The Shrine

After being under the NDP (New Democratic Party for the americans. They are the most left wing party of the 3 Canada wide parties) for 16 years, the Sask Party has swooped in to claim a majority government in Sasktachewan (over 50% of the seats) with 50.81% of the vote and 38/58 seats. This leaves the NDP with 20 seats with 37.21% of the vote and the provincial Liberal party with none at all at 9.53% of the vote. This may still change as many of the races were off by very few votes and absentee ballots as well as hospital ballots still haven't all come in. The political climate of Saskatchewan has shown that the NDP has mainly gotten their seats from the major cities of Regina and Saskatoon, while the outlying municipalities voted for the conservative Sask Party. There was an aggressive campaign by the NDP to smear the Sask Party by claiming the Sask Party was going to privatize the provincial crown corporations and wreck the great economic boom that Saskatchewan is going through. This will be seen in the time between the Sask Party actually taking office and Nov 7, 2011 when the next election will be held.

In other news, it turns out that I post much more when I have homework to do. Bovine out!

I thought there were four major parties in Canada: two left-winged, and two right-winged, with the minority parties being in the extreme for their group. Is that not the case anymore?

there used to be a slightly libertarian conservative party (reform) but they sort of combined with the old conservative party (actually called the new conservative party) like so many tigers into the voltron that is now the conservative party in government in Canada right now. Same sort of thing happened with the conservative party and the Sask party right here in Saskatchewan. The story goes kind of like this in regards to conservative parties in Canada... Conservative party gets into power, messes things up right good (NAFTA gave us a good deal with the big 3, but fucked us over everywhere else, or the terribly corrupt conservative party in Saskatchewan), gets out of power, loses TONS of credibility and seats.... but then merges with a new party or changes its name altogether, only to sweep into power once again.

The four parties holding seats in federal parliament are: Conservatives, Liberals, Bloc Quebecois, and the NDP. The Bloc does not count as a Canada wide party because it only runs in and has seats in Quebec. The Reform Party was similar with its ability to only gain seats in western Canada. Also, the Bloc is very similar to the NDP with its big pushes for social programs for the populace. However the Bloc is much more successful because they get Quebec a lot of autonomy and thus these social programs..... sadly the rest of Canada does not benefit.

Essentially the Progressive Conservatives and Reform party merged into a single party on the Federal level. They won a minority government, and mostly just make a lot of noise. Our economic rise has little to do with the current minority government though because it actually started 4 years ago.

SineSwiper wrote:I thought there were four major parties in Canada: two left-winged, and two right-winged, with the minority parties being in the extreme for their group. Is that not the case anymore?

The other "two" (Bloc and NDP) are big enough to grab seats and force the two big parties, the Conservatives and the Liberals, to pay attention to them but never big enough to win it all on a federal level. On a provincial level, you also have the Green party which in the election last month here in Ontario had 11% of the popular vote but didn't win any seats in the provincial parliment (sp?). Fucked up if you ask me.

We actually had a referendum in Ontario last month with our regular provincial election where you got to vote to change our voting system to ensure that stuff like the Green party getting 11% of the vote actually would have members of our provincial parliment, but our close-minded voters shot it down. First time in 80 years we've been able to vote on a referendum and people threw their only chance to actually change their political system away. Sure it had its flaws (we would have 20 more members thus spending more money) but it was better than what we have now.

But shooting this down with a 2-1 margin the voters have basically told the politicians "Please, continue to fuck me, my children, and my grandchildren up the ass" (calm down, Derith :-). Only chance we had to truly tell our politicians we weren't happy with the system and their abuse of it and we threw it away like morons. Woulda helped if we didn't have a record-low turnout for voters

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/ontariovotes20 ... 71010.html

First time in 13 years I actually had a reason to vote and my fellow Ontarians proved to me there's no reason for me to ever vote again.