Great Big C!!!—Good, Bad, Ugly and a Cold Dawn: some Thoughts on What Our Election Has Wrought

The Good
Yes, I'm pleased about the Conservative majority. I have a lot of respect for Stephen Harper.

Bad, Ugly and a Cold Dawn
I am not happy, however, with the mean-spiritedness of the "attack" ads the Conservative campaign people thought were necessary to help them get there. If that's what it takes to "win" an election it doesn't say much about us as an electorate, either. A victory, but not a clean or classy one. A shame.

I also think Heather Mallick, of The Toronto Star, writing in The Guardian, and who is entirely entitled to her opinion, goes a bit far in a gloomily leftish piece entitled, "Canada's Cold New Dawn: Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper is our version of George W Bush, Minus the Warmth and Intellect." For example, therein I find that if I am happy, I must be a grumpy old man, after all:

Grumpy old men are happy but modernists, women, young people, immigrants, people fond of evidence-based policy will be much less so. 

This because, along with the now to be unleashed Americanisation of Canada including super jails, new fighter jets, corporate tax cuts, an end to party financial support from the public purse,

The Evangelist Christian right is at the heart of Harper's Conservative party, and after years of being shushed, it will now demand an end to a number of things, including abortion rights.  

What? Had this been the case, the liberal media would have been all over it. This is evangelicaphobic fear-mongering; something that pops up in the media (and in the Anglican church) more and more these days.

None of the leaders, including Michael Ignatieff, deserved to have their character worked over by the other parties, but

a fine writer, historian and BBC talking head 

does not a Prime Minister necessarily make. Instead, we grumpy old men seem to have elected a "famously strange" one.

H/T daughter Kate on her Facebook page. Read all of Mallick's piece here.