Three McGill Undergrads Elected to Canada’s Parliament
Four McGill students, including the co-presidents of the university’s New Democratic Party Club, were elected to serve in Canada’s national parliament last night.
The National Democratic Party, long a marginal player in Canadian politics, made stunning gains last night, nearly doubling its previous best-ever vote percentage and almost tripling the number of seats it holds in parliament. With the Conservative Party winning a governing majority, the NDP now stands as Canada’s official opposition for the first time.
These gains came largely at the expense of the Quebec nationalist party Bloc Québécois, whose support collapsed to less than one fourth of voters in its home province. The NDP took 45 of its 68 new seats nationally from the BC, and the wave of voter support that carried it to that result often brought victory to candidates who had entered the race with no expectation of winning.
The most notorious example of this is Ruth Ellen Brousseau, an NDP candidate who lives a three-hour drive away from her district, works full-time in a bar, and left the country for a Las Vegas family vacation in the middle of the campaign. Despite not giving any interviews or campaigning in her district — and despite rumors that in a
