While walking to work today, I got the sense from the muted political chatter on the streets — chatter that was decidedly less muted yesterday — that Ontario is in the midst of a phenomenon I first witnessed after the 2006 federal election.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the political hangover. You had a wild time last night, but man, did you ever feel like crap this morning. Unless, of course, you support the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario, in which case you spent last night hugging the porcelain goddess while your NDP friends held your hair. Or not. This wasn’t Eyeopener election night, after all (that, friends, is a self-deprecating inside joke. You should have been there. Or not).

I digress.

The most interesting thing about the political hangover is that there is no cure; like it or not, Ontario will be governed by Dalton McGuinty and the Liberals for (wait for it) four more years. And it wasn’t until happy Liberals broke into the chant that’s become a staple of every U.S. president’s renomination that the full reality of fixed election dates really began to sink in.

Four years is obviously a long time in politics. Those who woke up this morning feeling the effects of a political hangover might as well have woken up to find they’d gotten married to a stranger during a drunken rampage.

Ontarians will head back to the polls in October of 2011; the Tories and the NDP will both almost certainly have new leaders and there is no telling what the controversial issue of the day will be.

It won’t be faith-based schools.

I don’t think.

But, as a few of us realized while watching CNN (of all things) at the same takeout Chinese place at which we watched the debate three weeks ago, now we’ll finally have more time to catch up on the 2008 U.S. presidential election.

And the possible 2007 Canadian federal election.

And November’s provincial election in Saskatchewan (perhaps, with enough convincing, we can get our own Daniel Bray to share his thoughts). I’m actually looking forward to that one, if only because it’ll be the first time in Canadian history when someone with my last name has a pretty good shot at becoming the premier. (I’d really been looking forward to someone with my first name becoming president of the United States of America, but we all know how that went.)