We're with Harper

Talk like that really makes Conservatives hot. Also phrases like… Our caucus is broad.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNqGadFP_W8

Justin Trudeau’s victory in the Montreal constituency of Papineau.

But at the Telus Convention Centre, it has.

Weak applause met news of a minority Conservative government at the Telus Convention Centre in Calgary. What it needed was a little bit of boosting. Just a little.

Calgarians are normally a staid bunch.

Here at the Telus Convention Centre, four photojournalism students from the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology–SAIT to you and me–were lucky enough to gain entry to the party for a little shutterbugging.

The Telus Convention Centre, site of the Stephen Harper party tonight, is no Guvernment. Find another wonderful substance, would you?

The rest of us may be watching events unfold this evening from our couches, which vary in comfiness. The Harper family will be casting a keen collective eye on the proceedings from a suite at the Hyatt Regency Calgary–a nice place–with easy access to the Telus Convention Centre, where Harper will respond to the results later tonight.

The Telus Convention Centre, in downtown Calgary, is a vast hangar of a place, with, today, a swirling swathe of electric blue running alongside one side imprinted with the Conservative logo. It’s eerie now, still empty and with the cameras not yet rolling. Soon, as Harper’s Calgary pied-à-terre for the evening, it will either be the launching spot for a Conservative triumph—a Harper majority, a strong minority—or the place of post-disaster introspection. On one side blossoms of umbrella-like light diffusers for the TV gang; on my side, opposite the stage, print reporters checking over their copy. It’s all still too quiet.

Who knew Stephen Harper would use the occasion of voting in Calgary to practice his French… He tells us that voting is a duty of citizenship–in a province that in March boasted a dismal 40 per cent voter turnout. His monotone self was in full evidence as he addressed reporters outside the polling station. So was his unique dress style: a deathly grey, blue and gold plaid sports jacket and a turquoiose open-neck shirt. Was he nervous? His couture suggests he is comatose.

Stephen Harper arrives at Harold Panabaker Junior High to vote and says of his dodo that it was “good.” Can we take that at face value?