The dust has settled on the B.C. election, sort of. We really won't know until the end of May what the new legislature will look like. There are two seats going to recount for sure, one with a 23 vote spread, and one with a two vote spread. Then there are 15 more seats with less than a thousand vote difference which could be affected by the final count of mail-in and other miscellaneous ballots.

The North Island is not one of the constituencies with a close election. Claire Trevena took the seat for the NDP with a margin of over 2,800 votes, getting about 52 per cent of the total votes cast. Marion Wright received only 39 per cent for the Liberals, while Philip Stone received just over seven per cent for the Greens.

It is depressing. The budget passed yesterday and what felt like a small opening in the door for a new kind of politics, has now slammed shut. The old fractious bombast has re-emerged in full force along with the feeling that government power is now shared between Conservatives wearing liberal clothing and Liberals who are really just tarted-up conservatives. The whole scene feels so strangely out of time.

For a brief period, the shocking answer to a political crisis was cooperation. And it was powerful. The threat of losing the Government transformed the Harper government into a puppet of its own political ambition. The result is that we are stuck with Flaherty's foolhardy attention deficit disorder budget. But Harper has a serious decline in popular support to show for it.