#Harper Romps to Victory in #Canada: 5 Questions for Canadian Political Scientist David Rayside

Yesterday, Stephen Harper and Canada’s Conservatives romped home to victory in Canada’s federal election. Holding office as a minority government for the past five years, Harper now has a majority in the House of Commons, winning 167 of the chamber’s 308 seats. The polls had pointed to an historic result for the New Democratic Party, and they look to have won more than 100 seats, up from 37 in 2008. The big losers, however, were the Liberal Party, which had governed Canada for much of the 20th century but fell to only 34 seats, while the Bloc Québécois, owing to the NDP’s surge in the province, was reduced from 49 seats to just a handful. To help us make sense of the election result, we turned to University of Toronto political scientist and Britannica contributor David Rayside, editor (with Clyde Wilcox) of the recently published Faith, Politics, and Sexual Diversity in Canada and the United States and author of Queer Inclusions, Continental Divisions: Public Recognition of Sexual Diversity in Canada and the United States and who on this busy morning in Canadian politics kindly agreed to answer a few questions from Britannica Executive Editor Michael Levy.

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