Posted on 05/13/2002 8:58:12 PM PDT by Ipberg
By Canadian Press
The Liberals lost strongholds in Newfoundland and Ontario Monday in a string of seven byelections that also saw Canadian Alliance chief Stephen Harper win the seat he needed to become Opposition leader.
Harper cruised to an easy win in Calgary Southwest in a race where the Liberals and Tories opted not to run candidates.
"You have taken the overwhelming vote that this party got in the last election in this riding and you have taken it higher," Harper told cheering supporters.
"Notwithstanding the decayed state of our parliamentary institutions, it is still an honour to represent people anywhere in the House of Commons."
In the Ontario riding of Windsor West, New Democrat Brian Masse scored an upset victory over the Liberals, bringing the NDP representation in the Commons to 14 seats. Former deputy prime minister Herb Gray had held the seat for almost four decades before retiring in January.
In Newfoundland and Labrador, Tory Rex Barnes, a paramedic, municipal councillor and union leader, defeated former premier Beaton Tulk in an unexpectedly close race in Gander-Grand Falls.
The victory, which gives the Tories 13 of the 301 seats in the Commons, shows voters are fed up with sleazy politics, a smiling Joe Clark said in Ottawa.
"Obviously when you have a government that is embroiled in corruption at the same time that it is ignoring the interests of health care and the fisheries, that sends a clear message to the people of Newfoundland and they, in turn, sent a clear message to the government," the Conservative leader said.
The Liberals' poor showing in the central Newfoundland riding -- they lost by only 742 votes -- came as a shock to most observers.
Elections Canada On-Line
Live Results
"Nobody anticipated this," said Steve Tomblin, a political science professor at Memorial University in St. John's. "It will send a message (to the federal Liberals) ... They will have to stand up and notice this."
Tulk, who served briefly as premier after Brian Tobin left the post in October 2000, said his campaign was sunk by complacency.
"I didn't feel that much discontent," he told CBC Radio. "I would say that 90 per cent of the people that I met said, 'You got this won. Why are you even campaigning?'"
In the other race in Newfoundland and Labrador, Liberal John Efford easily won Bonavista-Trinity-Conception. His Conservative opponent finished a distant second.
Efford is a former provincial fisheries minister who lost the provincial Liberal leadership to Roger Grimes.
In Quebec, Liza Frulla won in the Montreal-area riding of Verdun-Saint Henri-Saint Paul-Pointe Saint Charles for the Liberals.
Voters in another Montreal riding, Saint Leonard-Saint Michel, also chose the Liberal candidate. Massimo Pacetti will replace Alfonso Gagliano, the former public works minister who resigned under a cloud of scandal to accept a post as ambassador to Denmark.
In the east-Winnipeg riding of Saint Boniface, Raymond Simard won for the Liberals, who have held the seat in all but two elections since 1924.
Opposition politicians had billed the byelections as a referendum on sleaze and urged voters to reject Liberal candidates to show Prime Minister Jean Chretien they were upset by alleged corruption in the handling of government advertising and sponsorship contracts.
Last week, the federal auditor general called in the RCMP to look at how the government awarded $1.6 million in contracts to Montreal-based communications firm Groupaction.
Heading into the byelections, the Liberals had 166 seats in the House of Commons. The Canadian Alliance had 62 seats, the Bloc Quebecois had 37, the NDP 13 and the Progressive Conservatives 12.
There are three Independents and one more vacancy caused by last week's resignation of Bloc MP Stephan Tremblay.
THE TASK AT HAND IS TO SAVE CANADA FROM THE CLUTCHES OF LIBERAL CORRUPTION AND NEGLECT.
The Liberals' poor showing in the central Newfoundland riding -- they lost by only 742 votes -- came as a shock to most observers.Center-left governments are falling from the sky like hail-stones. Spain, Italy, France, soon, perhaps, even in Germany--Schroder's party took a pasting in Saxony recently, a portent of things to come. Ever so slightly, the pedulum swings to the right. But why, I ask you? Why? Why just now?
I hope that the Canadian Alliance will ride this swing to the right all the way to power.
Everything I've ever seen of the Cretin (sic) Government is that they are so arrogant as to be either unwilling or utterly incapable of noticing anything besides themselves. The Liberals will not notice, they will not reform. They will simply be voted out of office more and more until they no longer have enough seats to govern.
Which will be just fine with me.
Because people arent stupid and are realizing that they will view Middle Eastern people diffrently and we dont want them running amock in our country. And when the next attack occurs, and it will, and if its on the scale that 9/11 was on then expect a lot of violence directed against those people and some because they didnt assimilate into our culture and are scaring the shit out of a good portion of the American population by not speaking out about it but will sure damn get loud and emotional when they lie about 5,000 people being supposedly murdered.
Did this election reflect that?
bad weed......ba...d....................
Well, the process had already been slowly bubbling under the surface all over the world for some time, simply because socialism, whereever it is practiced, is doomed to eventually collapse under its own weight. The leaders of socialist governments continually try to accumulate more and more power for themselves, and tax more and more to pay for their schemes, and at some point the citizens simply will not take it any more. But at the rate it was going, it could have been at least another couple decades before things started seriously turning rightward in Europe, Canada and elsewhere.
Then 9/11 happened. That's all it took. It caused an instantaneous change in the worldwide Zeitgeist. Before, everyone had become lazy, carefree and generally of the belief that we'd hit "the end of history" and fallen into a system of worldwide political stability that was more or less permanent. And in one day, everyone woke up and realized that it's not true at all. There's a political system out there called Islamism, and it's completely incompatible with both American-style democracy and European-style democratic socialism. It wants to destroy us both. Thus we have to destroy it.
America's government and America's citizens both understand this and are preparing for it. The socialist countries' citizens are starting to wake up to this, but their leaders are trying to bury their heads in the sand. THAT is what's causing the far more rapid shift to the right by their voters.
Did this election reflect that?
Yes: the anti-Liberal mood is strengthening in Canada because of scandals like these. But it hasn't come together behind one party yet in the way that it did in 1984 where the Progressive Conservatives had a landslide victory.
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