Groobie,
Well, to give you an idea of the breakdown between the parties... here are the current results, although a few of these are still in play:
Conservative: 143 seats
Liberal: 77 seats
Block: 49 seats
NDP: 37 seats
Independants: 2 seats
While historically, only the Liberals or the Conservatives have made up the governing party, as you can see, the other parties are not insignificant.
To have a majority government (in other words, to have enough votes to get your laws passed), you have to have 155 seats. As you can see, no one did that tonight. That means that either the Conservatives will have to persuade others to vote with it, or to abstain from voting in order to get their laws passed. So are the smaller parties relevant in Canada... absolutely.
ML
