Anthony Westell was Globe and Mail bureau chief in Ottawa, 1964-69, and later a national affairs columnist for the Toronto Star.

It's really as simple as that. Final vote totals will show that the majority of Canadians remain center-left in their politics, and Liberal and NDP MPs will outnumber the Conservatives in the new House. However, government in Ottawa may well remain in Conservative hands until their opponents can get their act together.

On the right, it took years of civil war and election defeats before the Reform/Alliance could overcome and swallow the PCs. It will be no easier, probably harder, on the left as the Liberals and the NDP struggle for supremacy, unless of course Stephen Harper quickly proves a failure as prime minister and voters turn back to the Liberals in a reflex action.

That's not likely, but he is the least qualified person to become prime minister in at least half a century: educated to MA level in one university; never served in a government or held an executive position in business, seldom travelled outside North America. He has promised to govern from the centre and should have no trouble surviving for a year or two, if only because the opposition would not dare outrage the public by forcing yet another election before he has had a fair chance. In fact, his most serious opposition may come from true believers of his own – backbenchers, social conservatives, neo-conservative economists and libertarians who believe the best government is the smallest government. They have toiled for years to gain power to steer Canada away from the centre and toward the right. How much slack will they cut Harper?

In passing, it's impossible to imagine what the elder statesmen of the G8, in Washington and at the UN will make of this neophyte.

But we know at least that he's a good politician, with killer instincts behind the choirboy's shy smile. Just look what he did to Paul Martin. The Gomery report specifically cleared Martin of any responsibility for the sponsorship scandal a decade ago. But that did not deter Harper for a minute. He declared Martin, his government and the Liberal party to be corrupt and without the moral authority to govern. It was invention and a skeptical media would not have let him get away with it. Instead, the media cheered him on and actually helped him convince the country that Martin was not to be trusted.

Martin was pathetically unable to fight back, and just when that storm seemed to be passing, the RCMP put its spoke in his wheel by announcing, quite unnecessarily, that although it had no evidence a crime had been committed it was investigating a rumour of a leak from Finance Minister Ralph Goodale's office. Ah ha, cried the opposition, more Liberal corruption, and many observers have dated the decline and fall of the Liberal government from that event.

There was another event unnoticed by most Canadians that may have had a significant influence on the campaign. The Globe and Mail and CTV reported a poll showing the Conservatives with an enormous lead. The Conservatives gained momentum, the Liberals lost it. Other less publicized polls never found such a lead, and it probably never existed.

Of such campaign events is power won and lost.