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Bright Spots?
October 20, 2015 - 3:34pm
Any bright spots last night?
The NDP won three Saskatchewan seats.
Also re-elected 16 Quebec MPs including Romeo Saganash and rising star Ruth Ellen Brosseau.
I was convinced that with Edmonton being a three-way race that Linda Duncan would lose due to the Liberals eating into her support.
Many people wrote off Murray Rankin in Victoria but he held off the Green candidate.
Most of the talented B.C. caucus remains.
NDP picked up a new seat in Ontario, Tracey Ramsey in Essex.
Daniel Blaikie winning Elmwood-Transcona
I personally will not miss Peter, Paul, or Pat. Do those count as bright spots?
The Conservative in that riding is considering asking for a recount
I think the loss of any NDP MP is very bad, especially with a TPP voting. Definitely holding on to Quebec seats. REB, and representation in much of Canada, including Elmood. Also, the fact that this is clearly finally a chance to give the boot to people like Judy WL, and Rebecca Blakie. Very unhappy with the nepotism in Elmwood. Glad we got the seat back, but not happy to see another useless Blakie!
What is wrong with Judy WL?
Holding onto Niki Ashton is important. She is amazing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niki_Ashton
You still won more seats than the Liberals did in 2011.
Having been the official opposition for 4 years and having risen to first for at least a brief period in the polls solidifies the NDP as a viable choice federally.
Sorry, Lib, not telling you.
Gilles Duceppe losing his seat to NDP incumbent Hélène Laverdière was certainly a bright spot for me. link
Winning 3 Sask seats.
Ten aboriginal MPs, a record, including the splendid Romeo Saganash and newcomers like Georgina Jolibois and Robert Falcon Ouellet.
Many more women MPs.
Vancouver Island.
The official opposiiton critic on Bill C-51, Randall Garrison, is back in parliament and vowing to continue the fight against C-51.
Ruth Ellen Brosseau and Pierre Luc Dusseault, who were not professional pols but worked hard for their ridings, can keep doing so.
Stephane Dion will make a decent cabinet minister. A few of the other Liberals might, too.
And many of the new ministers will have constituency offices that are easy to reach by public transit, so it'll be easier to protest there.
I think we can cut Daniel some slack here. He did his own thing for a while, then he went and ran for election, and he won. Bill was a good MP who did a good job representing the people (why else do you think he held on in 1993?) and I'm sure Daniel will be more than open to learning from his father.
So what, recounts almost never change the outcome unless the margin is in low single digits...Its always possible that when elections canada does the official tally in a few days some errors in the totals could be uncovered but if after the official account Blaikie is ahead by 51 votes , there is about 99.99999% chance that a recount will make no difference
Wow were getting pity from Pondering, it must be worse then I imagined!
I'm kidding Pondering, I'm teasing.
As for bright spots, I'm glad the election is over, I was pissed off last night, but I felt this calm inner peace today and relief today, I'm been stressed over this election since the NDP dropping in the polls and fucking up, no its all over and I don't have to worry about an election until 2019, or until a NDP leadership race.
And an bright spot is the NDP has a chance for renewal. I got the logic of the NDP's platform, but I honestly didn't like it, it wasn't bold enough, it was out synch with the times, and while the childcare promise was good, it applied to to few people to be the centre piece of the NDP policies. A Basic Gareenteed Income should have been a centre piece.
So this is the NDPs chance to learn from rescent mistakes both provincially and federally. We're entering a new era and we have to stop fighting the battles of the past and look to knew ideas and new vision. So I'm excited about renewal.
Another bright spot is some of my favourite MPs survived, like Ruth Ellen Brosseau, Charlie Angus, Nathan Cullen, and some new ones, especially Erin Weir Economist and Karina Trudel who can lead the fight for the improving Canada Post.
It was nice watching Rob Clarke and Greg Rickford flaming out into third place. Also nice to see that the NDP won in Kootenay. That shows that the NDP still have some of what made it competitive in rural Western Canada a long time ago.
Stephane Dion was a shitty Minister back in the 90's, I see no reason to believe it will be any different this time.
I was in tears last night, but it was of course too much to think that the competent, cultivated, really bilingual (without gross errors) and progressive Anne Lagacé Dowson could have bested the Upper Class Twit of the Year. But it was good to flush Harper.
marc alfred, as for that story:
Yolande really doesn't look very unhappy now, does she?
Every riding I have lived in over the last 35 years went orange. I live on Vancouver Island and every seat went Orange except for May's. In the Comox Valley we defeated John Duncan a nasty racist Reformer and picked up the bonus redistribution seat as well. Burnaby South (Kennedy Stewart} and New West (Peter Julian) and Port Moody Coquitlam (Fin Donnely) which was my part of the Lower Mainland and where my two sons live are all orange. The NDP also won a seat in Saskatoon where I lived before Burnaby and also the Kootenays is orange where I lived during the '80's.
I predicted an NDP plurality because I went on a road trip on Friday to drop off one son in Coquitlam and move the other from Burnaby over to the island. Leaving aside freeway driving my trip took me through neighbourhoods in 8 ridings. All eight now have NDP MP's. I thought we were doing just great.
Peter Stoffer, Pat Martin and Paul Dewer were three of the best MPs we had. Don't get what your problem is to gloat in the defeat of your comrades.
Sadly if it was up to Vancouver Island the Mulcair would be PM, but its not. Still points for Vancouver Island for seeing through Trudeau's bullshit.
Over the past six weeks I've taken the Shoe Leather Express through various parts of University-Rosedale (my riding) and also Davenport, and was pleasantly opiated by all the orange I saw. Three times more orange than red, blue and green combined.
When the Atlantic results started to pour in, I thought "Oh, this isn't good, but at least here in the core of Toronto, we're safe..."
Unionist feels they were too pro Isreal, too prowar, ect...
I take no joy in there defeat, they served thier country well, but even I will admit they were not our strongest MPs.
I think we kept most of our best MPs, lost alot of good MPs, and a few great ones, but we kept most of our best MPs.
Our best MPs right now I'm say are Peter Julian, Nathan Cullen, Mulcair, Nikki Ashton, Romeo Saganash, Ruth Ellen Brosseau, Kennedy Stewart, Charlie Angus, Guy Caron, some others and pick up some news one who I think have great potential like Erin Weir. Okay we lost alot of really good MPs, leaving us with a smaller pool, and a surprising amount of new MPs, especially in BC and Sask. I think what like a third of the caucus is new?
It will be interesting to see the shadow cabinat, there are some big holes in it, but that can be an oppodtunity for the survivors and newbs to advance.
I saw the same in High Park. I couldn't believe it when everyone (and I mean everyone) started predicting Liberals would win it. Even with everyone predicting it, I still thought the NDP would win it based on what I saw there a couple weeks ago.
It was like watching some frazzled contestant on "Let's Make A Deal" choose the toaster oven over what's behind Door #3.
dp
An extreme dominance of Boulerice signs here, except for a few large Bloc candidate signs on the public roadway (very few on balconies or in windows) and the only Liberal ones were near the Liberal candidate's office. No con signs at all. A few small Green ones. Liberals not counting some very large Trudeau signs on OUR side of Jean-Talon. Some were unilingual English, at the corner of Jean-Talon and St-Denis! (Vietnamese, Italian, Arabic and Spanish more common right there).
The Liberal signs are oddly goth, and the colour scheme is also that of the 2012 Student movement here. I highly doubt the Libs have become "Communistes libertaires", pandas or bananas against Charest - or Couillard. And the colours I was sporting as I headed to the Alexandre-Anne campaign office, as I had a black cotton velvet jacket (an expensive, warm jacket, but which I had found at Le Chaînon, a charity shop that helps women in crisis) and a red woollen scarf which I'd happened to pick up at the same place on a different occasion. Sorry, I really don't like orange, except a more subtle burnt orange.
Stoffer - warmonger - even after the party convention demanded an immediate and orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan, he publicly defied the party and said, let's stay.
You agree with him? Go mourn your comrade.
Pat Martin? Pro-Zionist Likudist creep. Proponent of the "opposition to Israeli policy is the new anti-Semitism" line. Pushing his "allegiance to Canada" private members' bill for years on end, in order to try to keep elected Québec sovereignists out of the House. Plus being an all-round embarrassment.
Paul Dewar? Non-stop pushing Harper to be more aggressive against Russia, against Syria... and going so far as to issue (along with fellow Israel-panderer Wayne Marston) a statement on the party website praising Harper for making Canada the first country in the world to announce it would boycott "Durban II", the U.N. human rights sequel conference held in Geneva in 2008. On Jack Layton's orders, the statement was removed within a couple of days.
Good riddance to bad rubbish. To your "comrades". The NDP must root out such poison if it is to make its mark as the conscience of the Canadian political system.
What about the servivors, what do you think about the current MPs, are you pissed at any of them Unionist?
We lost some fantastic young MPs in Québec - plus Megan Leslie, Linda McQuaig, many others. That is the responsibility of the Lavignes and McGraths and similar back-room manipulators who will, hopefully, have their asses handed to them on a platter shortly.
As for the survivors - many are good, principled folk. That does not apply to Hélène Laverdière, who is as much a serial warmonger as Paul Dewar, whom she subbed for when he was running for the leadership. Her dirty role has been amply discussed on this discussion board. But given the choice between two warmongers (her and Gilles Duceppe), I suppose I'd pick her. And there are some others who should have been gone.
Why... what do you think, Brachina?
And even if it tilted red in one case and orange in the other, the fact that both cases disproved "split opposition elects Cons" scaremongering...