"I will always be at the service of the party".

Lots of silver linings in the election results. The Conservative minority, probably unavoidable, is happily tentative. Certified wingnuts Cindy Silver and Darrell Reid lost to Liberals Hedy Fry and Don Bell in Vancouver. The Liberals outperformed the final polls, taking only 6% less than the Conservatives in the national popular vote. The Bloc's relatively anemic 42.3% of the Quebec vote makes another sovereignty referendum a whole lot less likely (who would have guessed a few months back that the Bloc would actually lose seats?). The NDP made gains they deserve (even though, as a Liberal, it's very hard to like Jack Layton). Turnout went up from 2004. Stephen Owen kicked ass once again in Quadra. And, well, it really is kinda uplifting, honestly, to sit there and watch how well our democracy works, as the DRO and the poll clerk count out the paper ballots and check off the votes on the sheet and then seal them all up in the envelopes while us party reps look on. In my two polls, not a single ballot out of over 500 cast was spoiled.

But even so... no matter how much a Tory minority government couldn't be avoided (and it honestly couldn't), the part that's hard to take is that it's the necessary and relatively unceremonious end of Paul Martin's leadership career. The Prime Minister cut right to the chase in his concession speech in his riding of LaSalle-Emard (which, in the end, he won by 20 points), offering a graceful, inevitable, totally un-self-pitying resignation of his Party's leadership. His whole posture was just so totally sincere, and so quintessentially Canadian: it's not about the leader. It's about the Party and what the party needs to be and how it needs to act to get back ahead in Canadian politics. "Party before country" might not be so good, but "Party before self" is an integral part of our Parliamentary system. Martin knows it.

So Martin has to go. Somehow, though, it just seems like a big sacrifice to make. There are very few rich-country politicians who can claim to have produced more tangible (and intangible) positive results for their country over the course of their careers than Paul Martin -- mainly as Chretien's Finance Minister, but also, however briefly, in his role as Prime Minister for those few months when he was able to reap the first few progressive benefits of his earlier deficit-slaying medicine. There are few politicians out there who better embody the promise and frustrations of post-80s reform liberalism, the austerity and patient, sometimes halting, social progress that replaced the sort of sweeping liberal-progressive reforms of mid-century, arguably with more good-government than political success. And, frankly, there are few who performed so well and tenaciously when the whole enterprise curdled into the sort of cliched, weirdly insular popular adversity we've seen over the past year in Canadian politics... or, at the same time, who seemed utterly, fundamentally helpless to stop it from doing so.

So that's the bittersweet part of the night. It's not just the defiantly un-bitter end of a politician I much admire and was proud to work for. It's the question of whether modern neoliberalism , what used to be called "Third Way" politics before Bill Clinton and Tony Blair wrecked the term, can really work as a majority governing philosophy. And, if not, what exactly do we replace it with?

OK, back to black font.