The Canadian Government

As a Canadian, I feel obligated to say at least something about what's going on with my government. Unfortunately, I don't live in the country so it's hard to guage the ineptitude of the current government in dealing with the economic crisis.

The basic situation is this: the Conservatives hold a majority in the House of Commons, but it is not an absolute majority. This is what's called a minority government. Four other parties are represented, which when their number seats are combined, equal more than the Conservative party's. Three of those parties threatened to form a coalition in response to the Conservatives' plan to cut funding to political parties and their lack of any sort of plan to aid the struggling economy. To prevent that, the Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, suspended parliament until January 26th.

So now we find ourselves at a stalemate and the government is on vacation until January 26th. That basically means 8 weeks of the goverment doing nothing to fix the economy. Could you imagine if the US Congress just gave up the ghost for 8 weeks while the entire economy slipped deep into recession?

Obviously, the current situation has sparked polarized opinions across the country. Some people are for the new coalition, some are against. The latter, and the Conservative party, argue that this coalition goes against democracy (we had an election 8 weeks ago and the electorate chose a Conservative minority). The former says that if the government is going to sit there and do nothing will the economy falls into recession, something needs to be done.

There is one thing that puzzles me about the anti-coalition argument about this move being "anti-democracy." First of all, when you look at the percentage of votes that each party got, you see that the Conservatives had almost 38%. Now, when you add the percentages of the other 3 parties (the Liberals, NDP, and Bloc Quebecois) together, you get almost 55%. Perhaps I'm wrong here, but isn't such a coalition more representative of the electorate's will? The same holds true for the number of seats that the coalition would have versus the Conversatives (163 vs. 143).

Second, isn't this the point of a minority government? To form coalitions and ACTUALLY ACCOMPLISH THINGS. As the electorate, we were obviously not fully convinced that one party could lead the nation. So shouldn't we be happy that three parties are willing to put aside their political differences in order to do something about the problems facing the country?

Minority governments are great in theory for this exact reason. You have input from multiple sides in order to reach a solid solution that everyone can agree with.