Tuesday, December 02, 2008

Give Us What We Want....

Sixty two percent. That represents the number of Canadians that did NOT vote for the Conservative Party of Canada in the last election. But of course, what we got, again, was the leader of the Conservative Party as our prime minister. Such is life in this archaic first-past-the-post system of election.

But wait.....we may still get what we wanted. There is a pressure relief valve built into our system that can, from time to time, correct what seems to be wrong with out system. This is our parliamentary system of government. In fact, in this system, we never vote for a prime minister. we vote for a local representative who goes to the House of Commons to vote, on our behalf, for a member of that House to be the prime minister. Traditionally, in order to obtain governing power, people would join together and form political parties. If their party got the most members elected (seats) their leader could easily be voted in as prime minister since every other party would only vote for their own leader as prime minister. if the party with the most seats got more than half of the seats in Parliament, they had a majority and could never be defeated by the other parties.

So, for the last 32 months, Canada has had a minority government where the ruling party had the most seats but could be out-voted by the other parties at any time. Defeating the government often meant that Canadians would have to go to the polls in an election - much like we did at the beginning of October this year - at the cost of $300 million for the same result we went into it with.

Which brings us to the current situation. The NDP, Liberals and Bloc have negotiated an agreement to take down the Conservatives and form a government. Stephan harper is the master of his own undoing here. He miscalculated that the opposition would be in such a disarray that he could push through even more ideologically-driven legislation. Now he faces full non-confidence of the House. Some are crying foul - that this is "undemocratic". Undemocratic that a party with 38% of Canadians support govern or a coalition of parties with 62% of voter support?!

With all of its problems, our parliamentary system provides this great relief valve to bring stability and exert the will of the people on government.

I say, give us what we want.......

Take Action:
http://www.avaaz.org/en/coalition_for_canada