Election Night

8:30pm: Liberals surprisingly strong for now, and in the lead! Very early though, and probably mainly early votes being counted.

8:59pm: PQ government declared by Radio-Canada. Not sure if it'll be a minority or majority. It could be a long night, as many thought. The surprise is that the Liberals are, for now, above 30%. They are holding up particularly well in Quebec City, which hurts the CAQ, which sits at 18 seats despite actually getting the expected vote count (27-28%). The Liberals are also holding up in the Eastern Townships (except in Charest's Sherbrooke seat!), which is what separates the PQ from a majority.

9:15pm: Things have stabilized. The PQ is a few seats from a majority, but very close if you add in the two QS seats. The Eastern Townships are really what makes the difference right now.

9:43pm: Numbers have moved very little. It now looks quite unlikely that the PQ will win an outright majority. However, PQ+QS could get 63 seats, though they're quite not there now.

10:01pm: Radio-Canada declares that the next PQ government will be a minority. This is, of course, not a surprise, since everyone acknowledged it as a likely (even though not necessarily the most likely) outcome. The surprise, however, is that it's the Liberals, rather than the CAQ, that stood in the way of the PQ: right now, the PQ only leads the popular vote by 2%.

12:30am: It looks like the final results are:

54 PQ (32%)
50 LIB (31%)
19 CAQ (27%)
  2 QS (6%)

Note that the Liberals are exactly at the very high end of my admittedly wide ranges, both for the seat count and for the popular vote. They won more seats than when they formed government in 2007!

As for the act of terrorism, well, Québec politics are not dull. It will be interesting to see the fallout... Update: Apparently, it was even more serious than first thought. Let's hope that every Quebecer and every Canadian, from hard-core separatist organizations to compulsive Québec bashers, react to this in a responsible way.