Election After-Math

But Mr. Harper did his math post-election. “Disallow the Liberal/Bloc potential by bribing Mr. Emerson — whose Vancouver riding supported us with a whopping 19 percent — to cross the floor. What is one Cabinet position for a turncoat worth?” Harper must have thought. “The natural governing party, the Liberals, asked such questions for years. It served them well and kept us in the principled wilderness. Well, my new hedonic calculus, my will to power, now dictates that I too can hold the electorate in contempt, that voting is nothing but a parlour game that I control.”

But there may be an upside to all these numbers games. As the popularity of Sudoku is proving, numbers — the placing of one here to offset another there — can be seductive and sublime. And as the polls turned us all into strategic voters, our number became the X marked on a ballot. It felt good, frankly, to be in the game of calibrating outcomes, especially given the result — a virtual non-government in a country that obviously relishes abstractions.

And then there was Harper’s election after-math. While we obsessed over fractions, he introduced a whole new arithmetic.