Harper in downtown Calgary to await election results

“We remain citizens of the best country on Earth”. Even more remarkably, a government minister suggested as the election campaign got underway last spring that Ottawa may apply hate-crime laws against any efforts to boycott, divest from, or sanction companies doing business with Israel or its settlements as part of its “zero-tolerance” policy toward the BDS movement.

In a visit to Israel in 2014, Harper told a news conference that Canadians have learned the lesson that “when someone is a minority, a particularly small minority in the world, one goes out of one’s way to embrace them, not to single them out for criticism”. On Monday, incoming Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party won what the New York Times describes as a “stunning rout” – the Liberals gained 150 additional seats in Canada’s 338 seat House of Commons, giving them an absolute majority.

His wife Laureen, who was by his side throughout the campaign, looked grim, keeping her eyes down. He will continue to represent the people of Calgary Heritage, at least for the time being.

That’s why it would be so hard for this party to reinvent itself under Jason Kenney, the presumptive leadership frontrunner, the loyal Harper lieutenant and indefatigable minister who called for a change of tone and a “sunnier” disposition for the party on election night.

A policy convention had been scheduled for this May in Vancouver, and that will need to be postponed. When other embattled Canadians reached out to her with their stories, she wrote, “Stephen Harper Hates Me, Too”, a sequel that adds debt-ridden students, immigrants, and the environment, and a reference to the embarrassing Mike Duffy senatorial scandal to the mix.

Ahead of the first televised debate, campaign spokesman Kory Teneycke said that if Trudeau “comes on stage with his trousers on, he will probably exceed expectations”.

With just over a week to go in the federal campaign, the middle day of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend was relatively quiet.

But Giorno said the party is now launching a review of why their carefully hatched plan to defeat the Liberals and the NDP failed so thoroughly.

Another bright spot for the party was in Quebec, where results showed they may take as many as 12 ridings, more than double their 2011 showing.

But the most disturbing aspect of Monday night’s results came from a comment by Green Party Leader Elizabeth May. To the extent we fell short of the mark, I’m accountable, the buck stops with me, I take responsibility for that.

To take control of the government, the Liberal Party competed with another left-of-center party, the New Democratic Party, for a pool of voters that could conceivably support either party. But Dr. Charles McVety, president of Canada Christian College, says with the victory of the Liberals under Justin Trudeau, Israeli-Canadian relations are about to deteriorate – again.

Liepert, who was interviewed on CBC’s “As It Happens” on Wednesday, said the Tories had strayed off message, and put the blame squarely on the party’s campaign manager, Jenni Byrne. But no one with an ounce of sense can deny that the whole niqab brouhaha – self-evidently cynically generated by the Conservative Party’s foreign consultants and domestic backroom boys – was created to do this. “The Prime Minister was aware of the fact I was not very happy about this”.

“I am very upset”.

The names of two Ontario M-Ps are in the mix as Conservatives start thinking about who will succeed Prime Minister Harper as Conservative leader.

“That’s the largest thing that Stephen Harper has changed in Canada: just shrinking the size of government and doing so by reducing the tax base”, McGrane said.