They say history doesn’t repeat itself, but it makes a pretty good stab at it when it comes to the federal Conservative party and its leadership.

In 1966, 13 years before Andrew Scheer was born, John Diefenbaker was humiliated and dumped from the leadership by a party that had been persuaded he could not lead it back to power – a fate that Scheer is struggling to avoid today.

Let’s hope the new 43rd Parliament will not deteriorate into the ugly partisanship that marred the final months of the previous Parliament and that dominated the October election campaign.

Let’s hope that the election outcome has had a sobering effect. Let’s hope there will be more cooperation and less obstruction. Finally, let’s hope the new minority government, surely knowing its survival depends on it, will be more flexible than its majority predecessor and more disposed to move quickly on current issues and overdue reforms.

Andrew Scheer is never going to be prime minister of Canada.

And his Conservative party is never going to be closer to power than it is today – a strong opposition in a minority Parliament – until it recognizes that the country is changing. A political party that cannot adapt to change faces a bleak future.

In elections past, western Canadians were wont to complain that geography, time zones and the electoral system conspired to devalue their votes on the big night. With the outcome clear by the time ballot-counting crossed the Ontario-Manitoba border, eastern Canadians were snugly – smugly, to western eyes – asleep in their beds before polls closed in British Columbia.

It is going to be different tonight. It may well take west coast votes to whether the next government will be Liberal or Conservative – and majority or, more likely, minority.