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Canada Elections Unseat Harper but Anti-Russia Policy Unchanged (New Cold War.org) Originally appeared <http://newcoldwar.org/voters-in-canada-defeat-right-wing-government-but-pro-kyiv-anti-russia-policy-is-unchanged/> at New Cold War.org _____ Prime Minist-elect Justin Trudeau in Vancouver on Oct. 18, 2015 (photo by Elizabeth McSheffrey, Vancouver Observer) Canadians elected a new national government on October 19, sending 184 candidates of the Liberal Party to Ottawa out of a total of 338 seats in the federal Parliament. The hated Conservative Party of Prime Minister Stephen Harper came in second place with 99 seats. The other party results were New Democratic Party (44), Bloc québécois (10) and Green Party (1). The Liberals won 39.5% of the vote, the Conservatives 31.9%. It was a remarkable performance for the Liberals, who finished in third place in the 2011 election with only 18.9% of the vote. Three reasons for the Liberal victory were: 1. Canadians wanted an end to the coarse, right-wing government of Harper. Nearly three million more people voted in 2015 (68.5% of registered voters, or app. 61% of the adult-age population) compared to the last federal election in 2011. The Liberal vote more than doubled, to 6.9 million votes. The Conservative vote dropped by 226,000, to 5.6 million. (Canada’s population is 35 million.) 2. The Liberal Party successfully projected a youthful and progressive image of “change” under leader Justin Trudeau. He said a government led by him would increase taxes on the wealthiest people in Canada to better fund government services and it would run budget deficits, as needed, to finance capitalist infrastructure programs and restore some of the cuts to government services made by the Conservatives since 2011. 3. The progressive posturing by the Liberal Party was facilitated by the staid, conservative campaign of the social-democratic New Democratic Party. NDP leader Tom Mulcair campaigned as a fiscal conservative who would not radically change the economic policies of the Conservatives. The NDP vote dropped from 4.5 million in 2011 to 3.5 million in this election. The party lost all its seats in Toronto, Canada’s largest city. Its seat total in the province of Quebec dropped from 59 in 2011 to 16. Quebec has 78 seats in the federal Parliament. There were no significant differences in foreign policy between these three leading parties in the election. All three support the civil war government in Kyiv, the big-power sanctions against Russia and the threatening war moves of the NATO military alliance. _____
