Greg Sheridan, writing in the Australian, thinks last week’s Canadian election result signals a wider move to the left, and that it has broader implications, including here in Australia. The well-known American political commentator Charles Krauthammer, a man of the right side of politics, disagrees. He doesn’t think Canadians opted to move left so much as they were tired of nearly a decade of Stephen Harper government. My take is that they’re both right, and both wrong.

First some background on former PM Harper. Having been first elected in January 2006, his near-on ten year mark would have made him a very long-serving Prime Minister in Australian terms. The first two governments he led were minority affairs, the last a majority one. His base was in the west, which irked the more populated Ontario. And he won, and lost, elections under a first-past-the-post voting system with three viable parties, which makes results highly unpredictable.

Harper had re-united two wings of Canadian conservatism, with his more right-leaning vehicle more-or-less executing a hostile takeover of what was left of the ‘Red Tories’. Mr Harper was never personally popular. He came into office offering the promise of a shift to the right, to more conservative policies, on a range of issues. On many of them Mr Harper was a big, no, a huge disappointment to his core voters. He never took on the judges – and Canada’s top judges are the most activist in the English-speaking world, worse even than the US top court. He never once invoked the notwithstanding clause and only at the very, very end of his ten years did he begin to appoint any top judges who could not easily have been appointed by the left side of politics.

Mr Harper also did next to nothing for the military, at least if you think the military needs to receive government money. Australia spends a good deal more on its military than does Canada, and we have only two-thirds the population. And Mr Harper’s attempts to sort out the unelected Senate, not made any easier by the Supreme Court, looked incompetent at best. I would be remiss not to mention that Harper ran one of the most top-down, ‘my way or the highway’ governments in Canadian history.

Oh, and it took Mr Harper’s entire tenure to get the budget back to no deficit (and even that ‘announced just before the recent election’ outcome requires some generous assumptions) after he had overspent in reaction to the GFC.

For conservatives, though, Mr Harper did deliver on a number of fronts. He reduced federal government spending back to the level of the 1950s (and Canada’s federal government now spends a smaller percentage of GDP than any other G7 country). This meant handing a lot of taxing power, money and authority back to the Provinces. It was a commitment to real federalism, with competition and real revenue-raising power at the provincial level. Yes, in part it helped quiet down the Quebec problem but basically this is a wholly different (and far better) universe to anything here in Australia. It also killed off the worst aspects of so-called ‘co-operative federalism’ – which amounts to the Premiers getting together always and everywhere to ask for more money, never to push for cutbacks. Harper just handed much authority over to them and made them accountable. This was unpopular in the biggest population province of Ontario, which has an incompetent left-of-centre provincial government that has racked up more debt-per-capita than even California. Ontario is a mess. It can’t fix the mess it’s made of things – having unbelievably moved from Canada’s richest province to a ‘have not’. It wants Rudd-like levels of largesse showered on it and so Ontario swung massively against Harper.

Harper was also excellent on foreign policy (think Israel, standing up to carbon tax/emissions trading scheme carpet-baggers, seeing the UN for what it is).

All in all, though, he was unable to shift the political culture of Canada to the right; Canada was and remains noticeably more left-wing than Australia – at least it’s more left-wing in the non-union, PC, chardonnay-sipping, ‘progressive’ sense – though Australia’s ABC makes Canada’s CBC look like Fox News. So despite the more leftwards centre of gravity, Canadians get a semblance of public broadcaster balance; we in Australia don’t, full stop.

Oh, and Harper did at least manage to stand up for basic Enlightenment values when the Parliament repealed the national hate speech law, Canada’s equivalent to our 18C. That’s the law that Abbott left in place, despite promising otherwise. That’s the law that Turnbull now says won’t be touched, despite making contrary noises before executing his coup. And for anyone who is interested the sky has not fallen in Canada since repeal. Australian legislators ought to hang their heads in shame, every day, at their pusillanimity.

So why then did Harper lose? Before last week’s loss he’d led the Tories to steadily better election results in four straight elections. That’s unheard of. Not even FDR did that. But it means that Krauthammer is correct that a good many Canadians were sick of the man and his control-freakery. He was dour and did not have a winning personality (though that in itself was not considered sufficient for the parliamentary party in Canada to defenestrate him). Voters wanted change.

However, I also think they wanted to move left in the sense of more spending. The election campaign began with the eventual winners, the centre-left Liberals, in third place and promising big-time. The other even more left-leaning party started the campaign in the lead, and collapsed come election day. The winners, though, were led by the eldest son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. His son Justin, with an IQ noticeably below that of his dad’s, is now the new PM. He is good-looking; he’s buoyantly optimistic; he has an attractive wife and three young kids; and he’s young. During the campaign he exceeded the low expectations people had of him, indeed he exceeded them by a fair bit. Meanwhile the Tories came second with a moderately healthy 100 or so seats, nearly a third of the total.

So now the new PM, who has promised just about everything to all the usual Liberal Party vested interests, including to the eco-warming warriors, will have to start writing cheques. Some will have to bounce, as he over-promised. But expect at least a year long honeymoon. Oh, and Canada now joins the US in having a sort of first family. There it’s the Kennedys. In Canada it’s the Trudeaus.