say going forward? First of all ...

THE LIBERAL PARTY OF CANADA MUST DIE!

Seriously. The era of easy answers is over. I said earlier that if we held harper to a minority, the an NDP-Liberal coalition should have used its power to indict him for war crimes charges, exposed his authoritarianism, enacted legislative protections to prevent any prime minister from doing what he did in the future, and educated the populace on the fragility of their democracy. We should have destroyed harper and allowed the Liberal Party to take its place as the right-wing party in Canada.

That did not happen. harper has a majority.

The only thing now is for the Liberal Party of Canada to die. If you want corporate free trade deals and imperialist wars, vote Conservative. If you want public health care, public broadcasting, Parliamentary oversight, civil and social rights for everyone, vote NDP.

The Liberal Party of Canada is an anachronism. It is now the spoiler party. If "progressives" delude themselves into believing that the NDP are socialist extremists, and that the party of NAFTA and the invasion of Afghanistan and the rape of Haiti is a progressive party, and they again take their rump of a party out in 2016, all they're going to do is split the vote again.

Let's make it clear: There is now only one party for progressives to rally around. Let's make it a clear choice. NDP or Conservative. Our first-past-the-post electoral system has just shown its horrible inefficiency last night. Nothing is going to change that.

It is over.

Only narrow, selfish, deluded partisanship can make someone believe that the Liberal Party of Canada still has a role to play in the 21st Century. BOTH parties are guilty of partisan blindness. OKAY? But the NDP has emerged from this contest on top. The Liberals have lost Quebec. They long ago lost the West. They are the second-choice of Ontario voters.

Let it be the Conservatives vs. the NDP.

We are in for a terrible five years. harper and his nest of morons and vermin are going to believe that their stupid bullshit has been vindicated. It has not been. The quality of Canada's political culture has been tried and tested and found wanting.

Conservative policies do not work. But harper and flaherty are obviously going to jump to the conclusion that tax-cuts for the wealthy and massive cuts to the welfare state and deregulation of finance are winning policies. They're going to jump on to the band-wagon of ridiculous austerity and destructive tax-cuts that the Democrat-Republican coalition is pursuing south of the border. US austerity, the interest rate rises of the European Central Bank, the stagnation in Japan, ... they're all going to produce another economic crises. It is going to be "Great Recession Part II." And the moronic harpercons are not up to the job. They are going to be exposed for the evil fools that they are.

But we are all going to suffer for it.

Those people who united to try to defeat harper must now abandon the partisan divides and ask themselves how dangerous do they find harper? And we have to pursue other avenues of resistance. Real resistance. Not the sort of left-wing protester "resistance" which involves sitting on a sidewalk allowing some riot-police to smash your bones, but real, effective resistance.

We have to expose the failure of neoliberalism and work to show at least 55% of the voters that harper's policies are diseased fantasies.

We have to come up with a genuine challenge to corporate power.

It is going to be a terrible five years.