It can’t be denied that metrics are looking pretty ugly for the Liberal Party of Canada these days. In a recent column, the Toronto Star’s Chantal Hebert observed that since the New Year, the Liberals have lost 60 seats at the federal, provincial, in territorial levels, come within one seat of losing their official opposition status in Newfoundland, while being reduced to minority government status in Ontario.
For decades the Liberals were dominant in Ontario, but in the May 2 federal election, the NDP elected twice as many Ontario MPs as the Liberal Party. Out of 254 federal and provincial seats in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, the Liberals hold a grand total of 12, only two of which are House of Commons seats. There are only seven Liberal MPs left in Quebec, another erstwhile party stronghold.
These hard figures are obviously not a happy lookout for the Liberals, but also portend ill for the country in general, what with the only other choice for alternative governing party being the socialist, labour-union beholden NDP.
I’m a lifelong small-c conservative, and have more often than not supported the big-C Conservatives and their Reform and Alliance variants with my ballot, but I surely don’t want the Liberal Party to disappear, given the inevitability that some other party than the Conservatives will someday form a federal government.
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