The governing Conservatives and opposition Liberals each narrowly picked up a seat from their next weakest opponent in Monday's by-elections, in a set of results that confounded many pundits, took the pressure off Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, and will be sending NDP strategists back to the drawing board.
There's more there, but nothing I can really contest. Most confounded among the pundits was clearly John Ibbotson, whose piece on the topic sounds like it was written days ago and then hastily revised as last night's results came in. But, make no mistake, while the quantity of Michael Ignatieff's "woes" didn't change much in either direction with these by-elections, they certainly did not--as per Mr. Ibbotson-- increase. And the results are neither a sign of an impending, GTA based Tory majority or a Western breakthrough by the Libs. They are, more or less, random shit that happened.
The Vaughan story is probably the most interesting. PG offers these thoughts on that unusually close race:
Mr. Fantino was not as « imbattabile » as first thought, or was limited in his growth potential by the controversies surrounding Caledonia, his non-participation in an all-candidates meeting, and his refusal to grant media interviews to the CBC and Toronto Star...
Probably a bit of all those things accounted for Fantino's relatively poor performance. It was certainly an interesting fact that the Tories ran a guy that many Tory partisans were uncomfortable with. For example, this Conservative blogger demanded they be pulled from the BT blogroll to protest the Fantino candidacy.
It was also interesting that they were able to win without the support of their hard-cores.
