Well it was last week, and it really only affects the people within its borders, but my ancestral homeland province of New Brunswick, Canada had an election where the incumbent head of government, Blaine Higgs, was absolutely handed his ass in multiple ways. He led the governing Progressive Conservative Party (aka the PCs) against the opposition provincial Liberal Party, who are slightly more socdem than the federal Liberal Party (which is a legally distinct entity).

This is extremely good news because he's a vicious transphobe who was planning to do even more horrible things if he retained power, like hand over mental health and addiction treatment services to private-sector for-profit evangelical crazies. He deliberately underfunded education and health care as part of his "starve the beast" ideology.

Some context about New Brunswick politics because oh boy is it way different from legislative politics outside of the Maritimes. It's more like municipal politics in large cities. Sitting members are called Members of the Legislative Assembly, or MLAs. Historically, the difference between the PCs and Liberals has not been ideological. It's mostly been about who one was buddy-buddy with in university. There have been socdem PCs, there have been right-wing Liberals, there have been frequent switching of parties by sitting MLAs as part of the normal political process. New Brunswick politics is extremely local. It's all about personal reputation of MLAs. Citizens are usually pretty OK with a sitting MLA changing parties if they feel it's for a good reason.

Blaine Higgs and his crew were very different from traditional PCs. They tried to bring in Alberta-style wedge issue politics and top-down absolute party control to NB politics. The minutia of that is a whole post on its own, but let's just say that NBers generally don't like that shit. Party leaders generally live in fear of their fellow party MLAs, especially the locally-popular ones.

One of the biggest election issues was his legislation to forcibly out trans kids to their parents. He's one of those "parents' rights" psychopaths. His Liberal Party leader challenger Susan Holt specifically ran on a policy of stopping that. And she won decisively.

But the absolutely biggest fuckup of his is that he has spent decades on an ideological crusade against any government programs that benefit the francophone people of New Brunswick, which are roughly 42% of the population. NB is Canada's only officially bilingual english/french province, and Higgs was a proud member of an extreme-right-wing english-superiority party in the 1990s called CoR. Higgs spent his tenure in politics refusing to learn french which is even more insane than a sitting Prime Minster refusing to learn french. He worked hard to specifically defund services in majority-francophone parts of the province, mostly the north and the east, and especially in the part of the province I'm from, the Acadian Peninsula.

Onto the good news! The ways this fucker was handed his ass include:

1. Losing his own riding. Just like other Westminster-type systems where Prime Ministers have to be Members of Parliament, Premiers have to be members of the provincial legislature. Theoretically another sitting legislature member can give up their own riding seat for the party leader to have a seat in the legislature. In practice this is really only used to give a popular incoming party leader without a seat a way to sit in the legislature so that they can govern properly. His own constituents, a notoriously conservative and extremely english area that have reliably voted PC for most of the time the PCs have existed, tossed him out with a record-high turnout of 75%. His ego will not recover from this. His own anglophone conservative base rejected him. That will rankle him until the day he dies. He doesn't take rejection well.

2. He led the PCs to their biggest defeat in decades. Citizens were simply fed up with his shit on all matters. Ridings that have been reliably PC for decades went Liberal because this election was basically a referendum on him. The PCs are now eating themselves in blame-game infighting, which is very good news. The seat counts went from 25 for PC, 16 for Liberal, and 3 for Green before the election to 16 PC, 31 Liberal, and 2 Green afterwards. The total seat counts change slightly because the riding boundaries change from election to election to reflect local population changes and try to keep things fair on a per-capita basis.

3. Most of his closest evangelical-crazy allies also lost their seats or failed their challenges against Liberal incumbents. It wasn't just that the PCs lost, but that the PCs specifically allied with him lost disproportionately. We won't be hearing from the religious crazies much in the legislature for the next 5-ish years. And there's a lot of trans kids in NB who are sleeping a lot safer now.

This election was really a referendum on trans issues, fairness in providing services to francophones, health care, housing, and education. On all fronts the NB Liberal Party is way better. I'm very cautiously optimistic about the new Premier Susan Holt. She's announced that the first order of business is residential rent caps of 3% annually, which is going to earn her the eternal loyalty of NBers in poverty because there were no rent caps previously. And she's already announced policy changes to gasoline taxation that are going to completely piss off the Irving crime family, so maybe the bad old days of the PCs and Liberals being the two wings of the Irving business empire might be done.