So, we haven't gone down that road after all.

We haven't thrown in our lot with the climate deniers, the bigots, the corporate fatcats. We didn't drink from the kool-aid, didn't join the march to oblivion. At the end of the day we proved that we are not all petty, vindictive, short-sighted and small minded. For once, better nature won out over base instinct.

Just to be clear, this relief is not due to the return of Justin Trudeau to the Canadian Parliament. I think he is a bit of a goof-ball, and the Liberal Party in turns insincere, opportunistic, wishy-washy, and inconsistent, the timorous party of  bland half measures. It's the failure of the Conservative Party to unseat him. Clumsy as the Liberals are, they are at least lurching down the right path.  The Conservatives, under Andrew Sheer, would have abandoned the path altogether. They have largely turned themselves into branches of Big Business in general and Big Oil in particular, advancing a platform of burning and shipping bitumen anytime anywhere, unhampered by even the feeblest environmental regulation. Basically, the Oil Fetish party, not surprisingly, popular in Alberta. They pursued tax-cuts with the single minded determination of the religiously converted, knowing full-well they only benefits those already well-off. They ran an ugly campaign, spreading falsehoods and personal attacks. They continue to be propped up by "social-conservatives", a group who define their own freedom as the ability to suppress other people's freedom. A victory for them would have been a conscious decision to go backwards, to put on blinders, to embrace all that is ugly in current world politics. It would have been a fatalistic decision to look the world's doom in the eye and do absolutely nothing.

Much of the world has made this decision. Trump, Bolsonaro, Modi, Orban, the Five Stars. . . Here in Canada we seemed to doomed to go copycat, with Doug Frod and Jason Kenny.  With them, Scheer would have completed a hideous three-headed monster - I don't think I could have maintained any faith in a society that consciously embraced such a beast.

But we didn't. The Beast has been rejected, at least for now.

True, a lot of people did. Alberta (not surprisingly) and Saskatchewan ( a little surprisingly) went entirely conservative (and are now bitching and moaning about not being represented in Parliament). The Conservatives increased their seat count. The Liberals have been weakened. The NDP have been weakened. Progressives and middle-of-the-roaders are going to have to work together, and who knows if they can. Who knows how long this government will last, and who knows what'll go down NEXT TIME.

But for now, the Beast has been rejected. The culture of fear has been rejected. The Oil Fetishists have been rejected. Maxim Bernier's Far right project has been decisively rejected and is dead in the water - immigrant baiting on that scale didn't win a single seat. We Canadians showed ourselves just a little better than that. We've bought ourselves a bit of time. Maybe a year from now, I'll have to confront the Beast, but for now, the relief is tremendous.

I went to bed that night, to paraphrase Churchill, and slept the sleep of the saved.