I always wanted an excuse to link to this article.
Isn’t it the model for more than a few Latin American countries - with bad results all around?
Hey, Harper is proroguing parliament again. Last time, last year, it was to avoid a non-confidence vote, this time it seems to be to avoid dealing with inquiry into the torture of Afghan detainees and to replace outgoing senators with his people before parliament resumes.
I’m annoyed that the other three major parties are so totally ineffective that this guy with a minority government can shut down everything down three times in three years, yet still remain in power. Seriously?
I’m hoping the governor-general says no, but that’s unlikely to happen. There is no reason at all to prorogue parliament and everyone damn well knows it.
But yeah, Harper knows the opposition will cluck and fuss and do nothing, so he’ll get away with it again.
Proroguing sounds like some sort of WoW trick.
Man, fuck Stephen Harper. NPD! NPD! NPD!
You can really tell this is a videogame forum first. I think you mean NDP :)
In french it is NPD.
Daaaaaaaaaamn. Yes, I do mean NP–er, NDP. Ergh.
If I were in Canada, that’d be the party for me, although I’d prefer Bill Blaikey in the leadership post. I’ve had the opportunity to sit down with him for a couple hours and found him a very astute, sincere individual.
Seriously, fuck harper and everyone who votes conservative. It’s destroying this country. Of course, no one will notice because they pay 2% less taxes on goods. Whoop-tee-fucking-doo.
Oh well, we’ll have an election this year and most likely it’ll result in a conservative majority and then we’ll really see how fucking retarded they are, once they are fully loosed like the pack of ravenous retards they are.
I don’t follow Canadian politics too closely since I moved to the US quite a while ago, but wasn’t the (recent) really big shift in Canadian politics the formation of the Bloc Quebecois? IIRC, before that you had the west (other than BC) voting solidly conservative (as far as that goes in Canada) Ontario split but majority liberal, Quebec pretty solidly liberal, and the Atlantic provinces somewhat liberal, and BC a mix of liberal, conservative, and NPD. However now with the Quebec voting predominantly Bloc, Canada is always stuck in a minority government with the Conservatives in charge.
It seems to me that the cancer in Canadian politics, and the ones who are destroying the country are the Bloc. But then again I’ve always hated those bastards so maybe I am jumping to conclusions.
One more thing: I hope that the liberals have learnt their lesson that they can not get many seats from Quebec so long as the Bloc is in the election, so running a French leader makes no sense. Please don’t do that again. Hopefully they will get their act together, get a decent leader and form the next government with the NDP.
If everyone but the Conservatives hate Harper so much, why not form a coalition without him?
Not true at all. The Bloc was formed in 1991 and the Liberals managed to hold power for over a decade from then onward without issue. Plus, the Bloc is a good political party. Not as far left as the NDP, and way more realistic. The only issue is that they are a territorial party. If they were to go national with their platform, minus the separatist slant which they’ve acknowledged is pretty much useless nowadays, they’d do great things for this country. If you actually pay attention to their platform and politics, they are simply a very pro-people party. If you took what they want for Quebec and made it national, they would probably end up being exceptional.
The problem right now is that people were upset at the liberals and let the conservatives get a foot in the door. We don’t vote people in to office here, we vote them out of office. As long as the conservatives have a minority they’ll never do enough damage to get voted out of office. But I fear the real visible damage they’ll do once they actually have a majority.
Back in the fall of 2008, the opposition parties decided to form a coalition – the combination of their seats in Parliament in total would have been more than the number of seats the Conservative government. A coalition government is perfectly legal (as seen in a number of governments around the world), however, PM Harper spun it and told Canadians that the opposition parties were working against democracy.
If anything a coalition government represents different and more political views of Canadians than the current government. In the end, Harper had the Governor General (the Queen’s representative in Canada, since she is our head of state) to dissolve Parliament before the opposition parties’ coalition would defeat him in a vote of no confidence. It didn’t help that the Liberal party’s leader, Stephen Dion, even though a very intelligent man, lacked charisma and whose English was very poor (French being his mother tongue).
Harper is using Rovian political tactics. He smears the opposition leaders, especially the Liberals, even when it’s not election time. He wants Canadians to be constantly reminded how weak the opposition parties are and there is no real alternative to the Conservative party.
I haven’t been following the polls recently so I don’t know if the Conservatives are gaining any ground in Quebec and Ontario, where they need the ridings to sweep into a majority government.
Ok.
I guess we have to go further back then. The biggest change in Canadian politics was the implosion of the conservative party in 1993 after the 1000 year reign of terror of Brian Mulroney. 1993 saw a birth of two regional parties: reform and the bloc. Since the opposition parties were regional the liberal party ran basically unopposed in the other 5 provinces (and got a smattering of seats in the remaining 5) and rode to hefty majorities.
Only once the conservative party got its act back together in 2004 were the liberals challenged. Due to the Bloc holding dominance over Quebec they were unable to form a majority government and end was neigh for them as Ontario began to go back to their normal, ~60% liberal stance (instead of 100%).
Note that reform is now gone, they have become, or taken over, or whatever you want to call it the conservative party. The Bloc however, remains and will almost guarantee going forward minority governments – which is why I said that they were the biggest change in Canadian politics, as the other largest change has now been resolved (although it took ~10 years).
And Hannibal Lecter is a great guy other than the murdering, and so on. They are a separatist party. I don’t care if their economic policies are left of center or if they support gay rights, or whatever, they are for the dissolution of federation. Further, even if one could forget that they are axe murde… I mean separatists the fact remains that they are wholly a regional party and their only concern is what is best for Quebec (and I do not know if I agree with their definition of best, but like I said I don’t follow it too closely). That platform does not sell particularly well to other provinces.
I don’t know how this cancer will be excised from Canada. Quebec has always thought that it is special and they have whined for generations. Sometimes I think it would be best if they were allowed to go on their way (although that would mean that I would have to move family members) … although I have no idea how such a policy could be enacted or what it would mean.
I think that’s what makes Canada special. How many other countries tolerate a separatist party in their parliament, let alone have it be the official opposition for a few years? Canadians pride ourselves for our tolerance, even with the separatists. The last Referendum failed and the separatists never recovered from it. Sure now they’re the regional party but isn’t that the point of political parties, to represent the local/regional interests of the voters?
IDK, I thought that was the point of representatives. I thought that the point of parties was to unite representatives of similar political values so that they could have more power. But I am a software guy not a political scientist.
As a side note this was terrifying to live though. Sure, I had already graduated and I could leave at any time, but I have family living in that province. I had no idea what was going to happen. I was shocked at how close the final numbers came out. Horrified would be more accurate. To make things worse, my family is French and so they probably would have stayed within Quebec, I shudder to think what could have happened.
They probably would have had dual citizenship.
Yes, but what about their jobs? Their residences? If the referendum had gone the other way the effect on the economy would have been tremendously worse than 1976, which was god awful. People’s lives would have been shattered just so that French rednecks could thumb their collective noses at the English.
You make it seem like it would have been no big deal. Sadly that kind of thinking is pretty common in Quebec. Even were is technically possible to separate, which I doubt, it would have devastated the economy.