Can someone explain to me how the Liberals and BQ lost 40 seats each? That would be like the Democrats losing 80 seats in Congress to the Greens or Communists...

The Liberals are a center party thats been slowly drifting left, and nobody likes their current leader so most decided to jump ship to where of center they were.  Center right went Conservative and Center left went NDP.  

Not too sure about the Bloc.

Canada is a very moderate country in general which is (typically) why the Liberals have been so successful traditionally. Even though extreme progressives will disagree with me, a lot of the success Stephen Harper (Conservative) has achieved over the past several years has been the result of being a very moderate center-right party; and his policies would (probably) best be represented in the American political system as a "Blue-Dog" Democrat.

Michael Ignatieff (Liberal) didn't really understand the traditional success of the Liberals and decided to steer the party to being a far more progressive party in order to steal support away from the New Democratic Party. The NDP is run by a far more charismatic leader (although I have always thought he seemed creepy personally) and has the freedom to run a campaign less based on reality and more based on ideology because there is no realistic expectation that he would ever govern. As a result of this, moderate Liberals stayed home or voted for the Conservatives while progressive Liberals voted for the NDP; and there wasn’t much support left for the Liberal party.

The Bloc is a much more difficult to explain situation ...

Personally, I suspect that the majority of people in Quebec know that they will be throwing out the Liberals provincially in their next election and (probably) replacing them with the Seperatist ADQ; but they don't actually want to separate for Canada at the moment. If the Bloc remained in power they would face an unwanted referendum so they looked for someone else to vote for; and the NDP promised them (effectively) everything that they wanted.

I think you meant separatist PQ not ADQ. The ADQ did support the Yes vote in 1995 (with only Mario Dumont elected) but they have since changed their views on the subject saying the would prefer trying to get as much power as possible away from the federal government so the province could decide for itself on most issues.

You can see the real reason the Conservatives won right here in this thread. Kasz's chart clearly shows how the entire political compass has been dragged to the right (apparently also towards authoritarianism, can't wait until the entire country is run by the PMO and we don't need these annoying MPs) over the years. People now describe centrist policies as the "extreme left."

The NDP surge is a counter-reaction to this tectonic shift. Most people gravitate towards the center, which is why the Liberals have been the natural governing party for so long. Now that the NDP is the only major national party anywhere near the center, it's battle between the new moderates and the extreme right.

there is a reason Canadians in this thread avoid talking about the Political Compass chart.   its batshit crazy.  just like how it can have me out left and yet still right on top of the conservative party on things like the vote compass.  harper took the right and formed it into a strong moderate conservative party. 

you can keep your sore-loser talk up if you wish, but its really just sad.

Its not a 'tectonic shift' to the right.

If you bothered looking up any of PC's prior charts, you'd know that they've rated the conservatives and liberals in similar same spots since 2005. If anything, the charts show that Mr. Harper is a very centrist leader, and the NDP has gained popularity as an extreme-leftist party to a point that gave the Conservative party the majority; as the average Canadian doesn't want to gravitate to the most leftist minority party of most any election in a Western nation.

Look at the charts yourself:

(2011)

(2008)

As you can see, they've only gone right wing in economic ideologies, and not authoritarian. Most nations have done this, as they've woken up from their spending pipe dreams, into an age of more fiscal restraint which brings more free-market approaches.

Here are the leaders' positions (note where Mr. Harper is):

I would like it if Canada adopted some sort of hybrid first-past-the-post/proportional representation system like some of the European countries (I think New Zealand has this too). In this system one of your votes goes to the one of the incumbents contesting the riding and your other vote goes to a political party. This would prevent a party getting less than 40% of the popular vote getting a majority while allowing local ridings to get proper representation. And it would increase voter turnout as well because then citizens wouldn't feel like their vote doesn't count. I could have voted for the Liberal MP (who finished in 2nd place. The NDP were a distant 3rd in my riding) in my riding "strategically" to make sure Conservative MP doesn't get my riding and then vote NDP for the proportional representation vote to benefit my preferred political party. Just about every first world nation aside from the Commonwealth nations has Proportional Representation to some extent. It's time that we adopted it.

there should be senate reform on the agenda, at some point,  so you should contact your mp with thoughts on how it should be reformed. 

1. Firstly, those charts do not reflect the position of the Liberal Party accurately at all. Nor do they properly represents the Green Party's positions. The Liberal Party has been becoming more and more leftist in position (now actually opposing corporate tax cuts being perhaps one of the most telling positions of that shift) for some time now and is pretty much common knowledge to most active citizens in Canada.

The following chart better aligns each party's position:

On a side note, the Liberals and the Conservatives are not in similar spots even in your charts; no more than what the NDP and Liberals are in mine. One is more centrist with a slight leaning while the other is far and away leaning one way.

2. The charts, either thoses from the CBC or PC, show that Harper is decidedly far from centrist. Well perhaps not that far, but no more than what the NDP are on the opposite end,

On your other point, that's far from the actual reason why the Conservatives had won. The NDP had more than doubled their seats and greatly increased their vote share. Most of that vote, however, came from both the Liberals and the Bloc Quebecois. While that proved instrumental in the historic night for the NDP, it split the vote between two left groups in many ridings, in Ontario especially, allowing the Conservatives to take some of those ridings with as low as 30% of the vote.

I'm not trying to take anything from the Conservative victory, their strategy worked brilliantly (weaken the Liberal vote so that it will be more evenly distributed between both the Liberals and the NDP) but your reasoning is far from the actual case.

On another note - It is quite amazing to see a majority government form with less that 40% of the popular vote. I'm curious if this, or something similar, has happened before. There are now talks of a merger between the Liberals and the NDP from several pundits... it's going to make for an interesting year.