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Post by shykid on Mar 24, 2011 10:17:29 GMT -5
I am going to the airport to head up to Ontario in a few hours, and I just had a mental image of that greeting me when I get off the plane. Horrifying.
edit: lern2grammar, shy
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Post by Mlle Antéchrist on Mar 24, 2011 18:09:55 GMT -5
And the Conservatives' ads against the opposition aren't only childish and low, they're also damn weak. "Gilles Duceppe is too montrealer to represent the regions' people." Coming from Montreal is the worst that they could find? He had to come from somewhere, and the most populated city around sounds likely enough... And given that as long as Québec is part of Canada, Montreal will be a canadian city, I don't want a government that will reject it and its million inhabitants to earn some petty regionalists' votes. They haven't been playing those ads out here in Alberta, or at least I haven't seen any... which makes sense, given that we don't have an BQ candidates. Out here it's mostly just quote mining various Liberal party members. |
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Post by Mlle Antéchrist on Mar 26, 2011 2:20:15 GMT -5
So, it's official: We're having another election. The campaigns won't begin for another couple days, but the mainstream parties are already doing plenty of dramatic show-boating.
I like how Conservatives keep trying to badmouth the Grits by claiming that they'll form an "undemocratic" coalition with the NDP when the Cons themselves are a coalition party, and likely wouldn't be in power if they hadn't unified the right-wingers by merging. How quickly we forget, hmm?
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Post by canadian mojo on Mar 26, 2011 21:32:10 GMT -5
So, it's official: We're having another election. The campaigns won't begin for another couple days, but the mainstream parties are already doing plenty of dramatic show-boating. I like how Conservatives keep trying to badmouth the Grits by claiming that they'll form an "undemocratic" coalition with the NDP when the Cons themselves are a coalition party, and likely wouldn't be in power if they hadn't unified the right-wingers by merging. How quickly we forget, hmm? How I wish that the governor general would come out on national TV and take those fuckwits to task for lying about the legitimacy of coalition governments. |
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Post by MaybeNever on Mar 27, 2011 1:27:47 GMT -5
I'm not sure I see the problem with a coalition government, although possibly because they basically don't exist down here.
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Post by canadian mojo on Mar 27, 2011 2:44:18 GMT -5
There is no problem. It just that far too many people think that we elect a king and that he should be allowed to rule as he wants even if he controls less than half the votes. They seem to forget that everybody in the parliament is entitled to a vote and that they are free to band together as they want and are free choose whoever they want to be their leader.
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Post by Mlle Antéchrist on Mar 27, 2011 6:30:08 GMT -5
The problem is that people see our elections as being solely about who becomes Prime Minister, when that's secondary to another purpose: Representation that reflects what the majority of Canadians want via the election of MPs to the House of Commons.
I think a lot of it comes from being influenced by how the American system works. When you vote directly for a president, then yeah, a coalition replacing him or her might be undemocratic. However, we don't vote directly for the PM -- we vote for representatives from our ridings. It's the members of the party with the most votes that select the PM, with the party leader pretty much always being de facto PM.
If the NDP and Liberals gain more votes between the two than the Conservatives, and they form a coalition party that accurately reflects the overall platforms that their voter base wants, it's not undemocratic.
Edit: Just noticed that I basically paraphrased what Canadian Mojo said. Redundancy is redundant.
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Post by MaybeNever on Mar 27, 2011 13:14:24 GMT -5
I realize now that I slightly misread the original comment, and read "lying about the legitimacy of coalition governments" to mean that they were saying such governments had some when you felt they did not. I realize now that I had it backward.
So how come Harper's the PM if the Conservatives control a minority of the votes? Did they originally control more? Or do they hold a plurality?
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Post by theoneandonly on Mar 27, 2011 15:27:43 GMT -5
They have a minority of seats, but it's still more than the other parties. There are four parties in the House Of Commons - Conservative, Liberals, NDP and Bloc Quebecois - so you don't need to have a majority of seats to be the governing party
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Post by Mlle Antéchrist on Mar 27, 2011 15:37:15 GMT -5
I realize now that I slightly misread the original comment, and read "lying about the legitimacy of coalition governments" to mean that they were saying such governments had some when you felt they did not. I realize now that I had it backward. So how come Harper's the PM if the Conservatives control a minority of the votes? Did they originally control more? Or do they hold a plurality? We have four major parties in Canada (The Liberals, Conservatives, NDP and Bloc Quebecois) plus a ton of smaller parties, which allows room for minority governments. Basically, it's when one party has more seats than any other individual party, but all of the opposition parties collectively hold more seats than the ruling party does. We don't vote directly for the PM here, we vote for MPs (representatives for each electoral district or "riding") into positions referred to as "seats" -- basically, a position in Parliament -- and the party with the most seats, when compared to other individual parties, selects the PM from amongst their ranks Generally the party leader gets the job. In short, if two of the opposition parties collectively hold more seats between them than the ruling party does, and they form a coalition, they'd become the ruling party and the current PM would be replaced with the leader of the coalition. Harper is trying to claim that the Liberals and NDP are going to do this is Canadians don't vote for a Conservative majority, which the Libs and NDP are denying, and he's been trying to claim that such a coalition would be undemocratic, which is crap. The clusterfuck going on right now is the result of the other parties being unhappy with the budget introduced by the Finance Minister, and the Cons refusing to negotiate with them. The opposition issued a motion of No Confidence, and the Speaker of the House found the Conservative government guilty of Contempt. Since Harper doesn't want to step down, Parliament has been dissolved pending an election. It's all very dramatic. |
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Post by Jodie on Mar 27, 2011 17:03:27 GMT -5
I've always voted Green Party before, but I think I am going to vote NDP this year.
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Post by Mlle Antéchrist on Mar 27, 2011 17:13:05 GMT -5
I'm not certain of who I'll vote for. I just know that it won't be the Conservatives.
The frustrating thing is that I'm in Stephen Harper's riding, which all-but-guarantees a Conservative seat. It makes me feel a bit cheated at times. Still, adopting a defeatist attitude isn't going to change that -- you can't make a difference if you don't bother to vote.
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Post by Mlle Antéchrist on Mar 27, 2011 21:43:01 GMT -5
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Post by Jodie on Mar 28, 2011 13:06:55 GMT -5
^ Mine was Green Party, of course, with NDP a very close second. I'm still likely to vote for NDP though in the (maybe hopeless) thought that Harpie can be pushed out of office, even if there is a coalition with the Liberals.
I'm so sick of the these Conservatives - worst government in Canada evar.
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Post by Jodie on Mar 28, 2011 13:49:43 GMT -5
I like how Conservatives keep trying to badmouth the Grits by claiming that they'll form an "undemocratic" coalition with the NDP when the Cons themselves are a coalition party, and likely wouldn't be in power if they hadn't unified the right-wingers by merging. How quickly we forget, hmm? onservative Reform Alliance Party! I LOLed so hard when they called themselves that for about a day. |
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