Election Time in Canada. Conservative government loses vote of non-confidence

Your diatribe doesn't deserve an adult response so I just removed my recent post.

 

He's wearing an Eastern cowboy hat.

 

The Conservatives issue is that it is not the natural governing party in Canada. It's a given that a majority of voters don't support the Conservative Party. Luckily for it, 40 percent of overall votes usually translates to a solid majority of seats.

I don't have a problem with the Bloc winning 50 seats despite getting 12 percent of the overall vote. A regional party could do the same in the U.S.

 

The Bloc's existence has removed a giant swath of traditional Liberal seats.

In the past the Liberals could win pretty much everything west of Manitoba and they'd have a majority.

It's Day 2 of the campaign and all Harper can talk about is a coalition--a non-issue if there ever was one. Problem is, as Barry McKenna points out, this is an easy subject for lazy journalists.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/dominance-of-coalition-chatter-betrays-an-embarrassing-truth/article1959099/

The media are drawn to the issue because it’s a classic he-said, she-said story, which is a lot less taxing than talking about the big issues facing the country, said Christopher Waddell, director of Carleton University’s school of journalism and communication and a former Ottawa bureau chief for The Globe and Mail.

“It’s an easy story to do,” Mr. Waddell explained. “All you have to do is take what people say and repeat it. You don’t have to actually think about tougher issues and tougher questions.”


Harper will keep hammering away on this, I'm sure, but it's a weak strategy. At some point Canadians will want to hear reasons why the CPC deserves a majority.

This is pure speculation but for a lot of undecided voters, there's still this niggling thing in the back of their minds that Harper is too much the face of the party. Do we really want to hand over a majority government to a guy who doesn't want any other candidates in the party being seen? What's he hiding?

 

Certainly no fan of Trudeau but we have the same opinion of the Windsors....

 

Roy MacGregor of the Globe has an interesting take on the election: if there's a political debate and a Canucks vs Habs playoff game on April 20, what do you watch?

Hmmmmm. Not a tough one.

 

To those with more political savvy than myself, what do you think of this?

http://presscore.ca/2011/?p=1980

 

I don't really see a great deal changing here and that's kind of because of our multi-party system. The whole election is framed on Harper and Ignatieff not being either trustworthy or capable enough to lead and neither seems to pick up enough ground to move anything.

At this point, the fringe party voters still vote for their people too and they all seem to think they have a chance if there's a coalition or a minority government, so there it sits.

I do take a very cynical view that this election isn't going to solve much or bring much change, but then, if it does, I have a feeling it will swing in Harper's direction with a majority.

I think the opposition should have waited longer to bring the government down. They had non-partisan committees probing the Tories' so-called "contempt" and if they let those committees do their work, they might have had a more credible smoking gun on the contempt issue. Frankly, though some of the liberal media outlets are calling it a "historic first" that a government was found in contempt, what else would you expect a group of power-hungry politicians to do? If the opposition motion said it was going to toss out the government because they were "baby-eating monsters" it still would have been passed.

So, Harper introduces a budget that made some concessions on opposition programs and he's got one thing going for him. No one denies they've managed the economy well, there's another thing. Now, he goes after the coalition talk and gets Ignatieff to say he's not going to enter into any coalitions.

Factor that all together, and it makes one wonder why Iggy forced the election. It's not likely he could win without the other parties and he's now said he won't take them to build a government. Iggy can't win on his own, so Harper's strategically put himself in a position that he can win.

 

Sounds like the people who wanted to indict Bush for war crimes.

The post got one thing wrong. Parliament cannot convict anyone of a crime.

Where is the petition for Chretien and Martin to get indicted for war crimes? I don't put any stoc into what a lunatic posts on the Internet.

 

Ridiculous. For one thing, the opposition parties actually stopped any chance of there being any credible "trial" or hearing of evidence when they put forward the non-confidence motion and stopped their own committees from looking into this. At an impeachment, there are actually hearings, trials, and yes evidence.

Again, Ignatieff could have written anything into that motion about the Conservatives and it likely would have passed.

Besides that, unlike America where your president (and I believe his cabinet) are very much enshrined in the system, the prime minister himself exists only through convention. I don't believe there's any set doctrine governing how his cabinet operates.

 

Well, he's not MY president. I'm just a very non-political Canuck.