Resident Fellow David Frum

For one brief moment during the Canadian election campaign, polls held out hope that Stephen Harper might win a majority government against his weak Liberal opponent, Stephane Dion. Those hopes have been disappointed, leaving some Harper supporters with a vague feeling of disappointment in the ultimate result, a gain of sixteen seats (as compared to a Liberal loss of nineteen).

Those feelings are pardonable, but unreasonable. Polls in a highly volatile, five-party race are not very likely to be highly reliable in the first place.

To win reelection in the midst of the worst financial panic since 1929, with your soldiers taking casualties in a costly war on the other side of the planet, with a recession visibly gathering, and with your local currency dropping against the US dollar--that alone is an achievement. Actually to gain more seats (even if not as many as one might wish): well, that's an astounding achievement.

Speaking of polls, if the current U.S. polls are accurate, Stephen Harper after January 2009 will be the senior conservative political leader in the English-speaking world. What Canadian conservative ever though the day would come when the U.S., U.K., and Australia would all feature left-of-center governments--while Canada alone could claim a right-of-center government?

Some of the micro-trends of this election are highly promising for the future. A fifth of the vote in Quebec! Given the Liberal advantage in the English-speaking ridings of Montreal, that result implies that the Conservatives have emerged as the second party after the Bloc Quebecois in French-speaking Quebec. Who would have dared hope for that a decade ago? Conservatives have scored impressive gains in multicultural Canada, dramatized by the upset victory in Richmond, B.C. The heavily Jewish Thornhill riding elected the veteran newscaster and foreign correspondent Peter Kent for the Conservatives. All told, the Conservatives doubled their position in the suburban Toronto belt labeled "905" after the local area code, from six of twenty-two to probably eleven, depending on final recounts. (For good measure, they retook Belinda Stronach's former seat.)

Harper's position in the new parliament will be a strong one. At least two opposition party leaders will surely be quitting, the Liberals' Dion and probably the Bloc Quebecois's Gilles Duceppe. The vulnerability of a minority government is the risk that the opposition parties will force an election at an inopportune moment--but that risk looks vanishingly small for at least the next twelve to twenty-four months. This is a strong minority--and compared to what's happened in Australia and what is coming in the United States, that's a conservative achievement against a very powerful contrary tide.

David Frum is a resident fellow at AEI.