Oh (Yes,) Canada!
Our neighbors to the north have taken a small step in the right direction.
This was as much of a reaction to the smug liberal incumbent government as a mandate for conservatism, but the government in place in Canada just got a lot less goofy.Monday's election gave the Conservatives 124 seats, below the 155 needed to form a majority. The ruling Liberals won 103 seats while the left-leaning New Democratic Party won 29 seats. The Bloc Quebecois, which campaigns only in the French-speaking province of Quebec, won 51 seats.
"Each and every day, I will assure you of one thing -- I will dedicate myself to making Canada more united, stronger, more prosperous and a safer country," Harper told an ecstatic crowd in the Western Canadian city of Calgary after his win.
The result was a major triumph for Harper, a 46-year-old economist who created the Conservatives in late 2003 by pushing through the merger of two squabbling
right-wing parties. He will be the first prime minister from the oil-rich Western province of Alberta for 25 years.
Poor Michael Moore, he must have choked on his spare ribs this morning.
1 Comments:
Unfortunately for your smug, reactionary noting of Canadian politics (I thought that we here in the US should have no regard for other legal and political systems, unless our foreign policy programs were installing them or propping them up?), the further left parties in Canada gained more seats than they ever had in the past. And liberal political parties (you actually get more than two parties in parliamentary systems) ended up with a combined total of around 50% of the seats. The Conservative Party won only 36% or something like that. The real issue here is that Paul Martin's government was failing and under the weight of a corruption scandal. It wasn't a reaction to liberalism in Canada nor was it an endorsement of conservativism (Harper couldn't mention being a Canadian Bush-type for fear of losing an election solely on being a lapdog for a detested US administration). It was a frustration with a government that people felt was not serving it the way it has for years. The CP doesn't have enough of a mandate to govern effectively, and there will be new elections within two years. In the meantime, they'll still go on enjoying universal health care that is more effective and efficient than our cobbling together of private, high-cost, and poor-care plans; they'll go on staying out of peoples' private lives; and they will go on not spying on their own people.
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