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What is clear from these numbers is that the electorate has taken a sharp and welcome turn to the left in this election. The rightist Conservatives lost nearly a quarter of their support, and only gained seats because they combined into a single party to exploit Canada’s antiquated first-past-the-post voting system. The three progressive parties, the NDP, Bloc and Greens saw their share of the vote rise by 50%. Canadians clearly said once again that Bush-style right-wing governments are not for us. I’m very proud of my fellow Canadians today.

I’m delighted to report that the Green Party got more than double the 2% of the vote nationally they needed to get the new government campaign funding of $1.75 per vote per year until the next election, and also behaved so credibly the Canadian media conglomerate won’t dare exclude them again from the national leaders’ debate next time.

There are at least a dozen seats that were won by fewer than 200 votes, so until the recounts are over, we won’t know whether the NDP will hold the balance of power (i.e. since 155 seats is a majority, the Liberals currently need only include the NDP and the Independent in their governing coalition, since together they have, at last count, 155 seats. This would mark the third Liberal-NDP coalition in Canadian history, and these have been Canada’s most responsible and progressive governments. But if the recounts eliminate this margin, then we’re in for stalemate and probably another election soon. NDP leader Jack Layton has insisted on an immediate binding national referendum on Proportional Representation as a condition for supporting the Liberals, so we could well see seat totals that are far more representative of popular vote in the next election — possibly including at least a dozen (4% of 308 seats) Green Party MPs!

What was most remarkable about this election, and hardly talked about at all by the major media, was the stark urban/rural split in the vote. Canada’s Big 3 urban areas (Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver) went solidly Liberal, the NDP won almost all their seats in other cities, and rural areas went overwhelmingly Conservative. While the regional split I have remarked on before (Liberals in Ontario, Conservatives in the West, Bloc in QuÈbec) was certainly evident again, the urban/rural split transcended this regionalism and applied from sea to sea. The 2004 election map won’t look much different from the 2000 map above, except that Reform Conservative blue is now Conservative blue, there will be a bit more Conservative blue in Ontario and Bloc blue in QuÈbec, and a bit more Liberal red in the Atlantic provinces.

It’s interesting to note that a month ago, before the voters got angry and threatened to deal Martin a worse blow. the polls predicted 143 Liberals, 85 Conservatives, 60 Bloc and 20 NDP seats, very close to the final outcome.

Bush plans to screen all Americans for ‘mental illness’: As reported in the British Medical Journal, under another Orwellian program entitled, in Bush Newspeak, ‘The New Freedom Initiative‘, Bush wants all Americans, including pre-school children, to be examined by armies of psychiatrists and those showing signs of potential “disruptive or aggressive behaviours and emotional disorders”, and treated with a range of new, expensive antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs available exclusively from — surprise! — pharmaceutical companies that have contributed three times as much to Bush as to Kerry. This is a flagrant invasion of government into the private medical histories and choices of Americans — Big Brother doping up American children. The plan, developed in Texas, has been decried there as a massive payoff to the drug companies, and this new initiative makes it a national program. An executive who blew the whistle on kickbacks from pharma companies to the Texas legislators was fired for his indiscretion, the BMJ reports.

More foreign journalists terrorized, deported by US Customs: The Guardian tells the increasingly common story of harassment, detention and intimidation of British and other ‘friendly nation’ journalists when they attempt to enter the US. Although this treatment is mild compared to the now-routine despicable, arbitrary and sometimes lethal abuse that people born in the third world face at the US border, it is evidence that the megalomanic and paranoid Homeland Security brownshirts are now treating every non-American, and every American with a foreign-sounding name or appearance as an enemy of the state, and treating them accordingly. It’s a government-run hate factory run amok.

In other depressing and under-reported US news:

Balance of payments debt reaches another record: A statistic watched closely by economists, but not really understood by the media, is the Net International Investment Position (NIIP), the cumulative total of foreign investment and trade deficits. The Center for American Progress analyzes the unprecedented degree to which the US, and global, economy depends on willingness of the US’s trade partners to continue to finance the US’s insatiable demand for foreign goods and services, especially in the increasingly weak US dollar. See my earlier articles for the explanation of the danger. But take a look at the chart above to see how far it’s gone, surpassing $2.5 trillion dollars, a fourth of the entire US economy, last year. Imagine what would happen if the foreign creditors get nervous and decide to call in their debt, or at least denominate it in some other currency. Imagine what will happen when interest rates spike, and the interest on this debt alone suddenly exceeds the lenders’ ability to repay it without slashing domestic spending and massively increasing taxes. That’s exactly what happened to Argentina, and to the Asian ‘tiger’ economies. Except this time, the bankrupt debtors will take the creditors with them.

Heard the latest about anthrax?: There has been surprisingly little blather from the Bush machine about the recent revelations (in the 9/11 report etc.) that Al Qaeda has planned, and still plans, an anthrax-based bioweapons attack on US soil. The group claiming responsibility for the Madrid bombings said that Operation “Winds of Black Death”, involving a planned attack on the United States, was 90% complete. Attorney General Ashcroft has described the statement as coming from an Al Qaeda spokesman. But while senior government and all military personnel now get the (still risky and somewhat unreliable) anthrax vaccine, plans to administer or at least stock vaccine for all Americans appears to have been abandoned. So while Homeland Security wastes time (and America’s reputation) harassing harmless foreigners and torturing Iraqi inmates, this real threat to Americans’ security is ignored. It’s almost enough to make you think they are perversely hoping for another 9/11, or worse, to get re-elected.

Scary stuff. Michael Moore and Ralph Nader were both up in Canada this week urging Canadians not to make the same mistake as Americans by electing a Conservative government here on Monday. As I’ve reported already, even if the Conservatives get a plurality they won’t be able to forge a lasting governing coalition. Michael and Ralph have their work cut out for them in their own country, however. I’ll have more to say about both of them next week.

This week’s New Yorker contains the latest insights from award-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. None of the factions, he says, is happy with ex-Baathist hitman Iyad Allawi, the man selected to be interim Prime Minister when the US occupation force formally transfers power next week. The group least happy with recent developments is the Northern Iraqi Kurds, who, in the latest accord, have lost the guarantee of autonomy that had been promised them by the occupying force. They are agitating for an independent Kurdistan region (see yellow on map above), and the Israeli military and intelligence services have a large force in this region training Kurdish commando units. The Kurds have the largest military force in the country, the 75,000-strong peshmerga army, and their leaders recently wrote to Bush that if their autonomy rights are not restored they will not participate in the new Shia-controlled government.

Watch out for an attack by the peshmergas on Kirkuk as the first sign of all-out civil war. This flashpoint city, Iraq’s 5th largest, is part of the historical Kurdish homeland, and the centre of one of the richest oil areas in the country, but was ‘Arabized’ by extensive resettlement under Saddam Hussein. Hersh quotes an American military expert who predicts “If Kirkuk is threatened by the Kurds, the Sunni insurgents will move in there, along with the Turkomen [the Turkish ethnic minority in Northern Iraq], and there will be a bloodbath.” Kurdish military action will also likely provoke joint response from Iran, Syria, and (until recently unaligned) Turkey, as all three countries have sizeable populations and areas dominated by ethnic Kurds, who believe these lands should be part of a greater Kurdistan. Although Wolfowitz apparently favours an independent Kurdish state in Iraq, and the Israelis would be delighted to have the Kurds as an ally in the region, the official US position remains that Iraq should remain united. That’s easy for them to say, now that they are leaving — they can blame the civil war and break-up on the new Iraq government and on the UN, who will oversee it.

There is a very real threat that the civil war will quickly spread beyond the borders of Iraq. Turkey, which has become decidedly less pro-Western in recent months, has said bluntly “We tell our Israeli and Kurdish friends that Turkey’s good will lies in keeping Iraq together. We will not support alternative solutions”. And Saudi Arabia, always the most reluctant, unlikely, and taciturn ally of the West, has been the target of insurgents who are making it harder and harder for the rich Saudi elite to hold back the fiercely anti-American and anti-Western sentiment in the country and stay on the sidelines. If forced to take sides between an Islamic alliance of Iran, Iraqi insurgents and Syria on one side, and America, Israel and Kurdistan on the other, there is no question where its sympathies would lie. Its role, or willingness to sit out a civil war on its Northern border, will be pivotal in determining the length and outcome of the war. Look to them to try to look neutral, while financing and arming the Sunnis, while Iran will be much more overt in its political and military support for Iraq’s Southern Shia.

What is particularly frightening is that there is little doubt that Iran either now has, or will soon have, nuclear weapons capability, so that, as in the India-Pakistan conflict to the East, it is likely that nuclear bombs will be threatened by the area’s bitterest enemies, Israel and Iran. In both countries a threatened (but not actual) nuclear attack on the other country or its Iraq allies would probably be politically acceptable to the citizens at home. And both countries’ governments would welcome a foreign conflict to divert world and domestic attention from their controversial, unpopular and morally questionable activities at home.

It in unclear to what extent the Sunni Moslems of Central Iraq will be willing to coexist with the Shia Moslems of the South. While Shia Moslems make up 60% of Iraq’s population, except for Iran they are hugely outnumbered by Sunnis in the rest of the Mideast, notably in Saudi Arabia, Syria and Turkey. And the Sunni central section of the country contains most of the oil wealth and pipelines. When the common enemy, the occupying force, leaves next week, the gloves between the two factions may come off. That would pit Iran against the other Islamic countries in the Mideast, a situation it will likely go to great pains to avoid. Expect some back-room dealing between Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia, which may prolong the conflict but will probably ultimately produce a partitioning of the country.

All of this is likely to mean a long period of unrest and continued death and destruction, as a country with three peoples who dislike and distrust each other, after a hiatus under Saddam and another under the hapless and underresourced Americans, finally get down to determining the future of their country. In such cases, Balkanization has been a global trend for more than a century, so I will predict that there will be, more or less, three countries, uneasily coexisting, after a prolonged and brutal war. The South may combine with Iran, the Kurds will agitate for additional territory in Turkey, but probably settle for what they can get, and the Centre will be squeezed to share oil revenues and infrastructure with both, and become, Yugoslavia-style, all that remains of what was once a much larger Iraq.

The sad thing is that every country except Iraq itself stands to gain from such a war. America can say it got rid of Saddam and then left (people will forget the intervening year of incompetent occupation soon enough, especially if the neocons lose power in November so military involvement isn’t further prolonged). Israel will have a new ally in Kurdistan. Iran will have entrenched itself as the preeminent power in the area. The Saudi government will once again be able to be vocally anti-American and keep its people happy. Even the Turks will be able to tell its Eastern Kurdish residents that if they don’t like their status in Turkey they can now go to their own new country next door. The military contractors will all make a fortune, the mercenaries will have jobs for their short lifetimes, and everyone will have Iraq as an excuse for ignoring their own domestic problems.

The sticking point, of course, is the oil. The Western addiction to oil is now being matched by a similar thirst from China. The corporatists will, as a result, get free rein, no matter who is elected, to rev up arctic, offshore and other eco-sensitive and wilderness area drilling, the coal industry will finish off Appalachia and start strip-mining and burning lots more coal in other countries, and the nukes will be dusted off and fired up. At the same time the cost and unsustainability of this addiction will start to dawn on North America, which will follow Europe, at last, in accelerating use of renewable energy, and upping the price of hydrocarbons to discourage their use (and grab needed tax dollars in the process). Whether that’s enough to forestall an energy crisis unlike anything we could imagine is unclear, but I don’t see the intermittent sputtering of supplies from Iraq being enough to tip it one way or the other.

My final prediction is that, just as in Afghanistan, the West will lose interest in what’s happening in Iraq long before the people of the country settle their differences and truly begin rebuilding their shattered lives. But at least now, that inevitable, bloody process can start.