{"id":6013,"date":"2013-11-26T11:23:20","date_gmt":"2013-11-26T16:23:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/?p=6013"},"modified":"2013-11-26T11:23:20","modified_gmt":"2013-11-26T16:23:20","slug":"wheat-kings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/?p=6013","title":{"rendered":"Wheat Kings"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Trudeau<\/a>
Trudeau was so confident in the wake of the Forum poll, that he started waving “Vote PC” signs on the campaign trail.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

On the surface, nothing really happened last night. The Liberals held two safe seats and the Conservatives held two safe seats. Yes, they were counting ballots until late night in Brandon, but the seating chart in the House of Commons is unchanged.<\/p>\n

As is so often the case, most of the attention was on Eastern Canada, especially the McQuaig-Freeland battle in the centre of the Centre of the Universe. For the Liberals, the vote totals weren’t overly important, though they did increase their share of the vote in both Toronto Centre and Bourassa. For them, the key was building Team Trudeau by electing two MPs who are fresh faces, but still legitimate Cabinet material. <\/p>\n

The news is less encouraging for the Bloc, who dropped a few points and show no signs of life following their 2011 wipeout. If the Tory spin machine is looking for talking points, well, they successfully held off a charge from the Rhinos for fourth place in Bourassa, though the Rhinos could likely have closed the 700-vote gap with a better GotV effort.<\/p>\n

The NDP are no doubt disappointed to finish second in both ridings, but the truth is they probably dodged a bullet in Toronto Centre. A win for Linda McQuaig would have given them two weeks of positive headlines, but would have meant 2 years of headaches for Thomas Mulcair. McQuaig is very much an “old school” NDPer whose books all carry titles like “Why the rich are destroying Canada<\/em>” and subtitles like “PS, I hate oil companies and Americans too<\/em>“. Mulcair has taken great pains to paint the NDP as a centrist alternative to the Liberals and Conservatives, and McQuaig might prove more difficult to control than his caucus of 20-somethings from Quebec.<\/p>\n

More disconcerting for Mulcair is what happened in Manitoba last night. Unlike the two eastern seats, there was no expectation the NDP would win<\/em>, but they lost more than half their vote in both ridings, falling to third behind the Liberals. Brandon can perhaps be excused – there were clearly local dynamics in play, and Dinsdale’s last name carries some cachet. Provencher was a more boring race, but that makes the result more worrisome. Last election, voters dissatisfied with Stephen Harper went NDP over Liberal by a 2:1 ratio. This time, they went Liberal over NDP by nearly a 4:1 ratio. <\/p>\n

I wouldn’t extrapolate out very far. Kevin Lamoureux won one of the safest NDP seats in the country for the Liberals in a November 2010 by-election, and we all know what happened 6 months later. But 30% in two small town Prairie ridings is nothing to sneeze at for the Liberals. Especially when you toss in their strong showing in Calgary Centre last year. For the first time in a long time, there’s reason to believe that Western Canada might not be an abysmal wasteland for the Liberal Party. On a largely “status quo” evening, that’s fantastic news for team Trudeau.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the surface, nothing really happened last night. The Liberals held two safe seats and the Conservatives held two safe seats. Yes, they were counting ballots until late night in Brandon, but the seating chart in the House of Commons is unchanged. As is so often the case, most of the attention was on Eastern […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[202],"tags":[1398,1421,1394,1422,1420,1392],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6013"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6013"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6013\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6022,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6013\/revisions\/6022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}