Participating in Canadian Democracy:

[jeffreyab]

You may have noticed that all the major networks and newspapers have polls on their sites today asking people what they think of the coalition plan. The Conservatives have an army of highly-motivated underlings out there voting like crazy, but the fight back starts here! Please visit each of these sites and make your voice heard."



http://www.ctv.ca

http://www.globeandmail.com

http://www.thestar.com

http://www.torontosun.com

http://www.edmontonjournal.com

http://www.globaltv.com/globaltv/national/index.html

Please invite your friends and neighbours to be part of this historic change.

Gakked from theengineer

Comments

[maruad.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the reminder.

[maruad.livejournal.com]

The Winnipeg Free Press has a poll as well though you need to look at past polls to see it. It is overwhelmingly in favour of the coalition.

[ltmurnau.livejournal.com]

What gets me about this is all the Cons screaming in newspaper-column- comment entries (I try not to read them, but they are at the bottom of every story and it's a trainwreck moment I. Just. Can't. Avoid.) about how "undemocratic" this power grab is (and yes, I do think it's a power grab at the base of it all, no matter how you want to pick apart their proposals to deal with the economic crisis).

Let's go back about seven weeks; the Conservatives took power as a minority with 38% of the popular vote. What kind of democratic mandate is that? They should have felt morally obligated to share power with the next largest party, the Liberals, who got 26% of the popular vote, in a "Coalition of the Large Interests". Then you'd have a coalition that represented 64% of the popular vote, and 71% of all the seats (143+76= 219 of the 305 seats). But you know that would never happen (nor would it have happened if somehow the roles/parties were somehow reversed).

Just off the top of my head, Italy and Israel are two countries that have coalition governments all the time - they're perhaps not the most stable, but they are far from undemocratic and their governments still manage to function - schools and hospitals do stay open, social welfare systems do still operate, trains do run more or less on time... and in Canada this would be even more so, because all of these vital social and administrative functions are the responsibility of the provinces, who don't really care what party is in power in Ottawa as long as the equalization payments keep flowing.

[jeffreyab.livejournal.com]

Harper thinks he has been elected President I think.

He acts like a president who is the opposite of the party in control of Congress not like the leader of a minority government.

[ltmurnau.livejournal.com]

This is also a basic problem with the first-past-the-post system, as has been explained and moaned about at length anywhere you care to look - whoever gets even a fraction of the total votes ends up with all the power. It's this that dooms Canada, more often than not, to a regime of regimes that command neither the majority of popular support nor even the majority of elected representatives.

(Oh, and let's not forget that those BQ representatives, who are being portrayed as home-wrecking psychopaths, were in fact duly elected by large numbers of people exercising their democratic rights in a secret-ballot election. Sounds pretty aboveboard to me. Asking whether a party like the BQ should exist is one question, asking why so many people feel it necessary for it to be formed and continue to exist is another - and one I'm glad I don't have to answer!)