I know, I know, Bush, twice, but you're supposed to be better than this:
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is on course to win a second minority government and a stronger mandate to tackle a financial crisis amid the deepest economic slowdown in 16 years, preliminary results show.
Harper's Conservative
Party is leading in 145 districts, according to early results on Elections Canada's Web site. The Liberal
The stronger showing for Harper, 49, in today's vote strengthens his hand to control the legislative agenda as the country deals with the impact of the global financial crisis. His first task will be to shore up banks and manage a slowdown in tax revenue that threatens to end a record streak of 11 consecutive budget surpluses.
At least he's in the minority, still.
Hey, maybe all our wingers will emigrate!
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This is better than expected
A couple of weeks ago, we expected a Con majority.
The NDP has more seats now, maybe even up to nine more, and may even hold onto its one Québec seat.
You have to understand that Harper spent a very long time showing that his part of the right wing was compatible with the Québec right wing, but he blew it in this campaign. The Moment (for a majority) will be hard pressed to happen again.
Ah! Now I feel better
So I take back the snark about the wingers emigrating. I wouldn't wish them on anyone, although perhaps the Canadian immune system is more powerful than ours.
[ ] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
Was watching the Canadian Returns on TV
And they pointed out that the Cons were probably going to pick up more seats than last time. I think it's absurd to compare the results to the polls--POLLS!--from this cycle. Isn't the correct measure to compare it to the most recent, two years ago? By that measure, the cons didn't lose ground.
I have to say, the Canadian coverage was so much more informative than anything I've seen in the last decade in the US.
They didn't lose ground
...but they didn't get what they wanted. They ran against the weakest possible Liberal
Party there could have been, at a time when Québec voters were wondering what the point was in the Bloc, but they couldn't effect a decimation the way Jean Chrétien did. The Bloc ended up stronger, and the majority moment passed. And now we know where the low-water mark on the Liberal Party actually is.
So yes, we will have another 2-3 years of Reformatories. If the Libs can't get their act together, maybe longer. But still. It. Could. Have. Been. Worse.
there are lessons in this--
and the GOP here steals elections and blocks voters too, unlike our neighbors.
Voter ID
The Cons were playing Rovian voter ID games this time around. You couldn't just show up with an Elections Canada paper card (receive these in the mail) and a passport or something. Now there were stupid ID requirements.
Yeah, I read
about that. Which party voted with the Cons for that stupidity? That needs to be rescinded first thing, new parliament. The other 3 parties can just do it on a line vote, and they should, it hurts all of them and helps the Cons.
Everyone but the NDP
I can't imagine why the Libs would go for it, except maybe Harper added it to a confidence bill *sigh*. The Bloc sometimes reflects the occasional Québec bugaboo about hijab-wearers, I guess, and there were mutual accusations of voter fraud in The Referendum.
Needless to say, this noticeably hurts turnout in the North, among other places.
Every leftie
I know in Canada is saying "I can live with this". Minority govt is fine. He pissed off the other parties by breaking his word to call this election, they aren't going to be cooperative. Sure, it could have been better, but it's ok. Now at the bottom of the coming recession, we can turn around and hand Harper's ass to him on a platter.
Well, the Bloc...
...may allow the government to live if it tiptoes more carefully around Québec, which, I suspect, it will.
And Rahim Jaffer was toppled in Edmonton-Strathcona. By the NDP. That is a pleasant surprise, and a break from the unrelieved blue of Alberta.
why do you let the PM call elections?
UK does that too, and it's insane--they obviously time them for when they can win.
Artifact of government in Parliament
The government sits in the Parliament, and the executive functions of the government are actually functions of the legislature itself. So if the Parliament is deadlocked, the government fails. The PM, being powerful, can deliberately seize up the Parliament, so by custom he's allowed to cut to the chase and just call an election.
Nevertheless, Stephen Harper himself had your question, and he dealt with it by passing a fixed election law...whose spirit, if not whose letter, he violated by calling this one. Consequently, null result: another minority.
However, in a minority, the opposition can also lock up Parliament. So you never really can have fixed election dates in a Parliamentary system, unless you want to live with long periods of the lights off in Parliament.
i don't see why not--
people shouldn't have to be dependent on the whims of the person/party in power, should they?
knowing that every 2 or 4 or 6 years (at regular intervals) there's a chance to change officials is vital, i think.
And the ones in power want to keep and expand it, no?--which is why they shouldn't be the ones who get to call elections--it shouldn't be in their hands alone, but in the voters' hands.
Look what happens when you have fixed election...
...dates. You have two year campaigns where all those 'special' interests latch on to winners. You also have to two years of massive fundraising. Two years of getting on my nerves. This way keeps things a little shooken up. Not to mention that if parliament does stop working, they can throw the bums out and start anew. That's something I desperately wish we could do. Frequent elections also means more cylcing of who is holding a seat, a great benefit imho. I like some of the senators in this country, but frankly, most days I want to see them all gone.
but at least the officials aren't the ones
who decide when and if they get to keep or lose their seats. If nothing else, fixed elections keep officials on their toes bec they know that they'll be held to account (we hope) each time.
GQ..
....the election coverage alone had me clawing at the Canadian border to move there. It's incomparable to the drivel you see on CNN.
It's always dangerous setting an election date abitrarily...
.....do it too much or at too right of the time and you face backlash for being manipulative. Or at least you'd hope. So that's a problem with the system.
However, even two year spans are too much for the average person to remember all the mistakes their rep made. Make that 6 years for Senate members and 4 for presidents, and unless they make a HUGE, salient, bad decision sometime in there, they are hardly held accountable for it. It's usually one or two votes they are pressured on [again with the attention span thing] and often they escape from those.
So fixed election dates worsen the problem. There is too much of a time span in between to allow awful reps a chance to redeem themselves 3-6 months before voting day.
i still think it should never be their decision--
it has to be fixed, or somehow decided by voters--not sitting officials.
"Canada voter turnout lowest on record"
-- http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/reuters/08101...
"... Some 59.1 percent of eligible Canadian voters went to the polls Tuesday, breaking the previous record low turnout of just under 61 percent in 2004, according to preliminary results from Elections Canada released on Wednesday.
"There was either general apathy toward the candidates or a degree of voter fatigue as this was the third Canadian election since 2004," said Antonia Maioni, director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada.
Under Canada's system of government, the prime minister is able to schedule an election on the fly to test voter support and put seats in the House of Commons into play. ..."