Tuesday Evening Links

This and that for your post-election reading.

- Erin recognizes the long-term positives to be drawn from yesterday's election results:

The NDP replacing the Liberals as one of the two predominant parties is hugely positive. Canadian social democrats have been striving for this realignment since they founded the CCF in 1932.
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In the next election, progressives should no longer feel that they must choose between voting NDP because it is progressive and voting Liberal to stop Conservatives. The resulting concentration of progressive votes for the NDP would produce substantial gains in English Canada. If the NDP can gain as many seats there as it just gained in Quebec, it would form a majority government.

The next four years will be tough. But there is a bright orange light at the end of the tunnel.

- Andrew Steele also hopes for positive results out of the election campaign, including this possibility which seems a lot more likely now that the next trip in the polls is years down the road:

4. The lessons of a long-term plan. The NDP was executing a long-term plan in this election. Jack Layton consciously chose to target francophone Quebec over the past four elections.
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His party continued to work in Quebec, and Mr. Layton clearly was focused on winning over Quebec francophones during segments of both debates. This time, the long-term plan paid off, and Mr. Layton and the NDP will be rewarded by a fundamental breakthrough.

It is a good lesson that politics is not won today or tomorrow but over the course of years. Deciding on a strategic course, sticking to the plan and adjusting tactically as you move forward is critical.

The good news is other parties will hopefully follow this methodology, getting out of the insular hyper-caffeinated world of Question Period and back into thinking about the big picture.

- Scott Stinson suggests that the media should be able to learn from the campaign as well:

More debates would help. Had there been one debate specifically on the economy, there’s a chance the leaders would have had to spend time defending their visions -and their platforms. Mr. Layton never faced serious questions about his economic plan during the two debates, a fact Mr. Ignatieff could only lament as he spent the campaign’s final week belatedly attacking the NDP’s “fantasy” numbers. It’s too bad: that exchange would have made for good TV.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if the national media decided en masse to stop paying more than $10,000 a week for the right to join the leaders’ tours -a move that would essentially defund the highly scripted operations. It would be nice to see more -and more fulsome -debates. And it would be something if parties had to subject their economic plans to some sort of outside audit -one that compared Conservative apples to Liberal apples to NDP apples.

Is that expecting too much change? Is unrealistic to expect such radical reforms before the next campaign?

Perhaps. But change could happen. This was supposed to be an election about nothing.

- But then, pogge notes that the media itself was a major problem in its utter disconnect from the values of voters.

- Finally, Webb offers up what's probably the safest prediction coming out of the election results:

I'm going to make a prediction right here and now: Canadians will regret giving so much power to someone who was learning how to abuse it for the last five years. I'll give it two years for the grumblings to begin and three years before the sweat is really on. This is how I see it going, more or less:

The cost of the crime bill will skyrocket, especially for provincial governments. The economic pressure it creates will increase until it becomes unaffordable for either provinces or the country as a whole, and people will seek alternative measures for law and order. This will pit the provinces against the feds, and it will also pit Canadians against the possibility that their province and their country may go bankrupt. Austerity measures will be introduced and as a result taxes will go up. This will all go on against a backdrop of the energy industry making unprecedented profits each quarter with unbelievable subsidies. There will be a critical mass of discontent and that's about when the 'jets' will become another economic crisis we can ill-afford.