I think someone is broadcasting to different focus groups, with different messages. What I hear is that the unholy troika of layton, dion and the bloc. But the weight of the accusation is on Jack Layton being a comsumate ends justifies the means guy , followed by Dion getting what he couldnt get with a direct election.
I’m not gonna say what you heard on your media was wrong , but it might be crafted to get a desired result.
Had that happened after say two years from the election ,I dont think anyone would have disagreed with you. Seven weeks after an election might be legal within the westminster form of parliament , but its a coup none the less.
Quite easily I would imagine. I dont know what you think of Mr Harper personally , but I see Duceppe as being a consumate politician doing what ever he can for his constituency. He will work with whom ever he has to.
I will say though in my personal opinion that Duceppe falls into the same category as Ed Broadbent for me. He is in the wrong party. Had either been a liberal or a conservative , I would have voted either of them for PM. For a seperatist , I find Gilles Duceppe as a consumate Canadian , rather than a regional leader like Harper or Dion or worse a Toronto cityboy like Layton.
Not really , those other countries just call out the army and justify it with the state of emergency. Canada has a very strong sense of democracy. Unlike the States , we have not had a civil war , yet anyways. The closest we had was the Riel rebellion.
If anything , we have not had any sort of test that would make us wonder about our traditional democracy, to the point of taking up arms. Most people, tend to grumble and wait until the next election and then fall for the same thing all over again,hoping that it will be better this time around.
So long as we can avoid going to a pizza parliament, we can weather these little blips as they occur.
The GG has set a terrible precedent. Now a PM can ask to prorogue parliament to avoid a confidence vote. Bad news.
No floor crossers, but I am expecting around 12 Liberals in Conservative-friendly ridings to find sweet civil service appointments in the next few weeks, resulting in by-elections across the country in January. This could get Harper his majority.
While I’m delighted that Canadian politics is finally so interesting, I wish it didn’t have to be this way.
And if she had not, she’d had set the precedent of the Governor General refusing the requests of a duly elected Prime Minister, which is also bad news.
She had no good option open to her, so she picked the one that goes straight down the middle; it only puts things off seven weeks, after all, gives the Conservatives a chance to table a budget, tests the lasting power of the coalition, and doesn’t interrupt Parliament for very long, and prevents a standoff between her office and the PM. It’s telling that she spoke to Harper for two hours. We won’t know for a long time exactly what they said but I’ll bet you there’s some unwritten conditions on this.
This is a VERY unusual situation, Constitutionally speaking. It’s unliely it’ll ever come up again, at least anytime soon.
For what it’s worth, I agree with you about Jean. But even after a day’s reflection, I have to say, I’m really upset about how all this has turned out. For the first time since coming to the US, I’m really not feeling so proud of us.
You and approximately thirty-three million other Canadians. I’m sure members of the BQ and PQ are positively thrilled, but that’s about it.
But look at it this way; it’s going to be resolved, peacefully. The apparatus of state will function throughout the process. There won’t be a civil war or tanks in the streets. We’ll have another election within the next four and a half years in which we can vote out the clowns who started all this. The country has continued to plug along just fine while all this happened. That’s the mark of a truly stable democracy - that when you havea crisis like this, it’s mostly talking heads on the enws channels and white guys bitching at each other in Parliament and Senate seats being auctioned off to opportunistic weasels. It’s a GOOD sign, a sign of the strength of our nation, that this is as bad as it ever gets.
If he had prorogued for a year, then yes, however, he did not do this – he only prorogued for about a week longer (a week earlier) than it would have typically been prorogued for Christmas/New Years – he was lucky with the timing.
If he tries to prorogue again in January, then I doubt if the GG would go along with it, but by that time he may have come up with poposed legislation more acceptable to the majority of the MPs, and the coalition may have fractured, in which case he will not get the boot. If the government does fall in January, we will be back to the question of whether a coalition should be given a chance, or whether it should go to the polls.
Come January, what are we to expect? There will be a budget presented by the Conservatives, which will be a vote of confidence. If the Coalition is still in place, they will vote against it, and we will go to the polls again, or the Governor General will pass the governing mandate on to the Coalition. If it passes, the Conservatives will retain their governing mandate until the next vote of confidence, with the Coalition remaining a constant threat to their government (which it always is with a minority government). So, to retain their governing mandate, the Conservatives need to neutralize the Coalition, by appeasement, backroom deals, floor-crossing and by-elections? Have I got all this right?
Looking at it this way, it isn’t really a crisis so much as it the non-governing parties exercising their option in a minority government situation. They usually wait until a vote of non-confidence to do so; they just jumped the gun this time (greedy). Now the Conservatives have the time they need to do what they need to do. It seems to me the Coalition have played this badly.
Yes, the Coalition has played this badly. They come off looking greedy and incompetent. Why they couldn’t wait until the vote to bowl over the government and then approach the GG with their alternative is beyond me. I doubt the Libs are united enough to keep together until the end of January. They are going to look (even more than they do already) like morons you wouldn’t want running your communnity picnic, never mind the country. I hope Harper can put enough good things into the January budget that the Libs can back down from this with face. I hope even more that the Libs will have the brains to do this.
Harper has played it barely better. He was lucky in his timing for the proroguation, given the usual Xmas break etc. The bribing MPs / senators thing is not going to work out, if it is even tried, IMHO. At least there is some door opening to the opposition parties being done, although I don’t know what he could do that would be enough for the opposition parties (having been such a jerk through the last Parliament and at the start of this one) to feel like they don’t have to proceed with their ultimatum.
I don’t think anyone’s played anything well. Harper thought he could take advantage of the weakened Liberal position and act like a majority government during his economic update. It would appear that some back room coalition conversations had already been put in motion, but the economic update was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
The Liberals and NDP saw an opportunity to seize power at that point, with the BQ’s help, and went for it without apparent consideration as to how the people, specifically the west would take it. Then Harper infuriated Quebec with his continued separatist comments.
Now everything’s broken. Frankly I can’t see how a coalition won’t be asked to rule after January 26th. They have the constitutional right to form a government and I can’t imaging the coalition will magically decide to NOT call a non-confidence after the January budget presentation.
You could argue that the timing and the provocation for the Coalition* to jump the gun were not accidents (if you want to ascribe that much political game-playing skillz to Harper and Co.).
I keep wanting to call them the Coalition of Fill in The Blank - Coalition of the Unelectable? Coalition of the Sore Losers?
Come now - weren’t some of our Canadian posters just recently complaining about how boring your last election was? How the U.S. “had an appointment with destiny”, while Canada “had an appointment with the dentist”? But look now - EXCITEMENT! THRILLS!! DARING FEATS OF POLITICAL BRINKMANSHIP!!!
Canadian politics is busting out, baby! Why aren’t you all excited :p?
ZING!! POW! – It’s like a discount comic book full of improbable stupor-heroes. One-upping each other in questionably-democratic power moves and factual or tactical blunders with a SMASH! and a WHAM!, while the mines, mills, and manufacturing plants close one by one, the bankruptcies are filed at record rates, and even the oilsands slow down.
HARPERMAN has won this round by calling on the power of MADAME TREMA… but will his opponents strike back? Find out in the next issue of HOUSE OF COMICS!
“Well, they seem to be uniting us all in our hatred of game-playing politicians.”
Yeah, she seems fucking thrilled.
…
Oh, and as to the claims that the “Deal with the devil” PR attacks on making a deal with the Bloc would hurt Jean Charest’s Liberals in the Quebec election, the latest CROP poll shows the Liberals with a 16-point lead. Yeah, really killing the feeralist party there. Poor Jean’s gonna be stuck with a majority government at this rate.
Why would you think so? The party leaders will support the coalition, of course, but many in the rank and file are unhappy with Duceppe for supporting Stéphane Dion as Prime Minister. As I’ve said in other thread, the Angry French Guy (who didn’t actually vote Bloc) says Duceppe is the biggest loser in this political crisis. I don’t agree with him; I think actually trying his hand at “governing”, even if not as part of an actual government, is the only way Duceppe can save his party from being eventually crushed at the polls, but it shows that the idea is out there.
They had to have an alternative ready before defeating the government, if it was to be taken seriously.
That’s possible; I don’t have a feeling on the pulse of the rank and file. Certainly the party’s leadership and elite seems happy, but of course they’re the ones with the most to gain, I suppose.
Duceppe is the only one who comes out of this, to my eyes, NOT looking like he sold out. Supporting Dion doesn’t put his cause any further behind and gives it more legitimacy. By comparison, Harper looks like a jerk, Dion like a fool (helped along by his “cellphone hostage video”) and Layton like a king weasel. Even Elizabeth May has managed to destroy her reputation in just two months - her decision to start stabbing her own candidates in the back now looks like the beginning of a campaign to buy herself a Senate appointment.
Upon rereading some of the last week’s newspapers, I’ve come to the conclusion that asking for the prorogation and obtaining it a month and a half after general elections in order to avoid a vote of non-confidence is tantamount to Harper’s staging a coup.
What the coalition attempted was founded in the constitution. Harper’s actions were a perversion of the purpose of prorogation.
