Words are inadequate

I genuinely don't know how voting reform ever gets passed anywhere. It'll only hurt the party in power, so naturally they're against it, and since they're in power it doesn't happen.

The nice thing about the complete collapse of the Liberals is that it proves conclusively that given a choice between Republicans and Republican-lites, people tend to prefer the real thing, and given a choice between Republican-lites and an actual left-wing party, there are an awful lot of votes for the left-wing.

The trouble with the "and then the left coalesces into one party" is that, short of voting reform, it's a *best-case* scenario. I could easily see the vote on the left remaining fragmented for another decade. And of course four years of Conservative government is going to move the national dialogue to the right, there's really no getting around that, so the NDP may end up being seen as even more Scary Socialists. bleh.

(If Ralph Fucking Nader had had any interest in moving the dialogue to the left in 2000, there were an awful lot of ways he could have gone about it. Instead he chose the path that did the best job of glorifying Ralph Fucking Nader.)