Stephen Harper’s time comes to an end

After almost 10 years as Canada’s leader, Prime Minister Stephen Harper is packing his bags.

But Flanagan, who ran two of Harper’s leadership campaigns and one election campaign for the Conservatives, said the party is in good shape.

Harper was calm about the defeat that laid before him, according to sources who spoke to The Canadian Press over the past 24 hours.

The Conservatives have taken their first steps towards a leadership race with the creation of a committee that will set the rules of the upcoming contest.

If Parliament is convened before a Tory leadership convention, the interim leader will square off against Justin Trudeau in the House of Commons.

In this, Rathgeber echoes the words of Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi – not a Conservative, but hardly a radical leftist either – when he called Harper’s campaign “disgusting” and “unbelievably risky stuff”.

The party’s executive director, Dustin van Vugt, is in charge of a process to review the campaign. 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.

Being firmly shut out of power until 2019 is a harsher blow than Conservatives expected, but it gives them the luxury of time to figure out their flavour of renewal.

In any case, baring a few kind of disaster, Trudeau will be Prime Minister for the next four years.

Outgoing Edmonton MP Laurie Hawn says the fault with the party’s campaign might lie at the top.

Spokesperson Kory Teneycke struggled to contain damaging stories about Novak’s knowledge of the $90,000 paid to Mike Duffy to make his Senate expense controversy go away, and the role of a divisive Australian political operative Lynton Crosby in the Canadian campaign.

How does the party refill the war chest after losing power – presuming, that is, that it needs to do so? She was not in Calgary at the Tory headquarters on election night.

The federal government has become less active in the daily lives of Canadians, with direct benefits replacing big government programs, for instance. “But Trudeau has Jewish advisors, and numerous people around him have been to Israel”.

But he thinks it was the party’s less-than-optimistic tone that contributed to Monday night’s outcome and he didn’t think the Conservatives’ downfall was all on Harper. She has told friends she is taking a break from politics. They’ll also have to figure out how to behave in Opposition, liberated from the old message loop imposed on them by the old leadership.

On Twitter on Wednesday, Guy Giorno, a former chief of staff to Mr. Harper, and 2015 national campaign chair, admonished those who would take their concerns to media.

Monday night’s results were being described as a bloodbath by party loyalists who watched in disbelief as cabinet ministers were getting wiped off the electoral map by a surge of Liberal support that also saw the party steal long-held Conservative ridings across Atlantic Canada, Quebec and Ontario. Oliver lost his Eglinton-Lawrence riding in a near Liberal sweep of the greater Toronto area. They’ll appoint a leader in a day or two…

“That was the only consistent thing I ever heard”.

Public opinion researcher Hamish Marshall, a former PMO staffer and party pollster, issued a newsletter to clients Tuesday with lessons learned about the Conservative loss.

He ran on a platform of tax cuts, stressing his record on the economy as well as the need to boost security. Currently, Canada uses a first-past-the-post voting system to determine winners in parliamentary elections, which means that the victor is whoever receives a plurality of the vote even if that person does not garner a majority.