Election Recap: What The Fuck Just Happened

On A Wild Election

“I don’t think this will be easy. I don’t think the Liberals will spend this entire campaign in a comfortable lead. I think this will be tough. But I feel in my soul at the end of it all Mark Carney will win. To quote Bourdain, I have come home.”

That is how I ended my election preview on the day the writ dropped for this race in March, 5 long fucking weeks, and about 8 mental breakdowns, ago. It has been an incredible night, and no amount of dooming about the fact it’s likely the Liberals fall a couple of seats short of a majority government will change my good mood.

In December, there were polls where, depending on the model used and the methods involved, the Liberals might fall to the single digits in seats. When Justin Trudeau resigned we were in third place in seats on average and frankly if he hadn’t resigned we’d have been in fourth by inauguration day. The Liberals will govern comfortably for a while - a couple years at least - because it’s not in anybody’s interests to blow up this Parliament. The NDP need to have a long bloodletting leadership race that can reinvigorate their ideas and strengthen themselves financially. The race the Ontario Liberals ran in 2023 should be a model for them to follow, though I’d get the contest started sooner than the OLP did. (Seriously - make sure to take the tithe of donations to the leadership campaigns. It basically saved the OLP. Fucking do it.) While they’re having that race, they can and should prop up Carney, assuming late ballots don’t get us the narrowest of majorities.

The Bloc also don’t want an election this side of Quebec’s 2026 election. The Bloc and the PQ share donors, share activists, and I suspect after tonight are going to share a lot of candidates. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if a few MPs and candidates who lost tonight find nominations for an MNA position to revive their careers. But more than that, the donor base and the activists time and energy needs to go to reviving the PQ into a fighting force, after the near death experience it faced in 2022. If they want to win a provincial election in Quebec, they’ll need to heavily build that machine and warchest up, and another Federal election that splits time and money would be idiocy for the broader separatist movement in Quebec.

I’ll have more thoughts on the state of the Conservative Party in time, partially because it’s a hard result to judge and partially because it won’t be in these pages, but I will say Fanjoy winning Carleton is fucking hilarious and completely deserved.

The party that will get my ire tonight is the NDP, who lost good MPs tonight because they let a catastrophic incompetent lead their party off a cliff even though it was obvious to everybody that he was a disaster. He needed to go after the last election, as I wrote at the time, and everyone who claimed that he was actually good at politics needs to fucking apologize for lying, both to me and to yourselves.

The dirty secret I’ve said a lot before is that the only thing that everyone outside the NDP could agree on is that Jagmeet is shit, and yet the NDP kept him on. All these claims that the NDP had a great ground game and super popular incumbents and all of this trite nonsense was ruined by the fact that Jagmeet Singh led a wave that took most of them out. Don Davies might win, so that’s a victory for the Poll Denial caucus I guess, but 7 seats at most is a failure for them. And it’s not just Jagmeet’s failure, it’s a failure of everybody who failed to listen.

The story of this election is that both the Liberals and the NDP had leaders with dogshit favourables who needed to be replaced in 2024, and one of us did it and the other didn’t and one just gained seats and the other lost party status. I was right when I called on him to resign, I was right when I said the confidence and supply agreement was a mistake, I was right when I would consistently tee off on Singh and say he needs to be forced out, and now great MPs are unemployed because the NDP didn’t listen.

I was also right to push for Trudeau’s exit to the extent I did and I’m fucking gratified by this result. Whatever personal affection you may have for Trudeau, this is a result he never could have achieved, and the Liberals needed to stop Poilievre. This is an incredible win for Carney, for the Liberal team, and for the country. We are better off for it, and we are better off under his leadership. I’d love to wake up to 4 more Liberal seats somehow (not impossible but highly highly highly unlikely), but even without them it’s been a great night, and a great campaign.

It’s also been a great campaign for me, not to make this all about me but I haven’t slept and I don’t care. This site has seen incredible growth, my election night liveblog broke 72k views in the first 12 hours it was live (which is about 62k more than my debate live blog in the same time period), and fundamentally this election has been incredibly successfully covered by this site. The coverage in the run up, and the push to ditch Singh and Trudeau, but also the campaign itself.

One of the big Liberal successes tonight was Quebec, where they’ve gained a net of 8 seats and may gain a ninth if Terrebonne flips. One of this site’s focuses has been delivering the kind of in depth analysis of Quebec that’s often missing from English coverage, and a 73/78 individual seat hit rate without Terrebonne flipping and potentially getting the correct number of LPC seats exactly if Terrebonne does is the kind of thing I take a lot of pride in.

Obviously it wasn’t a perfect night and the LPC’s efficiency in Ontario evaporated in a way I didn’t expect, but I did correctly make the point that if the GTA didn’t go well for them they’d still be okay, as those gains would be made up partially elsewhere. The stunning victory in Carleton, as well as mostly good results in Northern Ontario, and beating Michelle Ferreri and Ryan Williams in Peterborough and Bay Of Quinte respectively, are proof of that point.

But most of all I’m happy. I never declared a majority certain, I like to think at least how I handled myself on the pages of this site was reasonable, and I’m happy to see the Liberals returned to office. Now I’m going to fucking sleep, because holy fuck this campaign has nearly destroyed me.