So there we have it – the last hours of Harper’s time in government, and lo and behold, there were no last grasps for power, no refusals to resign, no attempts to make last-minute appointments, no craven behaviour of any kind. From all accounts, the exit has been gracious and orderly, but as befitting his time in office, he kept all of the big decisions behind closed doors because he didn’t want any clips of him resigning or visibly stepping down in any way. And hey, ten years later, we’re not a dictatorship, this isn’t a fascist state, there is no cult of personality that people are worshipping. We had free and fair elections, and instead of voter suppression (and conspiracy theorists insisting that they would try to stuff ballot boxes, or that the odd ballots that had ink blotches on them from the printing process), we had a dramatic upswing in voter turnout. All of those doomsayers and the hysterical who have been bombarding our Twitter feeds with the insistence that democracy was dead in Canada – all for naught. That Vapid Narcissist whose stunt as a Senate page was part of her somehow insisting that the previous election wasn’t free and fair either and that the results were somehow stolen or illegitimate and necessitating acts of civil disobedience – she’s been trying to take credit for the election result (and inexplicably, people are actually congratulating her) – but this has nothing to do with her. There was no evil Bond villain that needed to be vanquished. This was politics. Sure, it was nasty and dickish most of the time, but it was politics. Hopefully we can spend the next few years unclenching, but we all know that Trudeau Derangement Syndrome is as much of a thing as Harper Derangement Syndrome. Hopefully, however, the hyperbolic nonsense won’t be quite so awful and unhinged (but who are we kidding?).

Good reads:

• Stephen Harper sent out a farewell letter to civil servants to thank them for the job they did, despite pretty much going to war with them for a decade. Unions quickly replied.
• Here’s your guide to the Conservative interim leadership. Diane Finley is pushing the “kids in short pants” under the bus for her pitch.
• Trudeau plans to hold a cabinet meeting later today, and one of the first orders of business will be to restore the mandatory long-form census.
• The NDP are also holding their first post-election caucus meeting today. No longer official opposition, they are branding themselves as the “progressive opposition.”
• Former Justice Ian Binnie held a general session for senators with disputed repayments last week, and begins individual arbitration sessions on the 16^th.
• The Green Party was paying Bruce Hyer an additional stipend for his role as deputy leader, but won’t say how much.
• Here’s a look at Canada’s first Afghan-born MP, who arrived as a refugee nearly 20 years ago.
• Kady O’Malley walks us through the good and bad points of the Reform Act sections MPs will have to vote on.
• Laura Payton reminds us again why the gender parity debate for cabinet is specious.
• Susan Delacourt writes about the path to victory for the Liberals.

Odds and ends:

Here are some more of the new Liberal, Conservative and NDP MPs.

Andrew Leslie has resigned from the board of directors of a security firm.

One of Harper’s former deputy communications directors has landed a job as the Senate’s director of communications.