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Justin Trudeau has stated his priority going forward will be climate change. He sees it as “unifying.” Many are claiming the election was “a climate-change election.” I beg to differ on both counts.
Legitimizing the mess we just endured under the explanatory banner that it was a vote about climate change is claptrap, and a pretty low grade of claptrap at that. Not even the watery pilgrimage of the sainted Greta Thunberg to our shores, and the emptying of half the schoolrooms of the nation for what was called a climate emergency march, had any perceptible effect on Monday’s vote.
Were climate change the central motivator, then surely this week would have seen Elizabeth May and a lavish posse of newly elected Greens setting the terms of Trudeau’s survival in the House of Commons, among which the first would surely have been sealing off Alberta from the rest of the country, until the May-Trudeau coalition could find some other place to put it.
Ms. May’s personal vehicle, which we know as the Green party, did make voluminous gains, for she increased its representation by a full 50 per cent. That is, instead of a solid two Green MPs, both from Vancouver Island, there is now one more, this time in New Brunswick, which surely qualifies the Greens as pan-Canadian at last.
But when you’ve got the end of the world as your calling card, and a leader who gladly appoints herself as the instrument of that same world’s salvation — a most powerful pitch — then surely, after 13 years of trying, you should be doing better than electing three candidates in a Parliament of 338. And if, as so many are still saying, this was a climate-change election, then the one leader who has made climate change her brand and banner, and who in a CBC interview stated “I have to save the whole world,” and worse, obviously believes she can, would have done better than adding one more member to an already unwieldy caucus of two.
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See Also:
(1) Federal civil-service unions happy to see Trudeau back
(3) 14 reasons why the Conservatives shouldn’t dump Andrew Scheer as party leader
(4) Election post-mortem, Part 1: A Conservative insider explains how his party got it so wrong
(5) Election post-mortem, Part 2: Why did the NDP get blown out? A war-room strategist explains
