General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Deep Hate For The Cheap Thug Trump Is The Ground Of This Election, Ladies And Gentlemen [View all]qallunat
(16 posts)In our system, in theory, every parliamentary vote on a bill can turn into a confidence vote, which could result in the immediate dissolution of the government. This necessitates that coalitions be formed by minority governments, but essentially allows majority governments a rubber stamp for any legislation they propose, assuming their majority is sufficient to buffer against member absences. In analogy to your system, ours behaves as though there were no presidential elections, but rather, as though Congressional elections were held for the whole House every four years, and the leader of the majority party automatically became President. By the rules of our system, Nancy Pelosi would be President of the United States
. I am not going to get into whether it's a feature or a bug, but this means that our MPs (congresspeople by anaolgy) are most often elected as avatars of the Party Leader. This make sense because generally MPs are expected to fall in line with their party when voting (the confidence vote rule makes it clear why). Interestingly, it's our Conservative Party that has historically been less authoritarian about "whipping" votes.
About coalitions: in practice, we have 3 parties that vie for control of the parliament, the Liberals (centrist corporatists, socially leftish), The Conservatives (generally center-right, but whose tent houses the more socially/fiscally extreme rightwing voters) and the NDP (nominally to the left of the Liberals, but AOC, for example, would be more to the left than the rank and file in this party, but not radically so). I exclude the Greens because they have never elected more than a couple of MPs and the Bloc Quebecois because they are a regional party whose ideology is difficult to situate between the Big Three for a very specific set of historical and cultural reasons to do with the role of Quebec in Confederation. Only the Liberals and Conservatives have held power federally. Where the NDP have held power provincially, they move to the centre and become indistinguishable from Liberals in governing.
I have seen it said on this forum, that the Democratic Party would rather see Trump re-elected than have Bernie as a Democratic President. I am not going to comment on that, but looking at Canadian politics through an ideological lens, it is true that, despite their left-leaning rhetoric, the Liberals always enact policies that cleave closer to Conservative rhetoric, and will always form coalitions with Conservatives (mostly informal, as Liberals tend to be tribally hostile to Conservatives and contemptuous of the NDP, broadly speaking) as opposed to the NDP. This is due to lobbyists, quid pro quo deals and somewhat less importantly, donors (we have no Citizens' United ruling, thank God!).
For leftists in Canada, then, we are stuck with the NDP, who tend to compromise their progressive tone whenever they feel it might reduce their electoral chances, and in any case, govern from the centre when in provincial power, and the Liberals, who campaign from the left and govern from the centre-right. The saving grace of our system, in general, is that our Conservatives are not crazy. Fundamentalist religion, while accommodated by the Cons, does not in general drive policy and although the oil and gas lobbyists are powerful, every party at least pays lip service to fighting climate change. Bay Street (our Wall Street) drives a lot of Liberal policy (e.g. NAFTA, USMCA or CAMUS, as we call it here).
All this to say, the general social, economic and environmental currents that colour your politics are present here and because we are in America's pocket economically and in many ways culturally, we watch your politics closely.