For Stephen Harper’s Conservatives and Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, Toronto’s municipal election is good news.

For Tom Mulcair’s New Democrats — not so much.

Drawing national lessons from local elections is always a delicate business. Monday’s contest is particularly tricky to analyze.

In large part, that’s because the vote hinged on a uniquely local issue: Did the city want four more years of the Fords in Toronto’s top job? Was it willing to risk the chance that in-your-face Mayor Rob Ford might be replaced by his equally belligerent brother Doug?

Making matters more complex was the fact that John Tory, the man who won the mayoralty race, was a Conservative favoured by Liberals.

During the campaign, high-profile Ontario Liberals endorsed Tory enthusiastically. When he won, Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne cheered.

By contrast, most high-profile Harper Conservatives tended to keep their distance.

Indeed, the most prominent Conservative to endorse Tory was former mayor and federal minister David Crombie.

Tellingly, Crombie served in cabinet in the pre-Harper era, when federal Tories still called themselves Progressive Conservatives.

Harper famously lauded the Fords in the days before Rob’s crack cocaine habit became public. On this race, however, the prime minister chose to remain neutral.

Still, it’s a good bet that Tory’s victory will provide more joy to Liberal Trudeau than to Harper’s harder-edged Conservatives.

That is one lesson.

The second and somewhat contradictory lesson is that this election also favoured the status quo. Of the 38 incumbent councillors running for re-election, only one was defeated.

Torontonians may have been anxious to keep the mayor’s chair Ford-free. But they were happy to re-elect just about everyone else on city council — including dyed-in-the-wool Fordians like Georgio Mammoliti.

This stemmed in part from the election’s single-minded focus on the contest between Tory, Doug Ford and Olivia Chow over who would be mayor.

But the victory of incumbency also suggests that residents of Canada’s largest city have no overwhelming desire to throw all the bums out.

Which should bring some cheer to Ottawa’s incumbents — the Harper Conservatives.

A detailed look at Monday’s election provides even more potential good news for the prime minister and his party.

On a ward-by-ward basis, Tory and Doug Ford were virtually tied. Tory won pluralities in 21 of the city’s 44 wards. Ford carried 20, doing particularly well in modest-income areas of Scarborough and Etobicoke.

An unabashed Conservative, Ford topped the polls in four ridings that elected Liberals federally in 2011 as well as two that chose New Democrats.

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Federal riding boundaries are due to change before next year’s election. Still, Monday’s results show that Ford Nation — with its love of low taxes and suspicion of elites — continues to thrive in the suburbs of Toronto.

And that is a boost for the Harper Conservatives.

Finally, the New Democrats.

By one measure, they more than held their ground. Councillors linked to the NDP, such as Janet Davis and Mike Layton, kept their seats.

Joe Cressy, a New Democrat who lost the Trinity-Spadina federal byelection to Liberal Adam Vaughan in June, picked up Vaughan’s old council seat Monday.

So that’s the good news for the NDP.

The bad news is that high-profile New Democrat Chow fared dismally in most of the city. She won pluralities in only three of 44 wards. In others with strong NDP organizations, like Toronto-Danforth (the bailiwick of her late husband and New Democrat icon, Jack Layton), she couldn’t beat Tory.

She couldn’t even carry both of the wards that make up Trinity-Spadina, the riding she represented federally in the Commons.

In part, Chow was a casualty of the anybody-but-Ford mood sweeping the city. In part, she paid the price of a lacklustre campaign.

But in part, her message of sensible social democracy just didn’t catch fire — either in its first, centrist iteration or in the second, more activist version.

The NDP will now have to figure what, if anything, this means for equally sensible social democrat Mulcair.

Thomas Walkom's column appears Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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