The New Yorker:

Stasis is perhaps an underrated virtue in political life. We know the virtue of stasis in our private lives, since selling the house and divorcing the spouse and sending the kids away rarely seems, on reflection, like a good idea. But there is something to be said in praise of stasis in our public life, as well. Electioneering rhetoric in democracies almost always champions change, its necessity and its benefits, but there are moments when a completely static result accurately represents the views and even, in a way, the evanescent mood of a nation, when carrying on the same way as before is the best result to wish for. This thought (in itself somewhat static) is inspired by the result of Monday’s snap federal election in Canada, which, after much toing and froing, with moments of momentum and checked momentum on all sides, ended with almost exactly the same Parliament as that with which it began. The Liberal Party of Justin Trudeau won the most seats, and will form its third consecutive government, though still not the majority government it sought when Trudeau called the election, a month ago; the Conservatives, now under the leadership of Erin O’Toole, a more progressive-minded leader than his immediate predecessors, have the second-most seats and a slightly greater share of the popular vote, owing to their near-monopoly of the vote in the Western provinces; a Canadian oddity, the Bloc Québécois, a separatist party that nonetheless sits in the federal Parliament, ended up in third place, with thirty-four seats, all of them in Quebec; and the leftist New Democratic Party, led by the well-liked Jagmeet Singh, came in fourth. (The final counts are not yet in, but the Conservative edge in the popular vote, which will likely end up at about one per cent, is real, though somewhat misleading: the center-left vote, the Liberals and the N.D.P. together, is still much larger than the center-right vote, and, in any case, a parliamentary system is the product of a series of local elections, not a national one.)

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