Canada's House of Commons. Creative Commons photo by Flickr user scazon.

With the House of Commons set to start back up again on June 2, Canadians will get their fist glimpses of the 41st Parliament. Given that the tumultuous campaign period, dramatic results, and overload of post-poll dissection nearly a month behind us, it may seem as though all the excitement in Ottawa has died down. But fear not, diligent politicos, there is no shortage of gripping storylines to follow as MPs new and old take their seats. With that in mind, here are five new trends to watch for as Parliament returns.

1. New faces

The re-opening of Parliament will also mark the debut of 108 rookie MPs. While some of them have already received a glut of press, others will be looking to make a good first impression with their constituents. With some of the youngest candidates ever to have been elected, this edition of Parliament could have a very different atmosphere. While the class of first-timers may bring a fresh new face to governance, they will also carry the mistrust that stigmatizes youth and inexperience. Prepare for a generational gap in the house.

2. New power

For five years, Stephen Harper has had to walk a tightrope over legislation, always wary that his tenuous minority government might be brought down by a non-confidence vote. While this approach helped keep Harper in office, it frustrated many of the Conservatives’ old boys. But now that he’s got his long-desired majority, the PM will be safe to push the party agenda as never could in the past. How far will the Tories go in exploiting their majority? Hard to tell, though it’s a safe bet that Harper will be a lot more willing to let his Neo-Con roots show and play to his base now that he doesn’t have to placate opposition MPs or left-of-centre voters.

3. New Jack

On one hand, the NDP’s new status as Official Opposition gives leader Jack Layton some moral clout and a more prominent soapbox from which to speak. On the other hand, with a Conservative majority in place, Layton has less power on Parliament Hill than ever. Whereas under the Harper minority, he often served as lynchpin for the government, Layton no longer has any leverage over the Tories. Will success and Stornoway change Jack Layton? Perhaps. But the 30.6 per cent of voters who backed the NDP will be looking for the same old Jack to bring more of that old stubborn idealism to a new Parliament.

4. “New Look” Liberals

After enduring their worst-ever showing at the polls, the Liberals will return to the House in a much different state than the one in which they left. The Grits will be in major rebuilding mode but, with a decidedly short-term leader, and without old pillars like Gerard Kennedy and Ken Dryden, it remains to be seen how easily or quickly a rejuvenated Liberal party can be established. In the interim, their main challenge will be to stay organized and maintain a noticeable presence in Parliament as they adapt  to their new role as Canada’s third party. Watch for new chief Bob Rae to make a big splash as he takes advantage of his long-awaited leadership role, and tries to claw back some clout for his maligned Liberals. He will be eager to get the party back into the headlines for reasons other than their historic loss.

5. New allegiances

At times in the past few years there was a cooperative all-against-one atmosphere amongst Canada’s opposition parties. There was even talk, though not as much as the Conservatives would have voters believe, that the NDP, Bloc Quebecois, and Liberals might unite under a coalition banner to take down the Conservative minority. The Conservative majority means that a coalition would do little good now but, with the Liberals having been decimated, and the Bloc virtually out of politics, a party merger isn’t out of the question. It’s happened before, as Harper can attest to. Even without a merger, we may, at the very least, see some Liberal and Bloc MPs jumping ship to join the bigger parties. Though often scorned, crossing the floor has become a post-election tradition in Canada’s Parliament.

Results by Riding. Map by Skyscraper Forum user "Vid." Click to see more

It was only a few years ago that elections in Canada were mostly predictable. For a few solid years, we could bet on Liberals, and some NDP candidates, sweeping the country’s biggest cities. We knew the Conservatives would sweep Alberta, take most of Saskatchewan and dominate much of British Columbia. In Quebec, the Bloc Québécois seemed destined to win the lion’s share of ridings, including a healthy mix of urban and rural areas.

Elections were, for those few years, decided based on pockets of ridings across the country that swung back and forth between, for the most part, Liberals and Conservatives. So when the Liberals had a stranglehold on Ontario during the ‘90s, and benefited from that now defunct divided right, that meant they won government.

But then, slowly, the Conservatives screwed it all up for their rivals. They made those mystical “inroads” into various suburban communities, mid-sized cities and even parts of Quebec. All of a sudden, most of Ontario was voting Conservative, and the Liberals found themselves scrambling to maintain their big city leads. Stephen Harper’s team stopped growing in Quebec, but they managed to win more of the Atlantic, save for Newfoundland and Labrador, and even picked up a few more seats in B.C.

Then the writ dropped in late April of this year. That’s when all the traditional dichotomies fell apart. Suddenly, cities weren’t voting Liberal at all, with a very few exceptions. And Quebec wasn’t voting for the Bloc. High-profile MPs from across party lines—foreign affairs minister Lawrence Cannon, prominent Liberals Martha Hall-Findlay and Glen Pearson, and virtually every Bloc MP—fell by the wayside. Oh, as did Michael Ignatieff and Gilles Duceppe, both of whom were supposed to at least save their own bacon.

Indeed, the 41st parliament’s electoral map looks a little strange. The NDP’s roots were in rural Saskatchewan, and decades of elections helped carve out an urban base, but all of a sudden the party has an enormous, if unstable, Quebec wing. The Conservatives don’t remember what it’s like to have an MP in Toronto, but now they have several in the biggest city going. And the Liberals, who might have at least counted on popular MPs winning based on reputation, are now much lonelier in parliament.

What does all this mean? The next time the country heads to the federal polls, it means parties will have to fight campaigns in some hugely unfamiliar territory. Save for the Conservatives out west, parties can’t rely on many traditional strongholds. The urban vote is split, as is the rural vote. Barring an unprecedented resurrection, Quebec voters will have only federalists to elect.

And further, many popular incumbents aren’t safe. On May 2, 47 percent of MPs won a majority of votes in their riding. Traditionally, those might be considered safe seats. But as Alice Funke of punditsguide.ca points out, a large margin of victory in one election doesn’t guarantee any victory at all in the next election. Her stats suggest that 35 seats that weren’t very close in 2008—that is, where the winner had at least 20 percent on the second-place candidate—changed hands this time around.

As exciting and, eventually, unpredictable as this year’s election turned out to be, it really just laid the groundwork for the next trip to the polls. Whenever that happens, we’ll find out whether or not this redrawn electoral map is for real—or a historical footnote. The only thing that’s certain is that it would be silly to guess what will happen next.

Last night’s election was extraordinary in more ways than we would have thought possible a few weeks ago. Canadian politics has been shaken up in a serious, permanent way, and this election will be studied for years to come. As we start to digest the result and its consequences, there are some clearly identifiable changes and trends at work:

1. A Majority Conservative Government

This is crashingly obvious, but the 166-seat showing for the Conservative Party last night was more decisive than anyone expected five weeks, or even 24 hours, in advance of the polls. A Harper majority represents a true departure from any Canadian politics of the past; we are in uncharted territory. The loss of the moderating influence of a majority opposition gives the Harper conservatives truly free rein for the first time, and given this government’s conduct as a minority, we should expect a swift and substantial turn to the right. Need an example? Last night, with results still trickling in, Heritage Minister James Moore told the CBC that the government would move right away to abolish public funding for political campaigns. The Conservatives now have both hands firmly on the levers of power, and they are going to move. Fast.

2. The NDP Ascendance

The pollsters predicted a good showing for the NDP, but again, the idea that the New Democrats could take more than 100 seats would have been laughable as recently as a week ago. Yet here we are, Jack Layton bound for Stornoway with 101 NDP MPs at his back. Layton will make a skilled and energetic opposition leader, and will undoubtedly use his bully pulpit to solidify the NDP’s newfound national base. The “Orange Wave” phenomenon is, for many progressives, a silver lining of this election, but the grim irony, as every pundit observed last night, is that Layton has less leverage now as leader of the opposition than he had as leader of the third party in a minority government. This election has to be counted the NDP’s greatest success to date — but still a qualified one.

3. Twilight of the Liberals

There were plenty of factors that led to yesterday’s electoral result, but if you were looking for one doorstep to lay it at, the Liberal Party’s would be the one. Their unprecedentedly poor showing in the polls echoes, in sentiment if not in absolute numbers, the trouncing the Progressive Conservatives received in 1993; the added humiliation of Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff losing his own riding, and then failing to resign before resigning anyway, has shaken the party to its roots. Speculation about merging with the NDP is probably premature but no longer an outright joke. Rumours of the Liberal Party’s death are exaggerated; still, even contemplating such a thing would have been unthinkable a year ago. The Liberals pulled the trigger on this election — though, having found the government in contempt of parliament, it’s not clear they could have reasonably chosen otherwise — and their strategists must have felt there was a reason to do so. The fact that they were so terribly wrong is going to prompt plenty of Grit soul-searching.

4. The Smashing of the Bloc

The apocalyptic showing of the Bloc Québécois spells the end of the separatist movement at the federal level; it’s hard to see how it can be otherwise. Reduced from 47 to just four MPs, with their leader defeated in his own riding, and swamped by the NDP in Quebec, the Bloc is over as a parliamentary force. That’s important because the party since 1993 had been a spoiler, changing the electoral calculus necessary to take the House of Commons. That fourth party, wielding many more seats than its popular vote would indicate, had been a keystone of the minority government structure that has prevailed since 2004. Their decimation will change the math for every election to come. What this means for the sovereigntist movement in general is unclear, too — will it dampen the appetite for another referendum, or embolden the Parti Québécois provincially? Again, who knows? We’re off the map here.

5. The Greens Take the Field

As special-interest party the Bloc exits stage left, the election of Elizabeth May as the first Green Party MP ushers in a new parliamentary voice. This was an important symbolic win for May and for the Greens, and perhaps an important substantive win, too. Being the only Green in the house of commons will hardly make May a power broker, but it’s a foothold, and May is known for being an articulate rhetoritician; she’ll make hay from even the sliver of Question Period time this seat grants her. Whether that translates to growth for the Greens remains to be seen, but if that federal election campaign per-vote subsidy is taken away — now a near-certainty — the Greens stand to lose a big chunk of the funding that helped put May in her seat. Have they built a big enough party machine in the last few years (and can they continue to build it for the next four or five) to do it on their own?

6. The Pollsters Are Jokes

The 2008 election was bad enough for the pollsters, who saw their accuracy deteriorate markedly. This time around was even worse. While they all saw the Orange Wave coming, no major pollster predicted the Conservative majority; none grasped the extent of the Liberals’ crashing fortunes, and the utter collapse of the Bloc was barely on their radar. And the media, hungry for numbers, babbled every poll projection regardless. Susan Delacourt of the Toronto Star predicted that way back at the beginning of the campaign when she provided a lesson learned from previous campaigns: “All media will declare that they’re going to not report on polls in the same old way and will break that promise by Day 2.” Bingo.

7. Voters Still Aren’t Voting

Turnout increased a bit this election, bobbing back above 60 percent. But electoral participation remains at distressing lows. Some blame our antiquated first-past-the-post system; others disillusionment with partisan incivility; or perhaps it’s that Kids Today don’t vote in elections. Whatever the reason, it’s a discouraging trend, and more discouraging is that there is no indication that most of these factors will improve. Electoral reform is off the table; a Conservative government has no interest in proportional representation. The U.S.-style attack politics that has metastisized in Ottawa will continue; the Conservatives slathered it on thick and were rewarded with a majority, and that lesson will stick. Perhaps younger people can be enticed to the ballot box by a resurgent NDP, which has traditionally enjoyed their support. Yesterday’s slight uptick in turnout could be the start of an upward trend — or it could be a bump on the long slide downhill.

In any case, it looks like we have four to five years of a Conservative government during which we can contemplate all these questions — and many more besides.

This year’s debate will include a new format, with six-minute one-on-one debates, followed by a 12-minute round for all four leaders.

There’s been much ado over the decision to exclude Elizabeth May from the debate. Debate reform has since taken over our country’s editorial pages. The inconsistency of including May in 2008 but shutting her out this time has angered people even beyond the Greens’ voter base. There just doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason to how the Canadian debates are structured or who participates. But there has been some serious study of the debates, and some recommendations worth reading.

During her time at as a research assistant at Queen’s University’s Centre for the Study of Democracy, Michelle Rogers authored a 60-page report on the Canadian federal election debates.

It’s well worth a read. The study, also embedded below, examines the history of TV debates, compares policies worldwide and tackles the tough questions of ensuring debates that are both democratic and realistic. It details the Lortie Commission (an ill-fated attempt to solve these question 20 years ago) and dives into questions like if the Bloc should be included in English-language debates.

Rogers comes up with some interesting recommendations, though you may not like them all. A sampling:

• Televised leaders debates should be entrenched in both the Canada Elections Act and Broadcasting Act.
• Federal party funding for election campaigns should be contingent upon full participation in leaders debates.
• Party inclusion criteria should be three of these four: 5 percent support in national polls; a sitting MP; a full roster of candidates across the nation; and federal funding.
• A series of debates should take place on national and regional themes, broadcast on local channels.
• There should be two debates in the final weeks of the campaign: one with all qualifying party leaders, the other featuring the Prime Minister and the party leader from the highest polling opposition party.
• The use of social networking platforms should be exploited to broaden the reach and appeal of election debates.

Whether you agree with her recommendations or not, Roger’s report makes for an interesting read and may help you reach an informed opinion on what’s become a key part of our elections.