So now what?
The Liberals can spin the loss of a quarter of their previously-held seats as a "victory" if they want. Of course they'll do that, sure as the day's long.
But they lost one out of four seats which they had previously held.
Hardly a "victory":
Holding onto three out of four seats at a time when a sweep was expected following their red-faced, foamy-mouthed, spittle-shooting, single-minded, overzealous haranguing of the government over questions that had already been answered and over no new evidence. Polling shows that Canadians aren't the least bit impressed by these irrelevant little non-scandals in the Mulroney-Schreiber, the Cadman and the NAFTA non-issues, however sensationalized they've been in the media and by the Opposition, most notably the desperate, demagogue Liberals. One would expect an easy retention of all of their seats, but it wasn't to be.
Retaining 75 percent of their own asses isn't all that impressive. They're going to be sitting uncomfortably from now on due to their loss of a quarter of the seats they put up for contest.
Trying to fabricate scandals out of irrelevant little things hasn't proven to be a winning strategy for the Liberals, who have failed to dent Conservative popularity as well as PM Harper's popularity and have failed to improve their own numbers as well.
Back to the old drawing board for the hapless, ever-corrupt and ever-more-useless Liberals. They'll have to wipe it clean of the silly, childish stick-figure caricatures making fun of and demonizing the Prime Minister and actually take stock of the reality of everything and deal with it like rational, mature adults, rather than the lost boys of Lord of the Flies.
Now what? After the expensive-for-the-taxpayers by-elections, do they want to suddenly, quickly say, "Canadians want an election"? That's going to be a hard sell, as they've been using the excuse that Canadians don't want one in order to justify their refusal to vote for or against the government on anything that would cause an election to have to be held.
Of course, it all depends on the polls. Liberals are all about polls. Like the stars, like crystal balls and tea leaves, they use them to make their decisions on what to do.
The optics of useless Liberals abstaining and walking out of Parliament, refusing to stand and be counted for important votes (oh, sure, a skeleton crew would take a token, if useless, stand sometimes just for visual effect, however pathetic and piss-poor) and preferring to repeat, as broken, scratchy recordings, the same questions over and over, with slight variation each time to pretend they're new questions, despite the reality that they've already been answered and that there's no new evidence at all to justify them, plus hijacking the Commons Committees for partisan witch-hunting purposes... isn't going to help them, either. Expect the Conservatives to highlight this shameful, abusive, useless behavior of the Liberals come the next election, which I doubt will be any time soon, regardless of the newfound, if delusional, upbeat mood of those power-and-money-fetishist fools, as reality will soon sink in for them that they still haven't a snowball's chance in hell of even holding onto all of their currently-held seats in a general election, that they'd pretty much be left holding their Toronto rump, facing a strong, majority Conservative government for the first time since 1993. And facing the prospect of losing their stranglehold over the unelected, unaccountable Senate via reform as demanded by angry, frustrated, betrayed Canadian voters.
Whatever one wishes to read into the by-election results, the Liberals are still damned if they do, damned if they don't.
