There will be plenty of spin that, despite the disappointing results, Stephen Harper was the real winner for mounting a strong campaign and upping his fledgling party’s seat count despite having so little time to work with. I don’t buy it.

Harper’s campaign was only a legitimate success if you’re judging it against Stockwell Day’s 2000 effort. But that only means that it was reasonably competent. Otherwise, it was actually a bit of a failure.

Heading into the campaign, a strong majority of voters were indicating that they wanted change. Given a passable alternative to Paul Martin’s Liberals, they would have taken it in a heartbeat – much as Ontario voters last year embraced Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals because they were looking for any alternative to Ernie Eves’ Tories. But Harper evidently failed to provide it.

It wasn’t all his fault, obviously. It was Cheryl Gallant and Randy White and Ralph Klein, and a nasty Liberal ad campaign that got more effective as the race went on. But the fact is, he ran a campaign that was no less flawed than the one Martin took so much heat for.

He failed to deliver a positive message. He equivocated just a little too much on social issues. He blatantly and rather clumsily tried to mislead voters as to his position on Iraq. He shamefully exploited the horrific murder of a 10-year-old girl in an already repulsive effort to paint his opponents as supporters of child porn. And, from a strategic perspective, he messed up big-time by getting way too cocky after the leaders’ debates.

Add all that to the fact that he’s not exactly the most charismatic or inspiring guy to begin with, and you can see the problem. I argued the day before the writ was dropped that the election would effectively prove a referendum on Harper’s suitability to lead the country. For now, at least, the people have spoken.

There’s no question that just enough NDP voters chickened out – especially in Ontario, and also in B.C. – to deprive the party of the major breakthrough it was hoping for. But it still has plenty of cause for celebration, if it plays its cards right.

The New Democrats will probably be reluctant to strike a formal coalition with the Liberals, if it’s offered. They’ll worry that, if they actually succeed in shifting Martin’s party substantially to the left, they’ll wind up with their vote eroding and get buried in the next election.

Maybe so. But you know what? They should go for it anyway. This is the closest they’ve gotten to power in 30 years, and who knows how long it’ll be until they get this close again. So they should take every advantage of the opportunity to make the government’s priorities their own – because that, after all, is presumably why people get into politics.

We’re not talking proportional representation, either - though it's understandable why they'd want it, having received more than half the Conservatives' popular vote but just one-fifth their seat count. We’re talking public housing, environmental protections, child care, and whatever else really matters to the people they aim to serve. If they really play their cards right, they might even be able to hold a couple of Cabinet positions responsible for those areas.

So get to it, guys. This is what you’ve been waiting for.

Update: Maybe they won't have a chance to get to it after all. The latest numbers show the NDP with 19 seats, one short of the number needed to put the Liberals over the top. They're within 150 votes in at least three ridings (in one case it's only about 40), so I'm thinking there'll be some recounts before we know for sure.

One of the highlights of last night’s coverage was the array of pollsters on each of the networks trying to explain that there was nothing wrong with their methodology – that they’d been tracking everything properly, and the electorate had just shifted in the past couple of days. But whatever their excuses, the bottom line is that our faith in their abilities to correctly peg the results has been inexorably shaken.

Good thing, too. One of the worst things about this campaign was the way that, more than ever before, it became more about following the polls than following what was actually happening on the hustings. It was like watching the ESPN Gamecast of a baseball game – you could see the numbers constantly changing, but couldn’t actually see what was moving them. And then, to top it off, the numbers proved entirely false.

If we take nothing else from the past five weeks, let’s at least remember that there’s only one vote that matters.

It’s mighty clichéd to mourn all the great candidates who deserved better fates. But at least a couple deserve mention.

Tony Clement, who lost to a far lesser candidate in Colleen Beaumier, has to be the unluckiest guy in Canadian politics. In the past couple of years, he’s lost the Ontario Tory leadership, his provincial seat, the federal Conservative leadership, and now a federal seat. Tony is a quality guy who, even though he’s still far too much of a conservative true believer for my blood, brings a lot to the table. One day, he’ll find voters who properly appreciate him.

Then there’s Dennis Mills. For the rest of the country, Jack Layton’s victory in Toronto-Danforth was the best outcome. But the riding itself has lost a truly committed constituency MP and a genuinely decent guy. Dennis has his quirks, and he was out of sync with urban Toronto on certain social issues. But for all the mediocrities toiling in the Liberals’ Ontario caucus, it’s a shame he had to be one of the few to go.