I must say I loves me the day to day uncertainty of a multiparty parliamentary democracy. Our federal election began a year later than the American presidential race, finished three weeks earlier so Harper could welcome Obama as neighbouring leader, and now the NDP and Liberals reach a deal to topple the minority Tory government next week but they haven’t decided who the new leader of the Liberal party is yet, so who knows who the Prime Minister will be when Obama stops being the president-elect? Will protocol demand that Bush leave a congratulatory message for someone? When we aren’t even having an election over this? I love these flurries of activity. What’s going on in the states? A whole lotta waiting for 1/20/09. We could have three more leaders by then.
(For my American reader(s?), our NDP and Liberal parties are our Centre-Left and Business-Centre parties. The Conservative Party is currently in power but don’t have enough members in parliament to do what they want with impunity, which is why this is possible. We’ve talked about this before.)
Note that I am not by any means an expert on the actual non-trivial implications of any of this, so please excuse any misinformation you might feel is part of my commentary.
I like that you call the Liberals business-centre. Since people began to view the Green party as a threat to NDP and Liberal votes, there has been an increasing tendency for people to categorize the Liberals as centre-left. Sure, they are to the left of the Conservatives, but they are to the right of the NDP (and the unrepresented Green vote). Just in terms of analytical tidiness, I think that puts them smack in the centre of our political spectrum. Not to mention the party’s historical willingness to compromise its policies to whatever is polling well, and its eagerness to appeal to the business establishment (admittedly a Conservative trait as well).
At the same time, I appreciate that in Canada the label centre-left is one a national party with the potential to form a government — sooner or later, in one form or another — is willing to embrace, because a sufficiently large chunk of the populace views the term favourably.
Anyway, JJU, I really just ended up here because I received a notification that you subscribed to my Twitter feed. Surely this was accidental, since I have posted a grand total of three messages, but I suppose you can now rest assured that you will not miss my next communique.