Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and Liberal Leader Stephane Dion.

The previous post on Canada's polls questioned the wide spread in predictions, from a Conservative victory by nine points over their nearest rivals, the Liberals, down to a five point Conservative win. The actual Conservative spread in yesterday's election was 11.4 percent--and that in a contest where differences are exaggerated by the presence of five parties in contention. Moral: you can't count on polls, something worth noting especially in our own election right now.

There are a number of surprises in the Canadian outcome. First, the large Conservative numerical and percentage plurality did not enable the Tories to win a majority in Parliament. They gained 16 seats, while their top rivals, the Liberals, dropped 19, so it is a real plus for Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Tories. First, Harper responded to criticism of his modest cuts in arts funding by making light fun of people who attend expensive arts fund raising "galas" and then complain about cuts in culture. In most places he probably got a chuckle with the allusion, alienating only a few artists who don't vote Conservative anyhow. But in Quebec "culture" is a surrogate for provincial identity and the separatist cause. The Bloc Quebecois made it seem that Harper was ridiculing French Canadian culture.

Then, when Liberal leader Stephane Dion three times fumbled a CTV question about what he would have done about the economy if he had been prime minister, the Tories made fun of his inability to answer a simple question. Dion was hurt nationally, but in Quebec he was defended as a Francophone speaker who was being ridiculed for not speaking and understanding English well enough. In both cases Harper was innocent of any malice toward Quebec or French speakers, but his opponents made enough use of his statements to blunt any gains the Tories had expected.

It is hard to see how the Conservatives could have made a majority this year anyhow. They might have found a couple more seats in B.C. and in Ontario, but even with a couple of gains in Quebec, they still would have been shy of a 155 seat majority. They were not successful in Atlantic Canada, especially in Newfoundland, where Harper is very unpopular for local reasons. In any case, it is hard for anyone now to get a majority in a system that seems to so many parties.

But if the Conservatives were a bit frustrated at their failure to gain a majority, the Liberals are broken and reportedly broke. Their "green" tax policies backfired and Dion, a former professor, was not persuasive on the stump. It has to be asked of the Liberals now what was asked of the conservatives 15 years ago: are they still a national party? The fastest growing region is the West, where the Liberals now are down to seven seats (the Tories have 70). Liberals can't seem to make any more progress than the Tories in Quebec and they are fading in Ontario.

It is not clear that the NDP is much of a national party, either. If the Conservatives have trouble winning in urban areas, the NDP is vacant in most of Quebec, the second largest province, and large swaths of suburbia and rural Canada.

The parties are all tired now and the nation plainly is tired of them. Tuesday's 58.5 percent turnout was the lowest on record. There doesn't have to be an election for four years, but it is very unlikely that there will be one for at least two. What Harper and his party now face is stabilizing the Canadian economy. Fortunately, it has been outperforming others in the West, which may be one reason that the Conservatives performed as well as they did in a time of financial worry.

The next political excitement in Canada will probably be an internal leadership fight in the Liberal Party, with Dion challenged by Bob Rae and Michael Ignatieff. The latter was shown in this campaign as a smart, adroit speaker for the party.

A peek at a more distant future comes with the political arrival of the Liberal Justin Trudeau, son of the late, long-serving Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, who transformed Canada into a much more liberal country two generations ago. Young Trudeau was elected in Montreal.