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Who wants a federal election?


bradm

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According to

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Politics/2008/07/23/6241136-cp.html

Liberal Leader Stephane Dion says Canadians have more of an appetite for an election this fall than they did at this time last year.

Dion says, Canadians didn’t want a federal election last fall, largely because they were already facing votes in several provinces.

But he says he’s being told by people across the country this summer that they want to go to the polls.

If people here on jambands.ca had the chance to talk to Dion, who would say that they wanted to go to the polls? (I'm not sure I would.)

Aloha,

Brad

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I recently learned that part of the 'parliamentary' system in England is that when elected the PM institutes his 'budget' -v- the USA in which the President has to have theirs passed by Congress. Which way does the sytem work in Canada. In the first case an election seems to take on a lot more significance.

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I believe that in England it is done as it is here - that is, a budget, being a monetary bill, is considered a confidence motion. It must pass the scrutiny of the house (roughly equivalent to Congress in that it is the elected legislature and not necessarily reflective of will of the leading party [things get tricky here to compare apples to apples, as you have a separation of powers where we do not, but the upshot being that those who vote on it are not all onside with the will of the 'big leader' - tricky again, as your president is head of state, whereas our prime minister is but the leader of the party with the most seats in the legislature and our head of state is absent in any meaningful way])

Basically, a budget needs to be proposed, election or not. As the current governing Conservatives enjoy only a minority government, an election isn't particularly critical in terms of providing a stop or approval mechanism to that budget. Cumulatively, the other parties hold more seats in the house of commons than do the governing party, so a particularly egregious budget would be defeated - which would then trigger an election as it is considered evidence that the governing party has lost the confidence and support of the people. If the budget was acceptable to the other parties, at least to the degree that it garnered enough votes from opposition parties to pass, the machine would continue to churn along as usual until the time threshold of 4 years is met, at which time a general election is mandatory (so this is very similar to your system, the difference being that we could have an election any time between the previous election and the 4 year threshold, which is what we are groaning about here .. because the last one wasn't so very long ago at all)

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I didn't get one of those. Anyone receive a parry effort from the Libs in the mail? I'd suspect that in a pamphleteering war, going toe to toe, the Libs might have a solid chance of winning at least this one battle.

Conservative mail outs (both municipal and federal) have been coming about once a week now for about 5 or 6 weeks. Non from any other party.

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