Bigotry

I’ve been enjoying reading the pro-Conservative blogs this morning, particularly the ones that had called for a very strong Conservative minority government win in last night’s Federal Election.

I was caught off-guard by this statement:

I think we will see that the women vote killed the Tories. They were scared by the Grits’ fearmongering.

To me that’s very reminiscent of Jacques Parizeau’s comment after the 1995 referendum that sovereignty was lost because of “money and the ethnic vote“. Perhaps Adam thinks that “womenfolk” shouldn’t be voting because they get in the way of the “man’s” party. What an idiot.

Though I’m pleased with the election results (my local candidate won), I’m still hesitant about what is going to happen in the next couple of years. Minority governments don’t last (the average is 1.5 years) and it seems the sovereignty issue has returned to Quebec (judging by Duceppe’s speech last night). The people who voted Conservative out west won’t be pleased with the results. National unity, bridging gaps and general cooperation are going to be incredibly important over the next little while.

I think the best result has been the vote count of the Green Party. They’ve qualified for federal funding and hopefully in the next election (which will be sooner rather than later), they might even get a seat.

This was one of the first elections where I didn’t watch much television coverage at all. I saw Darren Barefoot’s post early after the polls closed and checked out the live results on the Web. The CBC’s results page required manual refreshing but offered more up-to-date results. CTV and The Toronto Star’s results were built by the same company but I found that they either didn’t update (The Star) or offered incorrect results (CTV – they showed the Green Party candidate in Kitchener-Conestoga winning the seat). I remember the insanity at the returning office in 1997, fielding calls from the different polling stations and reporting the results to the national returning office in Ottawa. It’s amazing the elections run so smoothly in Canada.

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