damkira said:
Wow.. Please excuse my ignorance of your country... but what happened? I always thought of Canada as a stable democracy.
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He's just being melodramatic ...
Canada is currently being governed by a minority conservative government, and late last year the Conservative Prime Minister (Stephen Harper) tried to take advantage of a weak opposition Liberal party and their inept leader (Stephan Dion) and to change campaign finance. Without going into too much detail, the changes would be very negative for the Liberal party (potentially forcing them into bankruptcy) and only moderately negative for any other party.
Needless to say this did not go over to well with the Liberals and they decided to form a coalition with the less popular socialist party (NDP) and the separatists (Bloc Quebecois). Now, most Canadians didn’t have a problem with the proposed changes to campaign finance and agreed that a party should get the bulk of its funding from its membership, so the coalition tried to sell itself on the conservative government’s lack of stimulus for the economy. Unfortunately for the Coalition Canadian’s do not really want or see the need for stimulus on the same level as other countries, and the idea of a coalition government is amazingly unpopular.
Recently the Liberal’s broke their own constitution and appointed a leader to run the party who is far more likeable and competent than their previous leader; and it is unknown whether he would actually support the coalition. The Conservative government is tabling a budget early this week which has some stimulus spending in it as well as some tax cuts; if the budget is voted down another election could be called or the coalition could be asked to run the country. With what is in the budget it will be difficult to vote it down, so I would expect the Liberals to demand concessions from the Conservatives in order to abstain from the vote so that the budget passes.
