Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic The Canadian Election

and the votes are coming in.

looks like another Conservative minority government, but we'll know better in the morning.
Interested in watching the results as they come in?: http://www.ctv.ca/mini/election2008/electionResults.html

Heres a list of the political parties in Canada: http://www.ctv.ca/mini/election2008/images/map/party.html It's actually quite a few more than I thought. I've only ever had a max of six in my home riding.

Ah! The Canadian election. I've been thinking about it. Thanks for the update, and please tell us more when you have more news!

Ann

The Marijuana Party? Seriously? I was just teaching about the two-party US political system today and how there are actually other parties (like the Green Party) that just don't usually draw many votes. I said that other countries have lots of parties too (I was thinking of Italy...don't they have, like, 100 of them?). Since I know basically nothing about Canada (sorry, neighbors to the north!), can someone tell me: does your system work like ours...that there are two main parties and a bunch of others that just don't ever get many votes, or is it something different?

Yep. As predicted, another minority Conservative government. We spent 350 million dollars and ended up with the same thing we had when we went to the polls.

The only real story of the night (other than my region of the country going almost exclusively NDP) is that Justin Trudeau is now a member of parliament. Oh, and that we are likely to soon have a new leader of the Liberal Party .

ML

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

Okay, I just went to Wikipedia to figure out how your Parliament works, but my head is spinning. I'm sure I seem stupid, but I can't quite wrap my head around it. Did everyone in Parliament get elected today? In the US, only a portion of the members of Congress are up for election at any one time.

Everyone was elected tonight.

Also, we don't vote for our leader. When we go the polls, there is only one question being asked: Who do you want to elect as your local member of Parliament (your MP). You make an X on the ballet (using a pencil - no hanging chads for us ) beside the person you want as your local candidate. Then the ballets are counted by hand and the results sent in. The person in your local riding who gets the most votes becomes your MP.

Then, the leader of the party with the most candidates elected (the most MPs) is asked by the Queen of England to become the Prime Minister of Canada (Yes, we are a constitutional monarchy).

Hope that clears up some of your confusion. (Although, I suspect I just added to it )

ML

Oh, one more interesting little tidbit for you to chew on... Did you know that the head of state for Canada is the Queen of England?

ML

It's clear to me, but I'm from and live in Canada!

Then again, I find the US system confusing. I understand it well enough (thanks to years of American TV and movies), but that doesn't mean it makes sense to me.

desiree

Well, what fun is an election without hanging chads? I think I need to go back to college and take Comparative Politics 101, or perhaps hit the bookstore and find "Canadian Politics for Dummies." Maybe this is just a good excuse to take a vacation up north and learn all about Canada for myself. Now where did my passport go...

Susan, who has enough trouble explaining the Electoral College to 8th graders. "How can you win the popular vote but lose the election at the same time?!"

Maybe you can get Al Gore to come in and explain that one.

Susan,

A good place to start would be to have your students read the statement Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) gave on the senate floor back in 1979.

Also, when discussing the possibility of another election in which the candidate with the popular vote loses the election, you might want to have the class debate a point not mentioned in Moynihan's statement, but brought up by Walter Dellinger (U.S. Solicitor General under Bill Clinton):

[W]e simply do not and cannot know who would have won a national popular-vote contest had one been held. In such a case, both candidates would have run fundamentally different campaigns, emphasizing different issues and appearing frequently in states like California, New York, and Texas. Who can know how people in those states would have responded had they been as informed by exposure to the candidates and their ads as citizens in Wisconsin and Ohio? One cannot persuasively impeach the electoral vote with a national popular-vote number that was wholly irrelevant to the campaign that was actually run. The hypothetical question of who would have won a national popular-vote contest if one had been held is thus completely unanswerable.

Oh man, am I feeling old now. I remember all the news when he was born...

Kathy

Yep. Almost $290 million dollars and we are right where we started from Lowest voter turnout in decades.

A stronger Conservative minority government, but a minority government it is. Oh, and MLT, you're right...all day, my friends and I were discussing who the next Liberal leader is going to be.

Justin Trudeau. With a name like that, you think he has potential? A bit young, but I think, he could definitely be PM potential a couple of decades from now.

Rick Mercer did a very funny interview with Justin on election day. I have NO doubt he will be leader in just a few years.

I suspect that Justin will take a run for it at some point. I hope it isn't too soon, though. He needs some experience first. But I've already heard his name tossed around a few times.

I guess Justin as leader of the Liberal party would be about the same as if John-John Kennedy had taken a run for President in the US.

Hey, I wonder if Ben Mulroney is going to get into politics?

I would like to thank you all for this education in and update on Canadian politics. Last Wednesday, I was chatting with a lady at church who's from Canada, so I asked about the election. Turned out I knew more about it than she did.

Then she asked me if I'd voted in it, and I had to confess that I was not Canadian. Nope, just have a lot of friends north of the border.

PJ

Well, it has started already... the breaking of campaign promises. Harper promised all through the election that he would make sure that we didn't run a deficit again. And now he's saying it's a possibility: http://www.cbc.ca/money/story/2008/10/17/federal-deficit.html

If I were Prime Minister, my very first law would be that any politician who breaks his election promises would go to prison for life. (Of course, since they'd all be there within the first few months, I guess it begs the question of who would run the country? )

ML

One of the things I stress when I teach about our government is that, if you look in the Constitution, you will find that the president doesn't have a whole lot of actual power. Any time a politician tells you what they're going to do when they get elected is, by its very nature, a bunch of B.S. - nobody has unilateral power to enact legislation. The only thing politicians have the power to do (regardless of party affiliation) is to make a bunch of promises that they don't have the ability to keep. I suspect the same is true in Canada and most places around the world.

Actually, grooby, the Prime Minister of Canada in a majority parliament is more powerful than the President of the US (in his/her own country). The Prime Minister in a majority parliament controls the majority of the votes - so he can basically do whatever he wants. (Which is why I like minority governments - I don't trust any of these clowns enough to give them that type of power )

In my understanding, the US is quite different. You have a much greater division of power.

ML