Canadonked It

Canadian elections aren’t really that dramatic but this one was insane. I know we are like, so polite and don’t even know what to press to toot our own horns, but right now we should be leaning the fuck on them like we were driving breakneck into oncoming traffic.

Canadians are now living in a Conservative (think Republican) majority in an essentially two-party system and the only people this doesn’t sound normal to are Canadians. Stephen Harper is a less entertaining George W. Bush who was easy to tote as “our George W. Bush” before he and his party gained power Monday. From here on out anything he says goes, which is bad news for anyone not male, white, and in the highest tax bracket. Seats in Parliament for two of the most notable parties we’ve ever had dissolved faster than high hopes for any Canadian team involved in any kind of playoff (for anything). Not one but 2 party heads didn’t get elected in their own riding. Even if Michael Ignatieff’s riding was adopted because the nutty professor had been away at Harvard for so long, Gilles Duceppe’s riding (which face it, is basically the whole of Quebec) pushed the silver-haired sovereignist out too. The Bloc has lost their status as any opposition, rendering them essentially voiceless in the House, but not to worry, Duceppe has vowed not to rest, “until Quebec becomes a country“. Did it end there? No! Both of them resigned! Before waiting around to see if anyone was going to do the unspoken expected thing and give a seat up for them – there just weren’t any seats to give.

Please picture a wedding in which everyone sits on the bride’s side except for 4 grumbling Quebecois men on the groom’s – awkward – and that is the situation the Bloc is facing. Now picture a Viking ship in which half the crew is thrown into sea and the boat is cast into endless circles, ultimately creating a whirlpool which will swallow it, and that is the situation facing the Liberals.

Then you have the underdogs in all of this who have created an all-dogs-go-to-heaven except if the dogs were socialists (jk) and heaven was Parliament Hill. The NDP rode a the tidal wave of Orange Crush or soda or whatever everyone is saying up the Rideau canal and wacky Jack Layton is hanging loose, just beaming at everyone with his incredible skin as leader of the new official opposition. And while Elizabeth May of the Green Party has a mere seat to herself in this whole thing, the way she has been treating it makes it sound like a Tudorian throne carried upon the backs of Orca whales.

There are 100 new MP’s and getting them all to sit in the right place is going to be like teaching at kitten kindergarten. In fact there was a segment dedicated solely to this on the news last night, a very uncomfortable looking sports journalist in front of a blue-screen of a fake House of Commons interior, the seats filled with nondescript foosball men MS-painted to the corresponding party colours that would be filling them.

Every reporter was behaving like this, with the Elections Act no one could talk about poll-results as they came in so everyone resorted to two-bit observational comedy. Demanding “doobies” be sent down to dejected Liberal headquarters, and then asking what a doobie was. After they get past that frantic, near-hysteric, laughing gas reaction to everything they get unanimously sleepy, cranky, and mad at each other. The results start to come in as the polls close East to West, and as the wave crests in the Prairies so too does their excitement, somewhere around Calgary, and the commentary becomes, “It’s an orange donut with blue in the middle” and with every overweight white male Liberal MP conceding it is hard for your chin not to quiver along with all of theirs.

The strangeness in election night didn’t just end there, it is a werewolf with a lampshade on still stumbling around your living room. Ruth Ellen Brousseau, the winning NDP MP from a Quebec riding can’t even speak french, and took a break from campaigning mid-campaign to Vive Las Vegs. There were a few ballot boxes kidnapped, in which the cardboard boxes were snatched from school gyms and churches and stomped in the parking lot. Add confusing, drawn out concession speeches (“I just hope that that person, possibly a woman, possibly a young woman, I hope it is a young woman” – M. I.), the possibility that we are getting fighter jets and that our Prime Minister is a humourless cowboy with predator eyes who shakes the hands of his own children; this election, while rife with bad feelings in the collective moral gut of this country, has been pretty fucking funny.