The night of May 2, 2011, was a time of dreams unexpectedly come true and worst nightmares finally experienced. Stephen Harper’s Conservatives achieved their majority goal with an amazing 166 seats despite winning only five in Quebec, and the Green Party elected its first member to the House of Commons. The virtual disappearance of the Bloc Québécois (it retained just four of its 49 seats) made real Jack Layton’s own fantasy of becoming leader of the Official Opposition by taking the NDP to 103 seats, 59 of which came from Quebec. As for the country’s most famous public intellectual, Michael Ignatieff brought the Liberal Party of Canada down to its novel and ignominious status as the country’s third party, with a mere 34 of his caucus holding onto their seats.
That night’s political earthquake posed some basic questions for the Canadian party system. If the Liberal Party had long...
Stephen Clarkson co-authored the two-volume Trudeau and Our Times in the 1990s (McClelland and Stewart, 1992, 1997) and wrote The Big Red Machine: How the Liberal Party Dominates Canadian Politics (University of British Columbia Press, 2005). The third volume of his trilogy on North America since 9/11—Dependent America? How Canada and Mexico Construct U.S. Power—was published in 2011 by the University of Toronto Press.
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