Justin Trudeau's red wave makes Quebec the kingmaker again

When the Liberal tide swept in from the east, it didn't hit any breakwaters in Quebec this time.

Completely unexpectedly, given the opinion polls of the last few weeks, the Liberal vote kept rolling and helped move the third-placed party into first while putting a Trudeau back in 24 Sussex Drive and re-crowning Quebec a kingmaker of sorts.

Billed as the most unpredictable of battlegrounds, prey to a four-way split, Quebec embraced the Liberal call for change and delivered much more than the minimum.

The minimum was Montreal where the Liberals won their seven and only seats in 2011. This time, they won the island, breached the suburban barrier, and then went way beyond, doubling the number that were said to be needed from Quebec to form government.

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It's a victory that defies not only the polls but so many of the proclaimed knocks against Justin Trudeau in the province, be it his father's often-challenged legacy here or the late-campaign misstep by one of his key campaign advisers.

Dan Gagnier's stepping down over his lobbying job was supposed to have revived provincial resentment over the sponsorship scandal that Stephen Harper first rode to power nine years ago.

But in the end it was no match for the immediate and palpable euphoria surrounding Trudeau's rise.

Split votes

But ardour isn't the only explanation here for the Liberal advantage. It was also gained by the fact that so many of Quebec's 78 ridings fell prey to two- and three-way races with the Bloc and the NDP that the Liberals managed to come up the middle.

It was that parsing of the vote that left the NDP far behind in the end;its hope of a Quebec base dashed for the foreseeable future.

For NDP Leader Tom Mulcair, a former Quebec cabinet minister, that had to hurt.

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Quebec had been the stronghold where Mulcair once led in national polls.

The NDP entered this campaign with 59 Quebec seats, but they emerged with only a dozen, at last count.

Quebec was where the NDP lost its footing and ended in third place both here and nationally.

It's a crushing defeat best explained by the idea that Mulcair was simply unable to persuade Canadians that his was the face of change.

The NDP promise to balance the budget, to show theirs were the safe hands, now seems to have been their most damaging move.

That effort to short any criticism about being big spending social democrats allowed the Liberals to outpace them on the progressive side of the economy, ostensibly the central issue of this election.

What next for Mulcair?

A rather formidable former leader of the Opposition in the last Parliament, Mulcair managed to squeak through in his own Montreal riding of Outremont, a victory that still couldn't dispel speculation about a possible resignation in the days ahead.

Counter-intuitively, Quebec offered the only gains last night for Harper's Conservatives. But Harper himself was never a big factor in the equation.

From the outset, Conservatives in Quebec knew their audience and avoided promoting a leader who was considered almost a liability here.

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Instead, they hinged their provincial campaign on the local lustre of established politicians such as Denis Lebel and Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney as well as a handful of prominent former journalists and mayors.

The Conservative vote is considered efficient here. Geographically concentrated in and around Quebec City and almost nowhere beyond, it is both fiscally and socially conservative, and was refuelled halfway through the campaign by the niqab debate, which conflated Quebecers' security concerns with its increasingly secular priorities.

It's an issue that may not go away easily, but it is unlikely to be given a new pedestal by the Bloc Quebecois, the other party that shared in its promotion.

BQ Leader Gilles Duceppe lost his own bid for a comeback, though his party is upto 10 seats, just two short of official party status.

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In all likelihood, Duceppe's loss leads the party back on a quest for new leadership, leaving the Bloc caught in an infinite loop of its making.

Worse for the BQ, given the vast majority of votes for the three federalist parties in Quebec, the party created 25 years ago to defend and protect Quebec's interest in Ottawa has seen its mission eclipsed.