I’m not sure whether that’s really an ambition of his. He’s got a pretty good gig just cruising along every election without much trouble. Although, he must be pretty high up the list now in terms of experience in the party.
There’s one way I’m happy about the majority; in a sense, we can just get it over with now. Maybe the Cs will be fine and people can relax, or maybe they’ll be insane and we can throw them out in a few years. I have sort of had this feeling that it was inevitable they’d get a majority one of these times, and in such cases it’s best not to keep delaying the inevitable.
Regardless, I think the majority is perfect for the NDP.
The Sydney Morning Herald has reported Harper’s victory. Cite. Looks to be the same wire story that Cunctator linked to above, but it seems that the news is getting out there.
The linkedarticle links directly to Elections Canada and that page seemed to confirm the claim in the article. It’s interesting that it’s a commonly-held belief that campaigning is illegal on election day. I’ll defer to your legal knowledge, so let me modify my statement: if any party or party member was found to violate election law - including, and perhaps especially, the Prime Minister - then I want them to be held accountable (and yes, I feel the same way regardless of what party they are on). Our own government members should not be violating Canada’s laws and each and every opportunity to discipline should be taken. Past actions by other parties should not ever be seen as an excuse to justify the same behaviour by current parties.
I meant that the quoted boxes on that article were straight off the EC website, so the wording wasn’t changed. I guess I assumed that the phrase “illegally attempting to influence the vote of an elector or the results of an election” was within the context of wording specifically prohibiting campaigning on Election Day itself, and that statements like Harper’s on the radio would therefore be an illegal attempt to influence a vote at the last minute. Same with “election advertising during the blackout period” - a statement like “vote Conservative” by the Prime Minister could, IMHO, be interpreted to be advertising during the blackout period. I really thought campaigning today was illegal - it’s a myth/“fact” that in my experience seems to have been around for years.
Were it in fact illegal to campaign today, Harper’s words were pretty clearly in violation of that. Since it seems to not be illegal (though I’ll leave that up to Elections Canada to be certain!), then I guess I can’t be too upset about it.
There is a black-out on election advertising the day of the election - s. 323. However, “election advertising” is a defined term, in s. 319, which does not include speeches or interviews:
I would think it would be difficult to argue that an interview with a candidate on election day would count as “election advertising” under this definition.
I’ve been looking, but I cannot find any other verification of the Examiner’s claim: it’s not in any mainstream media that I can find; and even a check of the online log of the the radio station and host mentioned in the Examiner item show that while Good had many guests on the air via telephone this morning, and topics included the election, it doesn’t seem that Harper was among the guests. Maybe I’m missing something though. Can anybody confirm or deny through other news sources that what the Examiner said happened, actually happened?
I was unfamiliar with this fellow so I pulled up his wikipedia page:
“On February 4, 2010, Pankiw announced that he would once again run as an Independent candidate in the next federal election (which will be held May 2, 2011), in his old riding of Saskatoon-Humboldt. In the press conference in which he announced his candidacy, Pankiw informed the news reporters that he had invited that he did not need the media to win, that he had invited them to “rub it in your face”, and refused to answer a question over whether or not he was sober”
Are you really saying that you DIDN’T vote for this gem? I can’t imagine why!
Thank you, Northern Piper. As I’ve said, this is clearly something that has really been misunderstood by a lot of people, in the past and now. Facebook/chat discussions show that many of my friends also believed that active campaigning on Election Day was illegal. I appreciate your taking the time to explain it.
Looking at the Globe and Mail election maps shows some interesting things:
The Conservatives used to be a western regional party, and generally only managed to sneak into power if they picked up enough votes in Ontario. They were also more rural. But in this election, the Conservatives have widespread support across Canada, except in Quebec. They also won a lot of the big cities.
The Liberals are now an eastern regional party - they only managed to pick up two seats west of Ontario.
The NDP are now heavily beholden to Quebec politics. The bloc basically folded into the NDP. In addition, they elected a lot of fringe candidates with questionable resumes and no political experience, making for a potentially raucus and undisciplined back bench. I think the NDP is going to be very interesting to watch. They’re either going to move hard left, in which case they will lose a lot of the support gained tonight, or Layton is going to be herding cats for the next four years. A lot of the new NDP members are community activists or labor leaders, and I don’t think there’s much tolerance for either group among Canadians in general.
The liberals screwed the pooch by moving to the left. What they should have done is emphasized that they cut spending and balanced the budget and that they were the ‘safe’ economic stewards of Canada. Instead, they tried to chase Layton by becoming ‘NDP Lite’, and it destroyed them. Well, that and their weak leader.
The Conservatives had better not blow this. If they take this for some big mandate to enact sweeping social change, or they become the next Mulroney government and turn into low-tax, big spending deficit monsters, their support will evaporate fast.
But Layton’s got the toughest job. Somehow he has to make the NDP appealing to the rest of Canada while maintaining his core constituency of Quebec. That’s not going to be easy. It’ll be nice to have a charismatic, in-your-face kind of leader to go up against Harper, though. It’ll be good for Canadians, too - I think we’re going to get more political clarity than we’ve had for some time. Layton will force the debate.
The biggest danger for center-left Canadians (the Liberal’s constituency) is that the Liberals continue to melt down, and Canada winds up with two parties - one hard left, and the other center-right. That would push the center-left towards the Conservatives and make them the new ‘natural governing party’ of Canada - the role the liberals enjoyed when the Conservatives went too far to the right with the Alliance.
Conservatives…166…variance 17
NDP…103…variance 02
Liberals…34…variance 00
Bloc…04…variance 20
Green…0…variance 01
Total Variance…40
Not bad. I think I got the best prediction.
Good night, all!