It is hard to convey the palpable relief that had wafted across the capital by lunchtime the day after the stunning collapse of the Harper regime. Like survivors of a long and bitter occupation, old friends greeted each other with silent wide smiles, and then fell into quiet reminiscence under the sun of a beautiful autumn day, sharing inflated war stories on their part in driving the barbarians from the gate.

Recognition of the courageous fallen, especially among New Democrats — of those MPs, officials and staffers who did not survive the long campaign — were muttered in respectful sadness. More cheerful was the quiet satisfaction at the list of insults foisted on a sullen citizenry that would now be no more.

There will be not now be the hideous insult to the victims of communism laid in angry concrete in front of the Supreme Court of Canada. The long convoy of armoured black GMC Suburbans blocking traffic between 24 Sussex and the Langevin Block twice daily will no longer pass in silent contempt. Canadian soldiers will return to building sustainable peace in conflict zones, instead of the daily humiliation of serving as junior subalterns in the latest U.S. military folly.

Indeed, like footprints on a beach, the black marks of the Harper legacy on Ottawa and on Canada are already fading. They have left few public monuments that citizens will look at with either affectionate nostalgia or contempt. The foolish pundits who saw a “new Conservative Canada” being born under their watch are already rewriting their rhetorical excess. The Canadian courts will continue to reverse the judicial excesses of a gang in power who showed contempt for both government and the law itself. Memories of tax cuts for hockey pads and Lululemon gear are already being quietly chuckled over as a strange bad dream.

A senior First Nations leader, returning to the capital by train from working hard for the ouster of the Hun, greets an old colleague with nothing more than an overly fierce handshake and a penetrating smile that lasts several seconds longer than it would have two days earlier. A member of the permanent establishment greets a colleague in its seat of power, the bar of the Rideau Club, with a raised glass, no one having to say or guess to whom or what is his salute.

Sadly, for the hundreds of now unemployed young Tory staffers and their bosses, the return of Canada to normalcy — a Liberal government madly peddling back to the centre having campaigned on hazy promises to deliver more progressive Elysian fields — will soon erase their thousands of hours and a decade of effort to imprint a darker vision on the country.

Like every successful insurgent, celebrating their triumph over a hated establishment, the conquering Tory hordes faced a choice in the winter of 2006: to co-opt and to integrate the sullen subdued Canadian establishment or to remain aloof, to continue to play the outsider and to be proud of their isolated purity. Like John Diefenbaker, Jimmy Carter, and Mike Harris before them, they made the wrong choice. Renegades do not long remain in power.

So when the snow melts after a long Ottawa winter what will the dirty grit reveal? A Conservative party deep in a return to the bitter ideological divides of a nasty leadership campaign, probably. An NDP having bound its wounds, likely comfortable again in its usual role, hounding a business-friendly Liberal government into keeping at least some of its progressive promises.

An Ottawa officialdom, quietly, confidently, steering the good ship HMCS Canada back onto its true course: the sensible middle-power nudging the more powerful on the international stage toward good, and the nation domestically toward some small degree of greater fairness and some small victories for social justice. And the happy prospect of a two-year-long celebration of a progressive Canadian birthday will be peeking above the horizon.

But today, like the war-weary senior, slowly sweeping his front step of the mess left behind by the retreating armies, Canadians will reflect on how it happened. Ottawans and Canadians will soon move to long glasses of wine in front of winter fires, sharing the “where-were-you” chapter of story-telling about the dark years already fading.

And, perhaps, from the “How the hell did we let that happen?!” to the more useful, “So, what must we do to ensure that never happens again?” There are bitter lessons to be learned from first tentative, then full-blown invasion by the politics of class, race, gender, religious and ethnic division into the usually less welcoming body of inclusive Canadian society.

“Lest we forget,” it will be important to pass those lessons to future generations. How close we came to lasting damage, and how important it is to resist the fatal temptation of that poisonous politics when next it slithers into view.

Robin V. Sears, a principal at Earnscliffe and a Broadbent Institute leadership fellow, was an NDP party strategist for 20 years.

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