Election results: Liberal red starts to colour Atlantic provinces

This election was indeed about change.

NDP strategist Robin Sears with Earnscliffe Strategy Group in Ottawa doubts there will be any effort from within the party to turf Mulcair because New Democrats still posted one of their best results ever.

Canadians would rather endure a polar vortex or the Leafs finishing last – or multiple Mike Duffy trials – than experience the torment of another 78-day campaign.

He said he’s particularly buoyed by the Liberals’ commitment to fund a portion of the Broadway subway line in Vancouver – but there’s still the challenge of finding a portion of the funding from the municipal level, with no new funding options coming from the province. In Ontario, just eight New Democrats won their ridings, less than half the total in 2011, and with a scant 6.6 per cent of the popular vote.

Olivia Chow, Layton’s widow, also went down to defeat in downtown Toronto to Liberal incumbent Adam Vaughan, while Finance Minister Joe Oliver lost his Toronto riding of Eglinton-Lawrence to Liberal Marco Mendicino. Potential breakthroughs in Edmonton and Saskatoon failed to materialize.

After largely languishing on the sidelines of Quebec politics for roughly 10 years, the federal Liberal brand was rehabilitated Monday as the party picked up its highest number of seats in the province since the 1980s. They never stop working. They loudly and proudly opposed C-51, the government’s anti-terror bill.

If the NDP can’t hold on to that, they’re in massive trouble. There were wild predictions that federal NDP Leader Tom Mulcair would build on Alberta’s gains. “The Conservative government is gone, so now we can start to fix the damage Mr. Harper has created”. As the outgoing prime minister finished speaking, a few Liberals sang “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye”.

McMaster political science professor Peter Graefe said he does not anticipate much movement on the leadership front for at least a couple of months as the party reviews its financial situation following the campaign.

“A lot of people who vote Conservative, just based on the demographics, tend to be older Canadians who don’t depend on the TTC or transit the way students do and these things matter to them”, he said.

This then was a moment, an opportunity.

Lewis said something else that day that seemed to ring true.

He said the loss was “on him”, in what may have been a nod to the finger-pointing sources said was going on inside the Conservative war room as campaign team waited to see how bad the night was going to go.

At times, his insistence on delivering his talking points was irritating, but at the end of the day, staying on message was something he hadn’t been very good at before, and he figured it out when it counted.

In 1968 at Pierre Trudeau’s first election, and at Jean Chretien’s sweep to victory in 1993, the Liberals won 27 seats in Western Canada, but have not won more than 15 seats at any other election, and elected only four members to one Green, 15 NDP and 72 Conservative members in Western Canada at the 2011 election. Federally, the NDP doesn’t have a history in government. The former presented another embodiment of change.

Most troubling for the NDP are questions about how Horwath will stand up to the next election.

The NDP will need all of the help it can get.

Then the Federal Court of Appeal ruled in Zunera Ishaq’s favour.

In Montreal, a subdued Mulcair says party will keep pressing NDP values.

With that, what had become a three-way tie began to break.

With the polls simultaneously closing from the Quebec-New Brunswick border all the way to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, the scale of the Liberal charge became clear as the ballot counting commenced: The Liberals had more than 40 per cent of the popular vote and were knocking off Conservative and NDP heavyweights across the country. At the time, 14 per cent of British Columbians who supported the Tories in 2011 were going to vote for the NDP.