ELECTION RESULTS

And the Conservatives have swept to a...... Majority of 167! Cue fireworks.

The Bloc has been decimated, worse than decimated. They dropped from 49 seats to a humiliating 4, and lost official party status.

The NDP have swept into the Official Opposition position with 102 seats, more than triple their previous mediocre position of 29.

In a campaign that reminds me of the cartoons where someone runs off the side of a cliff, does a stationary bicycle routine in thin air for a minute, and then plummets to the depths, the Liberals went into something like free-fall from 103 seats to a third place 34. Only, unlike in the cartoons, the Liberals do not appear to have survived the fall without a scratch.

In some of the most dramatic news of the evening, Michael Ignatieff and Gilles Duceppe couldn't even win seats in their own ridings. Ignatieff lost to a Conservative, swept away in the flood that crumbled Fortress Toronto where the Conservatives picked up 32 out of 47 seats by one estimate. Up from their previous low number of absolutely none. Gilles Duceppe lost to an NDPer, by good fortune not the one who went holidaying in Los Vegas during the campaign.

Pundits learned that they didn't know as much about Canadian politics as they thought they did, and pollsters learned that they can be quite wrong, very few polls put the Conservatives as high or higher than they actually performed.

And Cheryl Gallant's "controversial comments" did not sink her victory in our riding, unless you consider a lead of around 17,851 votes over the next candidate (an independent) to be a close win. And for a certain relative of mine who shall remain nameless but knows who he is, the Blue Guy in your riding won by a margin of around, 25,251 votes.

In other news, I would like to uncharitably dig up an article Heather Mallick wrote on the subject of what if Harper get a majority.

Old-tyme religion will reign, and our spiritual leader will be Harper's favourite evangelical, Charles McVety... I used to decry the concept of tenure, suspecting it made professors coast in class, but now I see it as a fence standing between us and the intellectually primitive. In Harperland, your students would turn you in for Wrongspeak and you would lose your job...
Guns on the street, gated communities, rampant drug use, unlimited anonymous corporate political donations, no government safety standards for food and medicine, classrooms that resemble holding pens more than civilized safe rooms for the young to learn . . .Individuals would be in trouble.... The Conservative hate machine will swivel toward you like a Dalek and advance. You're doomed. A Harper majority government wouldn't just lash out generally. It would hunt down its enemies.
Fear these people. Don't get sick. Don't grow old. Don't have children. Make yourself invulnerable.

I suspect the Toronto Star columnists, if they were gathered together in a huddled enclave watching the election results coming in, may have had their keys collectively taken away as a result of their pain mitigation techniques.