Conservatives were the clear winners in byelections

We agree it's presumptuous to be making bold statements in light of the results of last month's federal by-elections.

After all, only four seats were up for grabs, out of 308. That's a little better than one per cent; hardly a representative sample.

And as is often the case with by-elections, the voter turnout figures were nothing to write home about. According to figures provided by Elections Canada, only about 28 per cent of those eligible to vote actually did.

So while it would be a mistake to read too much into these results, a couple of things are obvious.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservatives were the big winners election night. They took none of these four sets in the 2006 general election, but managed to collect one of them this time out, Desbethe - Missinippi - Churchill River in Saskatchewan, and they fell only about 150 votes shy of taking Vancouver Quadra. That's not bad, considering by-elections have something of a tradition of favouring the opposition parties, instead of the government.

If there was a big loser, we believe it was Jack Layton and his New Democrats. They finished last in Willowdale, some 200 votes behind the Green Party candidate. Besides, one of the strongest assets the NDP has ever had, namely former Ontario premier Bob Rae, is now a Grit, and a Grit MP to boot.

These are not happy days for Layton and company.

And despite some horn blowing in the Liberal camp, we don't think party leader Stéphane Dion has any business jumping for joy. True, the party did win three of the four seats being contested, but they won them all the last time out. The two Toronto races featured poster candidates, namely Rae and Martha Hall Findlay. The party would have been in very bad trouble indeed if either of those two had lost, or had achieved anything less than 50 per cent of the total votes cast. In both cases, the victors were just a little below the 60 per cent mark.

Winning two races his party was expected to win and losing one that they won the last time does little to help the Grit cause in the great scheme of things.

And it wasn't a bad night for the Green party. They crossed the 13 per cent mark in both Toronto Centre and Vancouver Quadra, which has got to put some smiles on a couple of faces.

So we see the results as meaning Harper has the right to grin, at least for a little while, Layton has some work to do, and we fear Dion still has some proving to do.

And who knows when the next election is going to be?