Whatever other unpleasant words define our 2019 election, take solace at least in what was not.

We are not awakening to a scorched-earth morning after, the dawn of Trumpism, Canadian-style. We are not facing a stampede of newly minted nativists racing to take their seats in Ottawa with their backs turned to the world.

Maxime Bernier made his way so controversially into the editorial boardrooms and onto the national debate stage, stumping noisily for the entire People’s Party slate, including candidates that made no secret of their contempt for immigration in general and Islam in particular.

And Canadians voted with a thunderous meh, allowing the rage to pass us by. Our electoral contours, for all our regional frustrations, simply didn’t bend that way.

Quebec itself delivered the coup de grace, voting Bernier out of power in his home riding of Beauce. It seems likely that the People’s Party now is done and dusted.

There were other populist flashes elsewhere in the campaign. Midway through the final weekend, Andrew Scheer told a Conservative rally in Richmond Hill he would launch a judicial inquiry into the SNC-Lavalin affair “to get to the bottom” of Liberal corruption.

But when some in the crowd began to respond Trump-style with a chant of “Lock him up!,” Scheer quickly drowned them out with chant of his own, steering their fury away from summary incarceration and back inside the bounds of Canadian electoral civility with the words “Vote him out! Vote him out!”

Perhaps we will learn more in the days to come about unseen hands on the electoral scale. Was there any serious meddling by vested interests, foreign or domestic, on social media? Did Canadians ignore populism all by ourselves, or was the dirty tricks “seek and destroy” campaign against the People’s Party exposed last week by the Globe and Mail a major factor?

All that to say, if Canada managed in 2019 to whistle past the populist graveyard, it is too soon to declare ourselves out of the populist woods.

It is far from assured that Donald Trump will be gone and Brexit broken before Canada’s next election rolls around. Canadian didn’t turn a global tide. But we didn’t allow ourselves to be swept along by it either. Yay, us.

In the meantime, there will be no escaping the polarized regional aftermath of Monday’s vote: The fresh nationalist energy in Quebec that has lifted the Bloc Quebecois from oblivion to become a major force in Ottawa again; and the aggrieved western fury that painted the prairies a particular shade of Trudeau-loathing blue.

Alberta, Saskatchewan and most of Manitoba, as it turns out, will have Justin Trudeau to kick around while longer, despite their best electoral effort to unseat him. And as the reality of Monday night’s results settles in, with projections of a chastened Liberal party bloodied but unbowed — and poised to form a minority government — brace for the caterwaul of #Wexit — emotionally charged calls for Western separation.

Alberta’s pollsters had forewarned how the alienation would play out as election day approached. It was a given that Alberta would zig as much of the country zagged. But the anger would be more intense under certain scenarios — if Scheer’s Conservatives won the most seats, or the largest share of the popular vote, or both, yet still found themselves on the outside looking in, unable to locate partners for a workable government from their minority share.

Alberta Premier Jason Kenny, in his steady drumbeat of support for Scheer’s Conservatives, floated the notion that Alberta’s voiceless feeling could soon take the form of a provincial referendum on equalization payments.

“It’s a real-sticking point in Alberta,” Janet Brown, publisher of the Wild Ride polling newsletter, told CBC News on Friday.

“Right now that just seems a little bit of a half-baked idea. But depending on the outcome of this election, Albertans may see more value in this referendum Jason Kenny is talking about.”

Brown did, however, acknowledge an element of the “cognitive dissonance” inherent in Alberta’s position: that the province continues to embrace two ideas — the claim of strong environmental stewardship and a demand for the primacy of the oil and gas industry — that are increasingly at odds with the emerging science of climate change.

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But in describing Alberta frustrations, she pointed east, wondering at the hypocrisy of central Canadian consumption patterns.

“All this talk of climate change is very much focused on the oilsands – and out here we sort of wonder, why does nobody pick on the auto sector? We’re producing the fuel, yes, but that’s where it’s being used — by auto manufacturers, by people who drive cars. Why aren’t we going after Bombardier? We aren’t we going after the airline industry?

“Although yes we are emitters a lot of the carbon is here because of energy extraction – but other Canadians are sort of behaving hypocritically. They’re not rising to meet the challenge, they’re just expecting us to rise to meet the challenge,” said Brown.

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