Minister X wrote:Four questions I wish to ask:
1) Amongst all the permutations and possibilities you guys discussed, I don't think anyone ever looked at
what has in fact come down: a conservative majority. You are all left of center, are you not? It's natural to discount possibilities you'd least like to see. Is that the explanation or was the result simply that far outside the realm of expectations? If the latter: why?
I hadn't discounted it, but it is far less interesting to discuss. A majority government of a single party, the one that had already had power for the past few years, looks to me like 'more of the same' - and so is not very interesting. The prospect of a party coming from third place in national voting (and fourth in the number of seats) to being
2) Why were the polls off by so much? Not enough money to run large ones? Electorate too fickle? Last-minute developments?
The main variations (between the vote and late polls) seemed to be that the Tories were about 2% higher, the Liberals a couple of percent lower. The other parties were about right in terms of the national polls. The thing is that what was hard to predict was how the large swing from BQ & Liberal to NDP would break in each riding. In some it served to split the anti-Tory vote, and in others it merely switched the seat from one non-Tory party to another.
There's also the other following factors that may have influenced voters between the end of last week and Monday:
1) The Royal Wedding, which will have given nostalgics and royalists a boost and contributed to a measure of good feeling over the weekend
2) The breaking news of the death of OBL would have had a small impact, but would tend to vindicate Harper's position on the War on Terror
3) The last minute campaigning included some attacks on the NDP that may have hit home and caused more people to come out to vote Tory to stop the prospect of a Layton-led government
There's of course the notion of 'shy-Tories', people who don't say they'll vote Conservative but will, the fact that polls themselves alter the voting intentions of people, and possible effects of a low turnout (probably hitting the Liberals and Bloc more as they saw defeat coming). Then there was the leaking of initial results from the Atlantic provinces.
3) Over the years at Redscape I've read many criticisms of the USA's two-party system, and many comparative appreciations of parliamentarism. I'm not against the rise of additional parties in the USA but I think the advantages of having just two are easy to overlook. As best I can tell, y'all now have an "enfranchised dictator" against whom 60% of your electorate voted. The Conservatives will get their program passed with a minimum of checks/balances. Had the non-conservative parties united (forming a USA-like two-party system) the situation would be almost precisely the opposite, but with a majority of voters actually having their wishes translated into results.
Possibly, but there are reasons why the non-Conservative parties would find it hard to unite. They had a majority of seats before, and so could have shared power simply by use of an early vote of no confidence. However, that would have meant the Quebec separatists participating or at least propping up a federal government (which would run counter to their propaganda as much as their aims), as well as relying on the NDP and the Liberals working together when they've been sharp rivals in several provinces.
You are right that having two big-tent parties can be advantageous.
The Canadian Constitution seems awfully non-democratic here. Am I right? Other than the fact that it's not your preferred party that won -- overlooking that fact if you can -- are y'all disturbed by this? Would you be happy seeing your preferred party have 80% of the power with only 40% of the vote?
Eh? The electoral system is the same as the US one, and so is no more or less democratic (mind you, the upper house is not elected, so
that is less democratic). The Canadian system was pretty much 2-party for much of the last 100 years, and it's only recently that the Bloc emerged, or that the NDP were more than a regional force. The FPTP system is certainly something that inhibits small national parties (and rewards regional parties and large national ones), and in the US has combined with self-serving laws to entrench the two-party system. Which means that people who would like to vote for another party face the choice of a lesser of two evils (or the 'evil of two lessers').
The problem is that you conflate the 'Constitution' with the 'political makeup' of the two countries. If the use of FPTP is undemocratic in Canada, it's undemocratic in the USA (and it can be, as we saw in 2000 when the Presidential candidate with fewer votes won more electoral college places), and for the same reasons. The 'fix' of the centre-left parties uniting is not a constitutional change, but a political one. Changing the voting system to something more democratic, such as STV or AMS (Single Transferable Vote and Additional Member Systems) would be.
Now, you have the 'checks and balances' of two chambers and a strong judiciary, where Canada (and the UK) have appointed upper houses, a supposedly unbiased and constitutional weak Monarch/Governor General, and an establishment judiciary, and those differences mean that one single election can't easily give all power to one party and that party won't have total control of the country, but is it democratic for the US to take so long to reflect popular will?
4) I lied about the bacon. How is it made? Can I get any of the authentic stuff in Albuquerque?
I've no idea about what Canadian bacon is. I hope it's nicer than US bacon (typically fried to a total crisp and over-sweetened). Is it like Danish bacon (mmmmmm)?