They yelled over each other at the leaders’ debates and then they did it again on election night.

If this post-election cacophony is a preview of Canada’s new “more co-operative” Parliament, we best set our expectations low. Politicians who shout together rarely work well together.

The nasty tone of Canada’s 43rd federal election carried through right to the truly bitter end. None of the three main federal party leaders was particularly gracious in their post-vote speeches, up to and including the odd spectacle of them all speaking at the same time on TV in the wee hours of Tuesday.

Normally, these things proceed in some kind of cordial order, though there have been exceptions through the years. But polite wasn’t really a hallmark of Campaign 2019, so perhaps the end was fitting.

It started late after polls closed with New Democratic Party Leader Jagmeet Singh, making the puzzling decision to use his post-election speech as a detailed rehash of the party’s policy platform. It was a half-hour long address, stretching over 2,200 words. This too is unusual — fully double the length of his counterparts’ speeches.

At some point, Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer and Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau clearly decided not to wait out Singh and headed to the stages at their respective headquarters at the same time, forcing broadcasters to flash back and forth between the two men who had gone into election night expecting to emerge the winner.

Only one of them could win on Monday night — it was Trudeau — but everyone, including Singh, used the speeches to boast of victory.

“We’re going to keep on fighting hard, we’re going to keep on growing,” said the NDP leader, whose party lost nearly one-third of its seats in Parliament on Monday night; going from third to fourth place in the Commons — from 39 seats at dissolution to 24 now.

“We are on the march, ladies and gentlemen,” said Scheer, whose Conservatives did win the popular vote, but finished a distant second when it came to seats in Parliament; 121 seats compared to the Liberals’ 157.

“Friends, you are sending us to Ottawa with a clear mandate,” said Trudeau, who no longer has enough Liberals to push through his agenda without help from another party or two. “I swear to you that we will continue what we have begun,” Trudeau added, apparently not yet at the realization that going from majority to minority means Canadians haven’t voted for business as usual.

It’s this black-is-white, losing-is-winning rhetoric that helps turn people off politics.

Several Liberals, privately and publicly, were talking on Tuesday of how they’d hoped for Trudeau to be a little less triumphal in his post-election remarks. He did win, and certainly the result could have been a lot worse for Liberals, to say the least. But Trudeau, in his remarks, treated the end of the election as though it was a game won, rather than the reckoning that it also was.

Amid the simultaneous din of three leaders talking on Monday night, it was Scheer who sounded the angriest notes, which may have at least had the virtue of being authentic.

The Conservative leader talked darkly of divisions in the land and how he saw Monday night as just the first step in defeating the Liberal enemy. Hang on to your anger, he told fellow Conservatives. “Let’s remember this feeling: coming close, but falling just short,” he said. “And let’s use it as fuel to redouble our efforts because our work is not over.”

Scheer, it should be noted, did his part in the ongoing grudge match on Tuesday, carrying that same tone right through to his day-after news conference in Regina.

We also heard on Tuesday from the Bloc Québécois Leader, Yves-François Blanchet, whose party was the only one to make appreciable gains on Monday night. (It should be noted that the Greens also added to their ranks, winning three seats, but leader Elizabeth May did not conceal her disappointment that the hoped-for big breakthrough had failed to materialize in this election.)

Blanchet, with refreshing candour, at one point said he had no responsibility to make this new Parliament work; that’s Trudeau’s job, he said, and the Bloc will be looking out only for its own interests.

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So there’s the picture of the Commons that emerged when ballots were counted on Monday: three leaders, all who lost ground, yelling over each other to claim that they won. The only party that actually did win strength has no interest in making Parliament function.

Welcome to the Parliament that the ugly election of 2019 created. It could get noisy.

Clarification - Oct. 28, 2019: This column was edited from a previous version to make clear that Yves-François Blanchet told reporters that the responsibility to make Parliament work belonged to the prime minister and the Liberal Party, not to the Bloc Québécois. A previous version stated that Blanchet said he had no interest in making the new Parliament work.

Susan Delacourt is the Star’s Ottawa bureau chief and a columnist covering national politics. Reach her via email: sdelacourt@thestar.ca or follow her on Twitter: @susandelacourt

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