Congratulations to Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party

There's nothing else to do.

Their divide and conquer strategy worked out very well and but for a Stephen Harper moment of loose lipped ideological hubris would have achieved a majority government.

One might have thought the Canadian people would have learned a little something about those strategies after watching them be played out in the US over the past eight years. One might have at least thought that some political elites might have learned what divide and conquer tactics looked like and what to do to counter them.

One would be mistaken on both counts.

Traditional left and centre-left alliances between the Liberal Party and the NDP have now been utterly destroyed. The two parties (including both forerunners of today's NDP) who, working together over the past 70 years, have brought the country old age pensions, unemployment insurance, protection for unionizing workers, national medical care and much else are now irreconcilable foes.

Canadian citizens who once could be counted upon to at least listen civilly to one another are now suspicious of one another's motives, morals and ethics and do not communicate at all.

The national institutions of public life are now either dysfunctional or becoming so and are equally distrusted by almost all.

There's nothing to say but congratulations for a job well done.

Particularly well done since there's no response possible. The mechanisms that might once have supported and allowed some constructive response are either distrusted or destroyed as well.

It's a bright new morning for the conservative movement in Canada.

I stand back in awe.

As well as in utterly dispirited dismay and grief.

It is a tragedy beyond comprehension and beyond words that the best hope for non conservatives in Canada is a massive economic collapse.