A Few Thousand Words on Some Meaningless Events

The only thing to be drawn from the results of Monday's federal by-elections is that there's nothing to be drawn.

Although some very clever commentators are drawing all sorts of conclusions about Monday’s three by-elections, there’s a growing consensus among pundits that they didn’t mean much. The Globe and Mail does a thorough job of demolishing all the politicians’ interpretations of the results. Stephen Harper claims that Vaughan voters electing Conservative candidate and former OPP chief Julian Fantino was an endorsement of the Tories’ tough-on-crime agenda. Except in Winnipeg North, one of the country’s roughest neighbourhoods, a Liberal won. Michael Ignatieff’s assertion that the Vaughan loss is reason for optimism because the vote was so close is highly suspect, because ceding a riding the Liberals had held for 22 years to the Conservatives is no reason to rejoice. And the Grits’ claim that the Winnipeg victory “demonstrated very clearly that the Liberal Party can win in Western Canada” is laughable because it merely doubled the Manitoba Liberal caucus to two seats.

Noting that the one of the two seats the Conservatives won was a traditionally Tory riding and that their victory in Vaughan was slim, the Toronto Star predicts that there will be more of the same in Canada’s political future. The “one signal that could be taken from Monday’s three federal by-elections is that no party really has the upper hand right now,” write the Star’s editors. “It is difficult to see a majority government in these entrails.” A few more years of deadlocked fun in Ottawa, then. Yay.

“Never has so much been made of so little by so few,” opines a Halifax Chronicle Herald editorial about pundits’ seemingly irresistible urge to find meaning in the votes of a few thousand Canadians scattered across the country. The Chronicle Herald, as well as the Winnipeg Free Press, argues that the by-elections won’t predict the outcome of a future federal vote but do show the importance of picking star candidates. “Both Mr. Fantino and Kevin Lamoureux, who won Winnipeg North for the Grits, had high profiles,” says the Chronicle Herald. “If Mr. Fantino had run for the Liberals, who had also courted him, he probably would have kept the riding in the red column.”