According to CBC's favourite analyst - Eric Grenier, it's a longshot for Justin to win a majority government. And I hope it doesn't happen either! The Liberal Party tends to be the mystery meat of politics....you never know what you're going to get after they form a government. They can move from left to right and back again....but at least their not the northern branch of the Republican Party...otherwise known as Harper Conservatives!
In my riding - the newly redrawn Hamilton West - Ancaster - Dundas riding, it started as a three way race, but three weeks ago, it started becoming obvious that the large anti-Harper vote decided to break for the Liberals, and now the Liberal candidate has put it out of reach with a more than 23 point lead over the Con candidate....so, now that I feel safe that a Conservative flunkie won't win here, I can safely cast a spoiler vote for the Green Party and bump up their total a little bit more.
If Harper loses...as expected by every pollster...he has only himself to blame, since he outstrategized himself with his games of divide and conquer. I am noticing that to my south - the riding of Haldimand-Norfolk...a safe Conservative riding in almost every federal and provincial election is hotly contested with the Liberal candidate holding a slight 2.5 point lead. I'll be interested in the details if it does break for the Libs, since there is a large Six Nations community in that riding, and we've been hearing about many natives across Canada intending to vote for the first time because of Harper's scapegoating of natives....we'll see what happens tonight.
If Justin gets in with a minority, he will saddle up to the Cons before he does with the NDPeep. C-51 win go unchanged, TPP will go through and pipelines will get pushed through, no action will take place on the climate change front and the Cons won't let him legalize pot. Con or Lib win means nothing will change. People are stupid.
NO, even though Justin Trudeau won't likely do anything bold or outrageous like stop the damn pipeline building or that even worse trade pact, there's no way in hell he's going to form any kind of alliance with Harper! That would be political suicide; and now that he's in it, I'm sure he's planning on a long career in politics.
From what I've seen, the big difference between the Liberals and Conservatives is that the Liberals are still a big-tent party that tries to grab as many potential votes as possible, while Harper's reformulated Conservative Party follows the strategy of their Republican brethren to our south: concentrating on core conservative voting blocks...older, whiter, largely male voters, small business, farmers etc., while they ignore much of the urban vote....recall from the last election they refer to young working women as "Zoeys" and tag them as one of the voting blocks to ignore.
This may have been a big part of the reason why the Harpercons were so enamoured with trying to restrict and reduce the size of the voting public. If you're going to concentrate on a traditional conservative voting base that's slowly shrinking in size, the only way you can win elections (aside from outright fraud) is to try to reduce the size of the undesired voting blocks that have turned against you.
