Re-election means never having to say you’re sorry

Paul Wells: The Trudeau Liberals return confirmed in their beliefs and comforted by big numbers in Central Canada. The introspection is over.

https://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/trudeau-re-election-means-never-having-to-say-youre-sorry/?fbclid=IwAR0ptBDmxebcrJBVNgFKg7hil9RKVpBwhqM0MEY5RSRMfVTNuvQw1hZZ7F4

I’ve got a hunch that when the federal Liberal caucus meets, observers will be surprised, even taken aback, by the jovial tone among Liberals. And an emerging theme of federal politics in months to come will be the scale of Justin Trudeau’s electoral triumph.

Now there’s a word you don’t hear often. Triumph. It’s not one that came automatically to any observer on Oct. 21. It sure isn’t how the results looked to me, at first.

You know the results as well as I do: The Liberals won 20 fewer seats than in 2015, falling from 177 to 157, losing their majority in the House of Commons. They lost a million of their 2015 votes. They lost the popular vote to Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives and it wasn’t close: the Conservatives’ edge was nearly a quarter of a million votes. The Liberals were shut out in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Their share of the popular vote, at 33.07 per cent, is the lowest ever for a governing party in Canada. The Bloc Québécois is resurgent, there’ve been Western separatist meetings, it’s all pretty chastening.