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Since Cadman used to be a Conservative, I doubt he’ll join up with any possible Liberal-NDP alliance.
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There has to be a Speaker elected from one of the MPs, so that will make 307 voting MPs, with one Speaker, who votes to break ties. If an MP happened to miss the vote so the Speaker must vote, I think the Speaker would vote to keep things the way they were (so to defeat the Motion of Non-Confidence), but I’m not sure.
Westerners, we want our government to be fiscally conservative just as much as you do. How could anyone argue with that? Especially after watching our beloved Liberals burn through cash the last decade on every scatterbrained social engineering wet dream since the New Deal.
But your guys scare us with all that faith based garbage. Sorry, that’s just the way it is, I guess probably because Ontario is a highly educated province. Most of us think it’s just fine if gays want to get married, we don’t really care one way or another, and we don’t think men should be telling women what to do on the abortion issue. We support any decision the women make.
We want to get the nosy government out of our business too, but we don’t want to exchange intrusive gun control laws for intrusive faith based laws.
One thing is for certain, the taps will be gushing now. Martin has waited a long, long time for this. Open up a vein, Canadians.
(disclaimer: me speaking on behalf of Ontario is a generalization yes we know thanks for not pointing it out like you just discovered something )
I’m shocked to say that the 2001 Census doesn’t bear out sven’s asssertion that Albertan’s are statistically less educated than people from Ontario.
Shocked I tell you. Shocked.
Ontario Ont % Alberta Alb % Alb-Ont
Total 9,048,040 2,322,020
Elementary-secondary only 3,987,295 44.1% 982,465 42.3% -1.8%
Less than grade 5 184,615 2.0% 27,055 1.2% -0.9%
Grades 5-8 552,760 6.1% 109,165 4.7% -1.4%
Grades 9-10 878,225 9.7% 243,310 10.5% 0.8%
Grades 11-13 1,067,735 11.8% 330,015 14.2% 2.4%
Secondary (high) school graduation only 1,303,960 14.4% 272,915 11.8% -2.7%
Trades certificate or diploma 287,540 3.2% 70,180 3.0% -0.2%
College education only 2,291,805 25.3% 667,075 28.7% 3.4%
Without trade or college certificate or diploma 575,310 6.4% 164,350 7.1% 0.7%
With trades certificate or diploma 510,985 5.6% 205,385 8.8% 3.2%
With college certificate or diploma 1,205,510 13.3% 297,340 12.8% -0.5%
University 2,481,395 27.4% 602,310 25.9% -1.5%
Without degree 894,065 9.9% 252,340 10.9% 1.0%
Without college education 463,710 5.1% 119,240 5.1% 0.0%
Without certificate, diploma or degree 351,390 3.9% 91,385 3.9% 0.1%
With trades certificate or diploma 2,920 0.0% 870 0.0% 0.0%
With university certificate/diploma below bachelor 109,395 1.2% 26,985 1.2% 0.0%
With college education 430,360 4.8% 133,100 5.7% 1.0%
Without certificate, diploma or degree 89,325 1.0% 31,775 1.4% 0.4%
With trades certificate or diploma 46,670 0.5% 20,700 0.9% 0.4%
With college certificate or diploma 215,560 2.4% 61,050 2.6% 0.2%
With university certificate/diploma below bachelor 78,805 0.9% 19,570 0.8% 0.0%
With degree 1,587,330 17.5% 349,965 15.1% -2.5%
With bachelor or first professional degree 1,052,400 11.6% 261,450 11.3% -0.4%
With university certificate above bachelor level 188,065 2.1% 23,365 1.0% -1.1%
With master's degree 290,730 3.2% 52,385 2.3% -1.0%
With earned doctorate 56,135 0.6% 12,770 0.5% -0.1%
colour me shocked pink by that revelation.
Nothing like a series of empty headed stereo types to make a point.
Seriously. I have no real love of regionalism but I know beter than to paint Westerners as a bunch of rascist hillbillies or the Quebecois as a bunch of treacherous emotional loons.
On real matters of politics Martin in his press confrenece today says he now has a mandate to meet with the premiers regarding healthcare reforms. One has to wonder what will happen with Mr. Klein’s plans for Albertan Healthcare now that the Liberals are in a much stronger position than previously expected.
Also anyone else hear the rumour that Harper is considering relinquishing his job as head of the party.
IANAConservative but I think it would be a huge mistake for Harper to resign as leader. I think he ran a pretty good campaign and it wasn’t for some ill-advised comments by some of his candidates that “scared” Ontarians as they did, the results could have been closer. This party needs to take some time and have a policy convention, let them decide whatever it is that they stand for and then he can decide if he still wants to lead. One of the problems with the Reform/Alliance/etc. over the past 10 years is that they lose the election and all of the sudden it’s time for a drastic change that ultimately doesn’t accomplish anything.
Now if they come out of the poicy convention with policies that are identical to the old Alliance ones then they have to be dumber than I ever thought. If you ever want to win a national government, you have to have a platform that appeals to the majority of the country, i.e. at least somewhat to urban Ontario and Quebec. The whole point of the merger was to start fresh, yet seems now more like a takeover and they’re back at square one, putting aside the Tory belt ridings they won in Ontario due to end of the vote split.
I agree. I thought Harper ran a fairly good campaign given that his party hadn’t held a formal policy convention. That bit them hard, since any candidate’s views automatically became potential party views.
Honestly had the Liberals seriously lost I’m not sure that Martin should’ve been tagged to be sacrificed. There’s a lot to be said about experience and the chance to argue from the other side of the House.
lookit all the chimps gathered round throwing bananas and feces…
This is one of my favorites, it’s called ‘protecting the herd from the interloper’
Did you have a question or just more stupidity?
That’s what I thought.
I think it would be a mistake for Harper to resign as well. What the Tories have here is a chance to improve their image. They’ve got a bunch of Ontario seats, and some fairly progressive members. If they are smart, they’ll do their best to not topple Martin’s minority for two years or so, but instead use their relative power to work towards sensible legislation. There’s no rule saying that they can’t team up with the Bloc to put serious hurdles in front of anything particularly stupid that Martin tries to pull, and do so without sending us back to the polls. Do some horse-trading. Appear reasonable. With an astute hand at the wheel, they could potentially come out smelling like roses. On the other hand, sending the party back into the turmoil of a leadership race, and still without a formal policy base, would be extremely detrimental to their cause, especially if the govt doesn’t last long. They’ve got a chance to become relevant on a national scale again, if they don’t screw up.
I have a question that HAS stupidity!!
English major here. It seems to me that following Canadian politics requires a lot more math than I am comfortable with. I mean, the NDP for example gets 19 seats, right? 19 actual people sitting up there in Ottawa? So how does the proportional representation thing work, like scule mentioned? Aren’t the ridings arranged so that each MP is representing somewhat the same number of people?
There is no proportional representation. That’s just something a few people have bandied about - most prominently Jack Layton, leader of the NDP, who, surprise surprise, would be the party that would gain the most seats if we shifted to some sort of PR. The current system is extremely simple. 308 ridings. One Member of Parliament elected in each riding.
House of Common Picture Scroll about halfway down for a half-decent picture of the House. The 19 NDP members will each sit in the house. If they are part of a “coalition” with the Liberals, they will sit on the left side of the House. If they are in opposition they would sit on the right side. There’s a historical reason for this but I can’t find it, I’m sure someone else will.
What scule was saying was that he believes PR is something that should be looked at as a way to reform our electoral system. As it stands right now, it is a 100% first past the post system.
The population of a riding can vary a great deal. This can lead to B.C., Alberta and Ontario being under-represented and everyone else being over-represented. This is a good article from yesterday’s Globe and Mail that explains population size.
Aha, right, and the Senate is appointed. You never had the Great Compromise of our federal system, with an equal number of Senators for everybody and a House with population equalized (although there’s always fights about redistricting anyway). I’m amazed people put up with that.
Thanks for all the answers, though! It’s fascinating!
Unsurprisingly, I don’t find that article particularly compelling.
For one, I’d be curious to see it redone with registered voters per riding instead of total population per riding. The highest population ridings are also the ones with the most immigrants. I have nothing against people who’ve moved to this country, but non-citizens don’t get to vote, and hence it seems extremely likely to me that the most populous ridings mentioned in the articles are also those with the lowest percentage of their population eligible to vote.
Second, I find it extremely difficult to feel sorry for Ontarians being “underrepresented” in Parliament when governments, decade after decade, give far more attention to how issues play in Ontario than to how they play in Newfoundland. If Ontario were being shortchanged by governments who focus their attention on Saskatchewan and the Yukon, the article would have a point. But that’s not the case, and the whole issue strikes me as being rather unimportant.
Mehitabel, the Senate is basically a non-entity. Its approval of legislation is only marginally more relevant than that of the Governor General. Very, very occasionally the Senate will delay bills that are exceedingly unpopular, but they haven’t actually refused to pass anything for many, many years.
There was the GST fillibuster. Mind you the PC’s suddenly found a loophole allowing for the appointment of 8 new Senate seats allowing them to push through their legislation.
Historically, however, the Reform-Alliance-CPC bunch has never really understood the concept of gradual gaining of legitimacy. After the 1993 election, in which they as a brand new party elected 52 MPs - an amazing performance by any standard - they spent four years acting as if they couldn’t wait for the next election to form a government, at one point suggesting that Chretien be removed from office because, the Reform Party claimed, he was insane. (Evidently disagreeing with Reform policy was evidence of insanity.)
After a terrible campaign in 1997 but succeeding in becoming the Opposition, they decided, for no reason whatsoever, to change the party’s name and elect Dorkus McMoron as party leader. Here they were, just beginning to gain legitimacy as an alternate vote, with Preston Manning having established himself as a legitimate party leader who exerted some influence over government policy - and they dumped him and the image of the party he’d created. Unsurprisingly, Dorkus ran a brutally bad campaign and they lost.
So on to 2004, with them having successfully swallowed the old PC party, and they made huge progress. A record run of seats, a breakthrough in Ontario, and they knocked the Liberals to a minority, and they did in while the economy was doing well. It seems obvious to me that for the Liberals to lose their majority in the midst of a solid economy is a tremendous and shocking event. NOBODY thought, a year ago, that the CPC had a hope in hell of doing this. Nobody. This is a huge, huge win. So why didn’t they do better? That’s easy:
- Because it’s a new party, AGAIN, and
- Because they do not seem to understand that Easterners will not vote for a party that even suggests they’ll roll back civil rights.
Point 2 feeds into Point 1. Every time some CPC backbencher babbled that he wanted to use the notwithstanding clause to roll back gay marriage or talked about bringing in pro-life legislation, the Conservatives lost a hundred thousand voted in Ontario. Since the party is new, we don’t know what the CPC would do in power, so we have to assume the worst.
I’m an Ontario voter. The CPC position on gay marriage was “we’ll let Parliament decide.” What the hell does that mean? I send them three E-mails asking their position. I never recieved a single response. So the Cletus backbenchers speaking out against it spoke for the Conservative Party. In effect, we had a party that was stating, in public, that they planned to implement pro-life legislation (the baby steps thereof, anyway) and take away, by force of something the federal government has never used, a civil right from a large group of Canadians. Hey, Alberta, what the hell did you expect? I, and a lot of other people here, think those items are more important than the sponsorship scandal. What I and a lot of Ontarians find amusing is that we’re accused of being stupid when we vote - yet our perception is that we voted on issues.
The thing is, the Liberal Party has individual people every bit as bigoted. The Liberals include Tom Wappel, who is probably the most evil, despicable quasi-person to hold federal office in my lifetime. But I know from experience that the Liberals will be, well, liberal on this issue. Because I’m familiar with them. I know Wappel is an outlier. I don’t know that Randy White is.
If the CPC wants Easterners to vote for them they have to stop changing the damned party name and leader. Only time and experience grants legitimacy. Let the public get used to Stephen Harper. Despite the jeremiads and shrieking you hear from the NDP, he is not an evil man. He’s smart and decent. The CPC had a bunch of Ontario seats. Let the true conservatives from Ontario influence party policy and make Ontarians comfortable with the party. You made big gains; don’t do something fucking stupid.
Now, it’s true that the Conservatives have an uphill battle. The fact is that “We need to tighten our belts a little, maybe change the way we do health care” doesn’t sell as well as “We’re going to give magic free money to the cities and create child care and spend a jillion dollars on you!” It’s a harder sell. It’s also true that recovering from an image of bigotry is hard to recover from, whereas you don’t get nearly as badly ripped for being just plain stupid. Nobody questioned the NDP’s reflexive opposition to free trade, despite the fact that it was obviously a great move when it was implemented, that none of the warnings of Canada becoming a U.S. state came true, and repealing it would cost hundreds of thousands of jobs and plunge innumerable Canadians into poverty, reducing the tax base and hurting every social program we have. You get a free pass on intellectual shortcomings. You don’t on rights. The Conservatives have a harder marketing job.
But it’s not gonna be easier if they change their leader. Again.
[hijack]
Article V of the U.S. Constitution:
Abolishing the Senate, or changing the system by which each state has equal representation in it, would require the approval of not merely a three-fourths but all of the 50 state legislatures. Politically impossible – all of the underpopulated states, overrepresented in the Senate as it is now, would have to be persuaded to give up that enormous political advantage. What are the chances? You could argue that an amendment of the amending process itself, approved by 3/4 (not all) of the state legislatures, would be sufficient to nullify the last clause of Article V, opening the way for a second amendment, approved by 3/4 (not all) of the states (or in some other way, such as a national referendum) to abolish or reform the Senate. But that would be iffy as legal logic, and almost as politically impossible.
Another solution that has been suggested is to amend Article I of the Constitution (which sets forth the structure and powers of the House and Senate), authorizing the House to enact legislation on its own sole authority, and reducing the Senate to a purely advisory body like the British House of Lords while still leaving it in existence. I haven’t heard any legal scholar’s opinion on whether such an amendment would be constitutionally possible. But, again, it would be politically impossible.
That’s why we put up with it. Because the Founding Fathers very carefully and thoroughly screwed us. Unless and until we’re ready to tear up the whole Constitution and start over, we’re stuck with it.
[/hijack]
Thanks for the info, Brainglutton, but what I meant is why the CANADIANS put up with that. They only have one place to compete for seats after all, and it seems disproportionate according to that article.
As it happens, there is an organization dedicated to that proposition: Fair Vote Canada – http://www.fairvotecanada.org/. From the FVC website:
And according to the report I heard on All Things Considered this afternoon, the Liberals will need a coalition partner to govern and the NDP is the most likely choice. And if they make PR a condition of their cooperation . . .
It’s possible, but if the House doesn’t have a clear majority, the current Prime Minister can either resign immediately and let someone else try to form a government, or he can face the Commons and see if he commands a majority.
If the PM decides to face the House, he has to survive a motion of non-confidence in his government. If the motion passes, he has to resign. If the motion doesn’t pass, then he’s shown that he commands a majority.
At the federal level, there was the case of the Mackenzie King government in 1925-26 which Grey mentions. The Liberals came out of the 1925 election with the second greatest number of seats. King had been the PM going into the 1925 election, and after it he insisted on his right to try his luck with the new Commons. He was able to command a majority, so he stayed on as PM.
More recently, in 1985 in Ontario, the PCs had a majority government prior to the election. The voters returned a divided Assembly, with the PCs having the greatest number of seats, but short of a majority. The Liberals had the second greatest number of seats, and the NDP came in third. The Liberals and the NDP announced that they had reached a deal and that the NDP would support a Liberal government. Premier Miller of the PCs nonetheless insisted on facing the new Assembly, rather than resigning immediately. The Liberals moved non-confidence in Premier Miller’s government, the NDP supported the motion, and the Miller government fell. David Peterson, leader of the Liberals, was sworn in as Premier shortly thereafter.
The article overstates its case. When you look at the actual number of seats a strict proportional allocation would provide, the crisis is much less.
Ontario is the only province in double digits in either direction being ‘underrepresented’ by 11-12 seats. BC is under by 4-5, Alberta by 2. Saskatchewan is overrepresented by 4 seats but all other areas have only 1 or 2 more seats (and we spot the territories one each, just because). OK, PEI should probably only have two seats, but it’s not that big a deal. Considering how much power Ontario exerts on its own, it’s difficult to say that its voice isn’t adequately represented in Ottawa. Just as with your Electoral College, it’s not healthy to have one province decide elections all on its own, even though it still happens time to time.