Whatever other unpleasant words define our 2019 election, take solace at least in what was not.We are not awakening to a scorched-earth morning after, the dawn of Trumpism, Canadian-style. We are not facing a stampede of newly minted nativists racing to take their seats in Ottawa with their backs turned to the world.Maxime Bernier made his way so controversially into the editorial boardrooms and onto the national debate stage, stumping noisily for the entire People’s Party slate, including candidates that made no secret of their contempt for immigration in general and Islam in particular. And Canadians voted with a thunderous meh, allowing the rage to pass us by. Our electoral contours, for all our regional frustrations, simply didn’t bend that way.Quebec itself delivered the coup de grace, voting Bernier out of power in his home riding of Beauce. It seems likely that the People’s Party now is done and dusted.There were other populist flashes elsewhere in the campaign. Midway through the final weekend, Andrew Scheer told a Conservative rally in Richmond Hill he would launch a judicial inquiry into the SNC-Lavalin affair “to get to the bottom” of Liberal corruption.But when some in the crowd began to respond Trump-style with a chant of “Lock him up!,” Scheer quickly drowned them out with chant of his own, steering their fury away from description incarceration and back inside the bounds of Canadian electoral civility with the words “Vote him out! Vote him out!”Perhaps we will learn more in the days to come about unseen hands on the electoral scale. Was there any serious meddling by vested interests, foreign or domestic, on social media? Did Canadians ignore populism all by ourselves, or was the dirty tricks “seek and destroy” campaign against the People’s Party exposed last week by the Globe and Mail a major factor? All that to say, if Canada managed in 2019 to whistle past the populist grave ...
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