It was long the result we were expecting: the election results are in and the Liberals have a minority government.
Election is over and we finally have a result: A Liberal minority government. It’s the election result we pretty much predicted almost from the very beginning. The reason we were able to predict this largely boils down to what we saw when the Liberals called the election in the first place: a weak reason for calling the election in the first place. He said he wanted to give Canadian’s a say in how we navigate out of the COVID-19 pandemic. No one really bought it and everyone knew that he just wanted a majority government. It was certainly possible for the Liberals to conjure up a better reason for this election and salvage the situation, but that ultimately never happened.
From there, Liberal support collapsed and the party could not gain back enough support to win that majority government. The end result is that the seat count for each party was left largely unchanged. So, the election that was about nothing ended up becoming a $600 million waste of time. Of course, as we noted yesterday, just because the election was about nothing doesn’t mean there aren’t implications in all of this.
If you followed our coverage of the platforms, you’ll note that the Liberals were loudly and proudly waving their efforts to crack down on the Internet within 100 days of forming government. This is their famed three pronged approach of speech regulation, online harms, and link taxes.
Even before the election, they were ramming this through government. No amount of logic, bargaining, or reasoning would get them off of this warpath. We can generally expect them to continue this warpath with the knowledge that an election call won’t save us this time around. The most immediate thing is delay tactics which is afforded under a minority government. This generally only buys time, but it is better than nothing at this stage.
If anything, what we are looking at is potentially partying like it’s 2005. This was around the Paul Martin Liberal government days. At the time, the Liberals were pretty much lobbyist controlled. As a result, the Liberals were pushing DMCA style copyright reforms which would put Canada on a very similar track to the US with respect to file-sharing lawsuits. The Liberals very openly held expensive fund-raising dinners in a “cash for access” style of lawmaking. It was yet another example of Liberal corruption that ultimately sunk the party. Meanwhile, ordinary Canadians got largely shut out of debates. If you went against the narrative on copyright, you weren’t worth even being listened to.
Today, we are seeing something very similar. The Liberals are in power. The Liberals are very much lobbyist controlled. While there was a consultation going around, it was basically a consultation in name only. The lobbyists of major corporations had their say and that is the direction the Liberals plan on going with all of this.
So, with our predictions coming true for the outcome and the extended time it took to get the final projection (it took all night to do this last night), where are going to from here? We have a speech from the throne coming up. What will be interesting to see is if we’ll actually get comments about the war on the Internet directly from the speech. It’s very possible we will given that the Liberals have been very open about their push to assault the open Internet. From there, we will probably get a budget debate. Chances are, the speech regulation will follow shortly after. Who knows? Maybe it’ll move up the queue and be something like Bill C-8 instead of Bill C-10? The number is probably the only thing really up in the air for us.
At any rate, once the “honeymoon” of the results is over, we expect things to get very bumpy from here on out with digital rights. Not a position we like to see, but a position we are seemingly destined to be in. Time will tell of course, but we’ve been pretty accurate so far.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
