“good riddance”

Used to express relief that some­one or some­thing has been got­ten rid of. Also, “good rid­dance to bad rub­bish”. A wel­come loss or depar­ture. This expres­sion is often used as an excla­ma­tion. — from a dic­tio­nary of idioms.

For the infor­ma­tion of my non-Cana­di­an read­ers, Stephen Harp­er and his Con­ser­v­a­tive Par­ty have final­ly been kicked out of pow­er by a sur­pris­ing Lib­er­al Par­ty land­slide win. There has nev­er been any Cana­di­an politi­cian that I have regard­ed with such loathing. He has rep­re­sent­ed every­thing I’ve con­sid­ered vile, dis­gust­ing and immoral in Cana­di­an pol­i­tics. Divid­ed oppo­si­tion, abysmal­ly low vot­er turnout and gen­er­al apa­thy kept him in pow­er for what seemed an eter­ni­ty, but the Cana­di­an peo­ple have final­ly wok­en up. As a suc­ces­sion of cor­rup­tion scan­dals weak­ened his posi­tion, Harp­er hired an Amer­i­can cam­paign advi­sor — a hack strate­gist from the U.S. Repub­li­can Par­ty — who advised him to run a cam­paign designed to exploit big­otry, super­sti­tion and igno­rance in the man­ner of the Tea Par­ty ass­holes in the U.S.. Cana­di­ans, to their cred­it, were large­ly dis­gust­ed by this kind of cyn­i­cal creepi­ness. Vot­er turnout exceed­ed any­thing expect­ed. There is lit­tle doubt that this was large­ly an anti-Harp­er wave, not inspired by any high hopes for any oppo­si­tion par­ty. “Strate­gic vot­ing”, where vot­ers care­ful­ly vot­ed for who­ev­er had the best chance of turn­ing out the Con­ser­v­a­tives, seemed to catch on, and young peo­ple seem to have flocked to the polls, too. I’m no par­tic­u­lar fan of Lib­er­al leader Justin Trudeau, but he seemed to find his feet dur­ing the extend­ed cam­paign, and his par­ty will form a major­i­ty gov­ern­ment, with a plu­ral­i­ty in the pop­u­lar vote on top of its vic­to­ry in seats. The Lib­er­als have many pol­i­cy posi­tions that I strong­ly oppose (such as sup­port for the TPP and a par­tial accep­tance of the hideous Bill C‑51). We’ll see how this turns out, but at least we’re rid of Harper.