Larry, you must understand how politics works in Canada. Here are the percentages of the popular vote in yesterday's election:

In terms of popular vote, the Conservatives had 36 per cent support compared with 30 for the Liberals, 17 for the NDP, 10 for the Bloc Quebecois, and 4 for the Green party.

Now...of those 5 parties, they can be described this way:

basically somewhat conservative in nature - Conservatives
basically somewhat liberal in nature - Liberals
socialist and very liberal in nature - NDP
provincial and strictly regional in nature - Bloc Quebecois (a one-issue outfit that wants Quebec to be controlled strictly by the French)
extremely liberal in nature - Green

So, the fact of the matter is that abut 36% of the Canadian public tends to be conservative, politically speaking, at this time...since the only party that IS conservative is the Conservatives.

That's normal here.

The fact that they won the election had nothing whatsoever to do with the war in Iraq or any war anywhere else. It had to do with the fact that people were sick and tired of a very old and worn-out Liberal administration that's been in power far too long, grown fat and lazy, and has a totally lacklustre and uninspiring man leading them (and he is now going to step down). The Liberals simply got burnt out, that's all. It's not that they governed all that badly, relatively speaking....or all the well either...they just were there too long.

The vast majority of the Canadian public wants nothing to do with the war in Iraq or the War on Terrorism, and it did not influence this election.

Only roughly one third of this public ever is inclined to hold what would be termed a "conservative" viewpoint in the USA. That's why we have five parties here, and only one of them is truly conservative. ;-) Under that circumstance, that party only needs about 34% of the vote to secure a minority government (in which case it must compromise with some other more liberal party in parliament to get legislation passed). That 34% does not represent the prevailing mood of the Canadian public.

The conservatives win in this country only when the Liberals have been in power so long that everyone is sick of them...or when the Liberals screw up and pick a really lousy leader who has no charisma (that's been known to happen on occasion, and it did recently).

If there were only 2 parties in this country, the conservatives would never be able to win any election unless they simply stopped being "conservative" (in the more recent American definition of the word).

This populace does NOT approve of the war in Iraq, unless you call about 20-30% nationwide support "approval".

This populace is profoundly cynical about the Liberal Party, the Conservative Party, and the USA's foreign policy...but there doesn't seem to be any way to avoid them, does there? We're stuck with all 3 of them, so we shrug and deal with it as best we can.