Canada’s Liberals Sweep to Power on Phony Anti-austerity Vow
By Keith Jones
Global Research
October 20, 2015
The Liberal Party, which has long been Canadian big business’s preferred party of national government, will be returning to power for the first time in a decade after winning a sweeping victory in yesterday’s federal election.
Little more than four years after suffering their worst ever electoral defeat, the Liberals polled about 40 percent of the popular vote, more than double their vote-share in 2011. This was enough to catapult them from a distant third-place to a parliamentary majority of a dozen or more seats in the 338-seat House of Commons.
Final seat and popular vote figures were not available at the time of writing. But under Justin Trudeau, the son of former Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, the Liberals made major gains in virtually all parts of the country, including the Atlantic provinces, Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, and British Columbia.
Yesterday’s vote was a massive repudiation of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his decade-old Conservative government. The Conservatives lost more than 60 seats, with many cabinet ministers, including Finance Minister Joe Oliver, going down to personal defeat.
Harper announced he was stepping aside as Conservative leader even before giving his concession speech.
The Liberals were the entirely undeserved beneficiaries of mass opposition to the Conservative government, which imposed sweeping austerity measures, further integrated Canada into the military-strategic offensives of US imperialism, and attacked democratic and workers’ rights.
The Liberals’ ability to portray themselves as the agents of “real” and “progressive” change was entirely due to the right-wing politics of the trade unions and the social-democratic New Democratic Party (NDP).
For years the unions and NDP have been working for the replacement of Harper by a “progressive” government in which the Liberals would play a leading role.
Since last fall, the unions have been spearheading an “Anybody but Harper” campaign, pouring millions of dollars into third-party anti-Conservative ad and protest campaigns.
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