Legal Government Coup D'Etat in Canada

I'm wondering if this is getting ANY news coverage at all in the USA, because Canada's news networks are going crazy right now.

We just had an election in Canada that ended in October. By Tuesday the government (party) that won that election will likely be kicked out of office and the losing political parties will be legally installed in power. This is MAJOR news and only the second time in history that this has happened in our country.

Do American networks even care? Did you know about this? I'm glued to my television.

I read this earlier:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/america/canada.php

But that's all. I don't usually watch news on TV, and everything I usually read is busy covering the stuff going on in India.

The government just revised the parliamentary schedule to delay the crucial vote until December 8th. The theory is that by delaying the vote by 1 week, the opposition parties will come to some differences and the coalition will fail. The Prime Minister (Stephen Harper) is desperately flailing here and grasping at straws.

I'm a MAJOR Harper fan, he is to me what Obama is to many of you, and I'm completely flat out in awe of what is happening here. I can't believe this is happening, totally out of left field.

Harper is going to go on live TV sometime in the next hour to address this crisis.

I haven't heard anything about it. It sucks, I know barely anything about other country's government. I wish there was a class at my college that taught about it, I guess I could read stuff online.

Let me try to explain what's going on to my American friends.

Our government is a parliamentary system with two houses, a lower house (the House of Commons) and an upper house (the Senate). The senators are appointed for life by the Prime Minister, which usually means somebody is appointed in their 50s or 60s and serves until 75 or death, whatever comes first. The Members of Parliament sit in the House of Commons (HOC) and are elected directly by their consituents.

The Prime Minister is the leader of the party that controls the most seats in the HOC. Kind of like combining your president and your House Leader into one job. So right now, the Conservative Party controls 145 of 308 seats, and Stephen Harper is the leader of the Conservative Party, so Stephen Harper is the Prime Minister. You will note however that 145 is less than half of the 308 seats.

In Canada, we can have an election three different ways. One, the Prime Minister goes to the Queen (this is a traditional, symbollic gesture and he actually sees a representative of the Queen, called the Governor-General, unless the Queen happens to be in Canada at the time) and asks her to disolve parliament and call an election. Because the government has maximum terms but not minimum terms, what that means is that the elections are not at fixed dates and can be called any time the Prime Minister wants, with a maximum length of 5 years and usually they are called every 4 years. The second way to have an election is if the government in power - ie. the party with the most seats - loses a vote on a bill pertaining to national finances. So if the government puts forth its 2008 budget for example and it does not get passed, then there is an election. The final way is if the government declares a vote to be "a matter of confidence." Basically if there is a vote and the conclusion is that the House has lost confidence in the governing party's ability to govern, there will be an election.

On December 8th, the government will be putting forth a fiscal update - being a money issue, this is a matter of confidence that the government must win. In the economic update, they government has proposed several changes that will save small amounts of money as a symbolic gesture during a financial recession. I say symbolic because all of the cuts were from the public sector, including a pay cut for elected government members, a pay raise cap for public (government) employees, and cancelling a program that pays political parties a $1.95 subsidy for every vote they receive in an election. Because the second biggest party in Canada - the Liberal Party, with about 80 seats in the HOC - is in major financial trouble and near bankruptcy, they have decided to reject the update and vote against it. The third biggest party - the Bloc Quebecois - does not engage in fundraising and so they have decided to vote against it. The forth biggest party - the New Democratic Party - doesn't like the pay cuts to public (unionized) employees because they are a socialist party, so they will vote against it.

Because the vote will fail, we would normally have an election. But we just had an election 8 weeks ago, so doing that would mean paying $300 million dollars (the cost of an election) in order to save $30 million (the actual cuts that the opposition opposes). Instead, the Liberals, NDP, and Bloc will all team up to form one large party. This would give them more seats than the Conservatives, making them the new government who can then choose a leader to become Prime Minister.

What it means, the short version: We will have a new government, a new Prime Minister, without having an election, and the leader will be somebody who lost the election and received fewer votes than the one he is replacing.

You can see how many hoops there are, how unlikely this is to happen, because everything has to line up just perfectly. This will be an historic month in Canada if this actually goes through.

Harper just gave his brief, 3-4 minute speech. He said that he was delaying the vote for a week so that Canadians can call their member of parliamet and tell them that they want to opposition to respect the democratic process and leave the government intact.

Harper is known internationally as probably the most composed, professional, strongest leader of any first world country. I've met the man personally a half dozen times and he always inspires confidence. Just now in his speech he as pale and looked to be completely in a state of panic. I've never seen him speak with so little confidence before.

That's probably enough live news updates from Zedeff for today. By next week, this will be written into history books. Let's get some of the Canadian opinions in here!

Zed good to see you back with more political insight. I agree that what is happening unbelievebale. It almost feels like this overthrow is breaking the rules. I personally can't stand Ed Broadbent one bit. To me, this is a black eye for Canadian government.

Do you think this is going to happen? Are we going to see a liberal-new democratic government. God help us...

Holy Fuck.

Good luck, Canada.

Encouraging the democratic process is the best thing for the PM to do. It's upsetting that the other parties could be so selfish.

Holy shit. Zedeff, thank you so much for the way you explained this; I had no idea what was going on and I get it now. Please keep us updated!

godisdead wrote:

Do you think this is going to happen? Are we going to see a liberal-new democratic government. God help us...

This will definitely happen. The Liberals are a very power-hungry party (ditto the Conservatives) and they've tasted blood now. Even if Harper phoned up Dion tomorrow and said "I'll give you anything you want, just name it" I think Dion would still go forward with this.

The horrifying thing is that we'll have a Liberal-NDP-Bloc coalition managing the economy during this economic mess. The NDP campaigned hard during the election for a $50 billion increase in business taxes. If companies are going bankrupt and causing job losses, how is adding $50 billion in unexpected costs going to help that? The Liberals... Green Shift? Do we want to fundamentally change our taxation policy at a time when revenue streams are unpredictable, both for citizens and for the government? And then the Bloc; they of course will want tens of billions of new spending in Quebec at the expense of the rest of the county and again, disproportionate spending to help one place during a nation wide economic problem is hardly a solution, or fairf at that.

It boggles the mind that Dion is going to be Prime Minister. He only was supported by 22% of the country.

What boggles my mind, in addition to this entire situation, is that Dion had already all but offcially relinquished the Liberal leadership, and then suddenly he's going to be PM. Give me a break.

i want to street fight harper and stand on his kneck
thats how you play the dating game

question though, who had the most votes overall this election?
it sorta sucks how the green party gets 900,000 votes yet not one seat in the hoc and elizibeth may has to sit in the public seats during all the meetings even though so many people voted for her

brianoverprovidence wrote:

question though, who had the most votes overall this election?
it sorta sucks how the green party gets 900,000 votes yet not one seat in the hoc and elizibeth may has to sit in the public seats during all the meetings even though so many people voted for her

True enough... :S


By the way, I have to say, it's absolutely IDIOTIC that Dion can think that despite the fact that everyone thinks he's a douche, that he can take power through non-Democratic ways. -.-

What can you say though, those lefties are playing a tight game. I just doubt that this new government will stand for long.

Is anybody going to a rally on Saturday?

http://rallyforcanada.ca/

I'll probably be going. Zedeff, were you planning on going as well?

This is a bad thing. We are going to have Stephane Dion as Prime Minister. If the election told us ANYTHING, it's that Canada does NOT want Dion at the helm. This is a bullshit, power hungry move. It's a clever tactic, however I think it will back fire and will raise serious questions about the competence and legitimacy of Canadian democracy.

godisdead wrote:

This is a bad thing. We are going to have Stephane Dion as Prime Minister. If the election told us ANYTHING, it's that Canada does NOT want Dion at the helm. This is a bullshit, power hungry move. It's a clever tactic, however I think it will back fire and will raise serious questions about the competence and legitimacy of Canadian democracy.

True enough.
As much as I would prefer to have a more liberal party in power, Harper is the only leader that seems capable to me, right now. :S I mean, seriously, Stephane Dion as PM!? Who the hell actually wants that!?

So parliament is suspended until Jan. Harper has a over a month to put this whole thing off. The coalition is meeting w/ the Governor General later today. I still can't believe that this is happening. It's interesting to see responsible government In action, but damn, how will this coalition ever work???

Harper's argument in this debacle is maintaining national unity. He sees it as a disaster that the "separatist" bloc is in on the deal.

This is turning out to be a good fuckin' deal for Quebec.

WHERE THE FUCK IS ZEDEFF

well if worse comes to worst i hope we have another election and not just get stuck with dion. there are 2 things that really fuckin bug me about this. the first is that dion got the worst voter turnout for the liberal party since confederation and now he is trying to force his way into power... i feel like i'm in some african nation right now... the second thing that gets me is that the fucking sepratists are going to have vito power just going to show how far dion is going to go to get in

i think putting off the meetings untill january was a pretty low thing to do, not to mention d.u.m.b
we need to start making changes now and if they arent there to do it everything goes to shit
im going to side with the coup on this one even though i dont like dion, but i also dont like harper alot or jack that much, but its basically coming down to who dont you dislike the most