Amid the good-natured triumphalism at Scarborough Southwest MPP Lorenzo Berardinetti's election night victory party, there was just a hint of schadenfreude in the air.

Liberal Party faithful in the small campaign office crowded around the television set, watching both their own results and those coming in about Don Valley West, where Progressive Conservative leader John Tory was dying the death of 4,923 cuts, that being the number of votes by which Tory lost the riding to popular Liberal incumbent Kathleen Wynne.

The cheers for Tory's imminent demise were almost as boisterous as those for Berardinetti's imminent re-election, or the early media predictions of a Liberal majority.

Now no one wants to begrudge the Liberals their day - a second majority government in a row puts them in history-making territory - and Wynne is an enormously well-liked politician both inside and outside the party.

But while Tory's political demise may be a short-term victory for Liberals, it has the potential to be a long-term setback for the good folk of Toronto.

His politically disastrous views on religion and education aside, Tory represented a marked shift for the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party, away from the hard-right-wing, confrontational and ultimately destructive styles and policies of Mike Harris.

Tory's leadership marked an acknowledgement of important realities for urban Ontario that had previously been a blind spot for Progressive Conservatives - and a willingness to correct the errors that blind spot led to, to make Toronto work.

In the election, he promised cash for public transit that his predecessors abandoned and at least some form of relief on the $700-million download that his predecessors inflicted and perpetuated.

Would it have been enough? Would his value-for-money audits result in a price too high for Torontonians to stomach, for those corrections? Perhaps, but in all likelihood, we'll never have the opportunity to find out.

Tory's successors are almost sure to be cut from the same cloth as those predecessors, hard right-wingers who, thanks to the failure of mixed member proportion, recognize the party can obtain a comfortable majority government by demonizing Torontonians to the point of alienating their votes, and still pull in enough seats elsewhere to become a majority.

And four years from now, the memory of Harris will be almost a decade old; a large number of voters will be young enough to wonder what all the fuss was about.

So Liberals who are delighted at the demise of Tory's political aspirations should also be girding themselves for a serious fight, which this election was decidedly not. This time out, the Progressive Conservatives fought a defensive battle on a small, but significant education policy, when they might have attacked Premier Dalton McGuinty's record of broken and badly-bent promises to great effect.

That won't be how things go in 2011.

Then, the Liberals will be looking for a third term after a second one that odds are will have contained a recession similar to the one that seasoned former premier Bob Rae's NDP for defeat at the hands of Harris in the early 1990s. A party that plays on the same anger and anxiety that hard times engenders will be a formidable opponent.

Given that, it would be a comfort to think that Tory can hold on to the leadership despite lacking a seat in the legislature, despite having spent $15 million on an election that made no gains for his party, despite a large contingent of Progressive Conservatives who believe that Tory's move to the centre was as much of a mistake as his endorsement of public funding for private religious schools.

But realistically, Tory doesn't stand much chance of hanging on for the rest of the year, never mind the rest of the term. Ironically, Wynne's victory in Don Valley West could turn into the worst thing for cities in this province since the Common Sense Revolution.