Who said elections are an imprecise instrument of public opinion? Who said that strategic voting is useless? Who said that you can’t always get what you want in politics?

Conventional wisdom is usually unimpeachable, which is why it is conventional wisdom. Then again, not even the sages could predict the surprising outcome of the federal election of 2006, when Canadians threw up the electoral cards and managed to make them land almost exactly where they wanted.

Put differently, our much maligned electoral system — the antiquated 19th-century confection said to be in desperate need of 21st-century proportional representation — did something strange and wondrous: it produced the government and the Opposition the country wanted, in the balance it wanted and for the duration it wanted. Extraordinary, really.

What this all means is that the new government is a reflection of the national will. Putting the Conservatives in government, sending the Liberals into Opposition, strengthening the New Democratic Party, weakening the Bloc Québécois — all have created a Goldilocks Parliament, with just the right temperament and temperature.

What is so unusual here is that the electoral system seldom allows that; most of the time, there is a yawning gap in what people want from an election and what they actually get. That is why its reformers want to remake the system. But after this election, their case is less urgent.

No, the long, cold campaign didn’t deliver a perfect alignment between votes and seats. The Green Party, for example, got more than 600,000 votes and no seats. The New Democrats increased their popular vote by almost two percentage points and got 10 more seats. The BQ got 42% of the vote in Quebec and 51 of 75 seats. The Liberals got almost 21% of the vote but only 13 seats in the same province.

But that is not the point. What is more important is how popular sentiment became political reality. A country that didn’t want a seismic change in its politics did not get a seismic change. Instead, it wanted a minority government, restrained and contained, and that is what it got.

The minority Conservative government that took power on Feb. 6 won fewer seats (124) than the minority Liberal government (133) that preceded it. It confirms the anxiety of a radically moderate country that wanted a change, but a modest change. It wasn’t comfortable giving the Conservatives a majority.

Harper on probation

The genius of the parliamentary system is that it gives voters the option of putting a government on probation, and the country has exercised that option. Stephen Harper has room to govern successfully if he makes concessions and builds alliances. His is a conditional government until he can prove himself and build confidence in his leadership.

At the same time, with the same kind of logic, Canadians decided to push the Liberals aside but not sweep them away. If Canadians ever considered thrashing the party, as they did in 1958 and 1984, they apparently backed off. In the end, they gave the Liberals more seats (103) in Opposition than the Conservatives had (99) in the last Parliament. They also returned some of the most prominent Liberals.

The Liberals’ mission is to rethink, reorganize and renew. It is to prepare itself to fight another day, which may be as early as next year. Canadians have opted to keep the party around on standby.

Moreover, while voters were rearranging the House of Commons, they preserved the Liberals as a national party and made the Conservatives one, too. If voters denied seats to the Liberals in Alberta and to the Conservatives in Prince Edward Island, they gave the Conservatives 10 seats in Quebec — the biggest surprise of the campaign.

This is no small matter. A Conservative government without representation in Quebec — it had no seats there before the election — would have been a gift to the BQ, which exists to prove that federalism is a failure.

Another point: while Quebecers were abandoning the Liberals, they were also spanking the BQ, which had boasted of wiping out the Liberals, winning half the votes and setting the table for the next referendum. The BQ failed on all counts.

Now, let’s review. The country wanted a change of government and it got one. It worried that the government would not represent Quebec, so it elected Conservatives in that province. It wasn’t ready to destroy the Liberals, so it put them in purgatory, subject to reprieve. It wanted Stephen Harper in velvet chains and Paul Martin in genteel retirement, and it got both.

@page_break@What’s more, the country also wanted a revived social democratic party, and it got it. It wanted a diminished sovereigntist party, and it got that, too. It got new faces (Michael Ignatieff and Olivia Chow) and it even got a higher voter turnout, suggesting the system isn’t as broken as we thought.

Inequities? Of course. But seldom have Canadians been so shrewd, pragmatic and prudent. And seldom has the system been so responsive, and so happily decisive. IE



Andrew Cohen is a professor of journalism and international affairs at Carleton University. E-mail: andrew_cohen@carleton.ca.