Canada's Cold Update

Our northern correspondent has logged in via email with a link to this article ("Canada''s Cold New Dawn")  from the Guardian (UK) which explains the consequences of the parliamentary elections as kind of the Americanization of Canada with a polarized result: lots more seats for the farthest left party, and even lots more for the farthest right.  The upshot, quoting the article, is a "Canadian version of George W Bush, minus the warmth and intellect, is now prime minister." And he has a legislative majority.  Among expected changes:

Harper's Conservatives will pass an omnibus law and order bill within 100 days to make jail sentences mandatory for many offences, and begin building super-jails, copying a system that even its authors, the Americans, have begun to abandon. The huge purchase of fighter jets from Lockheed Martin, which was an election issue, will now go ahead – Harper says it will cost $9bn, government auditors say $39bn – as will massive military shipbuilding.

The Evangelist Christian right is at the heart of Harper's Conservative party, and after years of being shushed, it will now demand an end to a number of things, including abortion rights. Canada has no law against abortions, and they are available free.

Corporate taxes will be cut almost immediately, Bush-style. Political financing laws will change: parties now get money for each vote – but this will end under the Conservatives, whose plans also include loosening the section of the current law that sees corporations barred from donating to parties. Given further corporate tax-cutting and other Conservative measures, the party will have a huge advantage in terms of the amount it can solicit in corporate donations under a new political financing law.

All this presided over by a prime minister who sounds like an Evangelical Richard Nixon: "Harper himself is a famously strange man... Humourless and awkward in gait, he was once photographed shaking hands with one of his own children."

Our correspondent added an election analysis by Marc Zwelling that suggests the non-right didn't add numbers of votes but reallocated them to the New Democrats.  Plus he notes that the oil and gas industries are just as involved in Canada in their machinations on behalf of the right.

Update: Our correspondent adds (in the comments) that the Conservatives won 40% of the popular vote while the combined others, mostly to the left, got 60%.  But according to parliamentary district, the Conservatives won 54% of the seats.  He also wants you to see this video, for a reason I have yet to fathom.