Election night was tough for our friends in the Liberal Party. We know what that's like. And so we can well understand why they and some of their apologists have been tempted to try to de-legitimize the key election outcomes -- the rise of the NDP to Official Opposition and a Conservative majority, realigning Canadian politics around these two national political parties -- by saying the latter only occurred as a result of vote splitting by the former.

The argument goes like this: Stephen Harper gained more than 20 seats in Ontario by increasing his vote by only five percentage points. The victory in these key ridings (so it is claimed) happened because the NDP supposedly drained votes from the Liberals, giving the Conservatives more seats.

Several Toronto Star and Globe and Mail columnists have suggested that the Conservative majority resulted from too little strategic voting for the Liberals. In every federal election that I can remember, the Liberals have appealed for progressive votes to stop the Conservatives (or their Reform-Alliance predecessors).

Poring over the entrails leads me to a couple of observations.

First, as is usually the case, the change in the distribution of seats which commands headlines is an imperfect reflection of the change in the distribution of votes.

The NDP breakthrough in Quebec was remarkable and historically important and unprecedented, but so was the NDP surge in English Canada. The NDP's 30.6% share of the national vote was based on 43% of the vote in Quebec, and a very high 28% share of the vote in the rest of Canada.

Strikingly, limited seat gains outside Quebec poorly reflects the actual change in the NDP vote. Between 2008 and 2011, the NDP share of the national vote rose from 18.2% to 30.6%, a gain of more than 12 percentage points which is a huge shift.

Here's a couple of curious facts from our last federal election three years ago:

First: Compared to the 2006 election before that, the Harper Conservatives won 170,000 fewer votes, the NDP with Jack Layton got 75,000 fewer votes and the Liberals, then led by Stephane Dion, got 700,000 fewer votes.

Everyone and their Aunty Gladys agree that Mr. Dion personally kept that massive horde of Liberals hiding at home on Election Day, 2008. So what happened to a lot of Conservative and NDP voters? No one seems to know. What -- who? -- turned them off? And how do they get turned back on?

Two women are sitting on a bench. After a while the first woman says, "Oy!"

The second woman replies, "Oy!"

The first woman says, "All right, enough about the children."

Kind of like how Canadians think of their political choices these days, seems like.

For many months now, we have been treated to a steady stream of articles and television reports about political polls, breathlessly over-thinking variations that fall within the margin of error. Analysts embarrass themselves trying to think of things to say about gross swings in regional numbers, which are then contradicted by other polls and then by the same poll, taken a week or two later.

Although he doesn't say it as frequently as he once did, when speechifying for something he deems profoundly patriotic, Stephen Harper concludes his speeches with "God bless Canada".

That phrase seems oddly out of place and anachronistic in Canadian politics, even though there is no formal separation between church and state. Indeed, we think that publicly declaring one's religious affiliation is the kiss of death when running for elected office.

Stockwell Day was ridiculed, and rightly so, for professing his belief in a 6,000-year-old Earth.

Of course, the whole Alliance/Day campaign of 2000 was a disaster and Day's penchant for absurd ideas like creationism was only part of the problem.