Any way you look at it, there’s a lot of good you can find as you take a close

look at the results in Monday’s federal election.

Heading the list is the fact that despite the wintry weather in much of the country, the turnout was almost spectacular, particularly by comparison with those in recent municipal elections and in the presidential elections i n the United States.

Sure, the 65 per cent of eligible voters who did cast ballots is well short of ideal, but it’s better than the 2004 election, when merely 61.8 per cent of those eligible bothered to turn out on June 28, 2004, when snow was a distant memory for all Canadians south of the northern Territories.

A close second, in this scribe’s view, is the failure of yellow journalism to have its desired effect in Canada’s largest city.

Anyone unfortunate enough to pay the price charged for last Sunday’s Toronto Sun ought to have been more than slightly disturbed at its contents, led off by a front page offering 218 reasons not to vote Liberal.

Whatever else might be said about this abandonment of a fundamental of journalistic ethics — that opinions should be confined to editorials and columns and news columns should be free of bias — the move may well have backfired, in that the favoured Conservatives failed to gain a single seat in Toronto, the Liberals retaining all but three that went to the NDP.

In third place among the “good news” items was what happened in Quebec.

Early in the long campaign, the separatist Bloc Québecois seemed poised to win nearly all the seats in La Belle Province and the general expectation was that the Conservatives would once again be shut out. Instead, the message Stephen Harper had struck a responsive chord, particularly in rural Quebec, and the Tories emerged with 10 seats and a larger share of the popular vote (24.6 per cent) than the Liberals (at 17.3 per cent, concentrated in the Montreal area).

This must be seen as good for Canada, particularly when you compare the results in some of the francophone ridings with what happened in 2004. For example, in the riding of Louis-Saint-Laurent (named after the Liberal prime minister?), where the BQ candidate, Bernard Cleary, won by a healthy 3,281vote margin last time around, Conservative Josee Verner got 57.7 per cent of the votes — 28,606 compared with just 11,977 for Cleary and a mere 3,180 for the Liberal candidate.

What a contrast that sort of showing is to what seemed highly possible a few weeks ago — a Tory government that had overwhelming support in Western Canada but no seats in Quebec.

Now, Mr. Harper finds himself in a position where he could easily pick one of his 10 Quebec MPs as his deputy prime minister or House leader and thus find himself in a good position to do even better in French Canada when the next election takes place, perhaps as early as next year.

Of course, there’s also good news on the local front, in that after a brief respite we again have a member on the government side of the house.

And the local election results might also be seen in a positive light even by those who didn’t support David Tilson’s re-election. Not only was there a good turnout mirroring the national figures — 65.1 per cent of the 75,797 registered electors — Mr. Tilson’s convincing victory was still short of a majority win. All told, when the last of 232 polls had reported, he had 23,627 votes of the 49,304 ballots cast. In other words, 25,677 electors voted for someone else.

One way of looking at that result is that what’s regarded as one of the safest Tory seats in Ontario (particularly in provincial elections) might not be that way forever, particularly if there’s a move one day to accomplish either a merger or an alliance between the Liberals and NDP aimed at replicating the “Unite the Right” feat that produced the merger between Canadian Alliance and the federal Progressive Conservatives.

It will be interesting to see what role Mr. Tilson will wind up playing in Ottawa. The fact that his party was shut out again in Toronto will increase the likelihood that he will not have to return to the backbenches. He may not necessarily win a cabinet post, but his experience should auger well for at least a posting as a parliamentary assistant or a committee chairman.

Then again, his provincial experience in the role could well lead to him being picked for a disciplinary role as Conservative party whip.

Whatever the case, this is one election that will lead to some interesting days on Parliament Hill, as Mr. Harper tries to avoid the disastrous outcome Joe Clark encountered when he tried to obtain the passage of an unpopular federal budget. As you might recall, his minority government fell, Pierre Trudeau came out of “retirement” and the Liberals coasted to another election win.

The same thing might happen if the new government comes up with a budget that’s disliked by all three opposition parties, all of which are at least slightly to the right of the Tories when it comes to economic issues.