So the voters of Canada have spoken. I’m not perfectly pleased with the results, but in my opinion there’s more good than bad there. Some comments:
- Looking right now like a minority government, which I think is a good thing right about now. Neither of the parties that could potentially have taken a majority of the seats would have done much useful with it: the Liberals are in bad need of a little correction and reorganisation, and the Conservatives haven’t even agreed on a platform yet. I know that CW is that minority governments are bad, but I’ve never seen the necessity of that. (Granted, the last one we had in Canada was when I was 4, when I wasn’t exactly paying attention to such things.)
- Even better, it’s a Liberal minority. This gives a much higher chance of maintaining some sort of loose equilibrium in the government; any partnership between the CPC and one of the smaller (left-ish) parties would be uncomfortable at best for all involved. Plus, I’m still not convinced that the CPC is as moderate as they’ve been trying to claim.
- As of this writing, the Greens have 4.3% of the national popular vote. The current laws state that parties that receive better than 2% across the country (or 5% in those ridings in which they’re running candidates, whichever is smaller) can receive public funds: roughly $1.75 per voter per year. Given the turnout so far, the Green Party has achieved this no matter what else happens with the rest of the returns; this entitles them to nearly a million dollars of public money per year (until the next election) for party-building and such things. I see this as a good thing.
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(In case you’re curious, the Greens are also the only
minor party
to achieve this threshold; the next best result was the Christian Heritage Party, which pulled in 0.3% of the popular vote.) - It’ll be interesting to see how the Liberals choose to play the new situation. The traditional option would be for them to form an alliance — formal or otherwise — with one of the other parties. The New Democrats seem like the natural choice; they have the seats when combined with the Libs to (barely) make a majority in Parliament. The Bloc could work as well, but since most of the Bloc’s gain in support came from Liberal defections in Quebec, I’m not sure how well that would play in la belle province.
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There is another way, however: rather than binding themselves to another party, the Liberals can try to rule by general consensus, getting support from other parties on an issue-by-issue basis. As the most centrist of the parties in the Commons, they’re in an excellent position to do this; off the top of my head I can’t think of any actual issues that the NDPs, the Conservatives, and the Bloc would all agree on.
Team Martin
could keep this up until they lost a vote of confidence, which could be a very long time indeed unless the other three parties think that a new election would work in their favour.
Once the tallies are finalised, I’m going to analyse the returns from a PR (Proportional Representation) standpoint. Variations on the theme of PR have been suggested for Canada, and I’m sort of curious how different the outcome would have been had something like them been in place.