UPDATE: Well, as I wrote below, the Minority Mammy is back for yet another minority government, with all five parties pretty much where they were at dissolution. As Kate McMillan points out, when the opposition's self-neutering battle cry is "Nobody wanted this election!", don't be surprised when the citizenry takes you at your word and returns exactly the same parliament as if no election had ever happened.
Yet, incredibly, Conservative Party husk Erin O'Toole has probably done well enough to survive as leader, which means that, as elsewhere in the Anglosphere, fainthearted pantywaist conservatism will stagger on - as will "land acknowledgments", "hate speech" laws and ahistorical civilizational self-loathing...
As I predicted at the top of this weekend's Mark Steyn Show, just in time for today's election in Canada Justin Trudeau is back in black. A new photograph has emerged (right) of the Peter Pancake of northern politics in blackface, black arms, black legs, black torso (though no word on whether the banana stuffed down his pants has also been dunked in a vat of Kiwi).
Justin was pushing thirty when he was in his Bollywood-meets-Jolson get-up. Stephen Taylor posts a picture of what Tory leader Erin O'Toole was doing at the same age - wrapping up a dozen years as helicopter pilot with the Royal Canadian Air Force.
That is honorable and impressive. But they made similar comparisons with flyboy McCain and choomer Obama in 2008, and it didn't work, because in politics "character" has been supplanted by attitude. And in any case, in his post-military career, Mr O'Toole has apparently acquired all the same views on "climate change" and whatnot as Justin, albeit without the shoe polish, which would come in useful for covering up the lack of principle and policies, not to mention the general shiftiness when asked a perfectly predictable question.
I would not have thought it possible to come up with a more hollow "leader" less persuasive on the hustings than Andrew Scheer, but O'Toole actually announced live on stage the other day:
This is not your father's Conservative Party.
No, it's your father's idiot non-savant Greta-following granddaughter's Conservative Party. Who needs that?
For the benefit of American readers, who are wondering how today can be Election Day when the campaign only began on August 15th, well, that's the advantage of the Westminster system: You wind up being governed by the same bunch of hack globalist groupthinkers, but it takes a twentieth of the time, a thousandth of the cost, and you don't have to be irritated by months of soft-focus ads trying to pass off some timeserving kleptocrat on the take from ChiComs and Z-list oligarchs as a horny-handed bluecollar son of the sod.
Around the world, Covid without end has vastly increased the benefits of incumbency, and not merely in the sense of always-keep-a-hold-of-nurse-for-fear-of-finding-something-worse. The central feature of the Westminster system is the balance between Her Majesty's Government and Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition summarized in so-called "Prime Minister's Questions" when the other fellows get to hoot and jeer at him without mercy. But for eighteen months now that balance has been diminished: Across the planet, the executive branch has gotten to present itself as emergency-management technocrats, giving daily health updates alongside men of "science". Parliaments in general, and thus the Loyal Oppositions, have been all but invisible save for periodic Zoom-call simulacra of zero interest unless some backbencher decides to start urinating on camera.
That's the only advantage Justin Trudeau had: incumbency at a time when non-incumbency has been quarantined by the Covid. What's that got him? The final polls show Liberals and Tories tied at 31 per cent. That puts neither party anywhere near a majority government.
But it does get Justin more seats than O'Toole. And in any case he'll find it way easier than the Tories to reach a deal with the smaller parties - the Bloc Québécois, the NDP, the Greens, the Even More Left Than All The Other Indistinguishable Leftie Parties party... No matter how totally O'Toole agrees with the Lefties they still refuse to admit him to the club. And, besides, even if he did do a deal with them, all it would mean is the abandonment of whatever residual conservatism is still to be found in the Canadian Tories, which they're gonna need state-of-the-art Wuhan-made forensic detectors to track down at the back of O'Toole's closet or buried in the backyard or wherever it's hiding.
So the likelihood is a Liberal minority, possibly even smaller than before, followed by an immediate struggle for the post-Justin crown.
Chances of an O'Toole ministry? Super-slim to none - and, even if he slipped through the cracks of a Bloc surge in Quebec and an NDP nibbling at Trudeaupian Toronto, O'Toole would be (to reprise my old line) in office and not in power.
So why bother dragging him across the finish line?
The one party leader not on stage for the big debate was Maxime Bernier of the People's Party - because he was the only guy offering anything different from the Grit-Dipper-Bloquiste-Green-O'Toolian generic globalist crapola, and we can't have that, can we?
Vote-splitting on the right only matters if you're at risk of scuttling a conservative government that is going to do anything conservative. That's not on the ballot. So, if you're interested in at least advancing the possibility of saving Canada while that remains still just about do-able, use the election to put a rocket up the flabby arses of the sell-out pseudo-Conservatives ...and vote Max!
Here's my conversation with Maxime Bernier from four years ago, shortly before the wretched husk Andrew Scheer shafted him and drove him out to form the People's Party. Much has changed since then ...but not M Bernier:
Max returned to The Mark Steyn Show for a second interview just this summer.
As for Justin, a second minority would mark the end of what passes for his political career - and the jockeying to succeed will begin tonight. The Mammy Singer will be a big ol' mopey Mammy Blue:
~It was a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, beginning with a new edition of The Mark Steyn Show with, among other delights, a spectacular Durham Report Watch Update Watch! On Saturday Mark Steyn's Passing Parade looked at two contrasting victims of the 9/11 world - Hollywood producer Moustapha Akkad, slaughtered by jihadists, and the fearless Oriana Fallaci, hounded to her grave by "hate speech" prosecutions. For our weekend movie date, Rick McGinnis celebrated Douglas Sirk's farewell to Hollywood. And our Sunday audio special offered a bar fight with the guy who wrote "Try a Little Tenderness".
If you were too busy filling takeout orders for under the bridge at Del Rio, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
The Mark Steyn Show and Mark Steyn's Passing Parade are special productions for The Mark Steyn Club. You can find more details about our Club here - and we also have a great gift membership.
