January 23, 2006: Stephen Harper becomes Prime Minister of Canada.
Here's what I wrote on the morning after:
So Harper scored a "big win" last night, which I suppose on November 28th I would have agreed with. However, the election wasn't on November 28th, and the early-January swell of Conservative support leaves this result a little empty.
As a decided "glass half-empty" guy (hint to future readers, I'll do a post on that idiom someday soon), I found the negatives in the big Harper win:
The Edmonton Journal did a bad typesetting job on the front page today. I go to the front door, grab the paper without looking at it, bring it in, lay it open face up on my bed, close my eyes, lie down so my face is right there, open my eyes, and see this headline: HARPER HUMBLES GRITS. So naturally, of course, I'm thinking a huge win. It takes a good 30 seconds of searching to find the seat totals above the headline. So then I see 124 Conservative seats, rather than say 158 or some such thing, and its automatically a disappointment.
Toronta and Mount Royal duck the big blue wave. This is bad, really really bad, and yet I'm not entirely sure why. But mark my words, some political hay will be made by Harper's failure to make a dent in Canada's two most pretentious cities.
"Alberta would be a better place if Todd Babiak was premier and Ralph Klein, you know, wasn't." said a venter in today's Journal. Goddammit, the federal election is barely over and now you socialist idiots are trying to ruin provincial politics too??
I also made a few comments that seem to have not held up much in hindsight. Remember when Rahim Jaffer wasn't a laughing stock but a respected member of the "old-guard"?
The Conservatives have swept Alberta. Ann McLellan is gone. Rahim Jaffer (take that, anonymous poster from 5 days ago!) is still firmly in place. The Liberals and their ilk can no longer claim to be a "national party". If the Conservatives can be faulted for not being present in PEI then the Liberals should be acknowledged as the party that nobody in Alberta is willing to tolerate.
So, uh, Ignatieff didn't become Liberal leader and the Conservatives won the following election eh? At least the bit about watered down proposals and no democratic or economic reforms from Harper the nouveau-liberal held up.
Ezra Levant last night apparently bragged to the east about how Alberta seperatism has been stopped with a Harper win. Only he didn't win. And I'll guarantee you that next election he'll lose. Ignatieff will run his own flawless campaign, the media jackals will turn on Harper, and we'll be back where we started. Watered down proposals, promising to back off on all the legislation that needs to be passed, forgoing important democratic and economic reforms, and for what? For 16 months in a cushy house with a shitty lawn in a god-forsaken useless city on the banks of a dirty river. No thanks, just give me my own country.
I mentioned something about coalitions. Well, that was a waste of space wasn't it, since the subject never came up again!
Harper's possible coalition partners: economically illiterate sodomy-loving assholes from out east, economically illiterate sodomy-loving assholes from out east, or, er, hey, economically illiterate sodomy-loving assholes who I'm pretty sure happen to be from out east...
Anyways, that was the story of Harper's ascension. For the story of his possible fall, I cover the next federal election here.
