A good slogan for the Tories might have been “I’m voting Conservative this time.”

I heard more than a few Liberal voters phrase their choice this way, connoting both a rueful vow not to vote the same way they did the last time, and a tentative, probationary willingness to experiment with the Conservatives. You could describe these voters as Tory-curious. “Sure, I’m voting Conservative, but that doesn’t mean I’m a Conservative.”

Many did—not enough to put the Conservatives into power, but enough to humble the Liberals, if that were possible. Heroic efforts will be made—and, given the media’s weakness for the expectations game, may well succeed—to spin this result as some sort of a triumph for the Liberals, largely because they did not do quite as bad as it appeared they might, circa June 10. But set against the landslide they were expected to win when Mr. Martin became Prime Minister, or even the comfortable majority predicted on the eve of the campaign, it’s clear how much has been lost.

The media love to talk about turning points and campaign tactics, but in fact the cement began to dry around the Liberals’ feet in the first week of the campaign. Accountability, integrity, trust: these issues hung around Mr. Martin’s neck from the start. True, he was able to turn that mood of mistrust back on to the Conservatives in the late going, especially in Ontario, with a sordid, brutish fear campaign that went largely unanswered by the strangely passive Conservatives. But meanwhile the NDP and the Bloc made major gains.

Indeed, in an election in which all three federal parties moved sharply to the left, it is striking that the biggest winner in this election is the Left: taking, between the Bloc, the NDP and the Green party, roughly a third of the vote. Mr. Martin moved off the centre-right, but was not able to find votes to his left, instead driving up the NDP vote. He moved off the strongly federalist position occupied by his predecessor in Quebec, recruiting former separatists as candidates, and succeeded only in driving the Bloc Quebecois to perhaps its strongest performance ever.

Mr. Martin’s critics in the Liberal party wondered aloud why he did not run on the Liberal record, notably its two great victories on the fiscal and national unity fronts. But he could hardly run on the Clarity Act, having tacitly opposed it. And while he met with early success as finance minister, conquering the deficit in the space of three years, that was yesterday’s issue. As Winston Churchill discovered, voters are ruthlessly—and rationally—forward-looking. The cruel irony of politics is that yesterday’s success sows the seeds of tomorrow’s defeat: by solving a problem, winning a war, defusing a crisis, you remove one of the chief arguments for your re-election.

Mr. Martin can hardly rejoice in this result. True, he will probably be able to hang on to power, depending on whether he can negotiate the support of the NDP. Certainly he must, if he is to hold onto his job—as the leader of the Liberal party, never mind as Prime Minister. But it is anything but a mandate. The public has reluctantly handed the keys back to the Liberals, not out of any great enthusiasm for the party or its platform, but purely out of central Canada’s enduring fear of the unknown.

It lessens every election, and eventually the Liberals will find that well has run dry. They were only able to turn the trick this time out by calling an election with 18 months to go in their mandate, and scant weeks after the uneasy marriage of the Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives was arranged. With a heavy assist from the media, they were able to charge a party that had not even held its first policy convention with having a “hidden agenda.” (Hidden agenda! They’d barely had time to print up business cards.)

But now the election has past, and the Tories have elected more than 90 members, with a significant contingent from Ontario. As Ontarians have a chance to look at the new party and its leader, as they watch their Ontario MPs perform, as the bitter dregs of the old Progressive Conservative party fade from view, it will no longer be possible to paint the party as “the devil you don’t know.”

And while Mr. Martin was able to hold on to enough centre-right voters to stave off the Conservative hordes—and his enemies within the Liberal party—this time out, he can now govern only with the support of the NDP. What this means for the country one shudders to imagine. But it can hardly endear Mr. Martin to the good burghers of Ontario, who may live to regret their loss of nerve this time out. And if Jack Layton makes good on his pledge to make proportional representation the condition of his support, we can kiss goodbye to majority governments forever.

For the Conservatives, it is another bittersweet campaign. Once again, they have made great gains on their previous showing. But once again, they have fallen short of what they might have done.

While Stephen Harper’s position as leader is secure—and while his achievement in bringing the two parties together and preparing them for the snap election is real—questions should nonetheless be asked about Conservative campaign strategy: notably, the decision to downplay the platform.

The Liberals, it is said, value power at any price. They have held on to power, just. But at what price?