News Is the Canadian government dispute an abuse of rules?

[tanker]

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Canadian_political_dispute "The document was fiercely rejected by the opposition for not fiscally stimulating the economy during the economic crisis,[7][8] for suspending the right of federal civil servants to strike, and for suspending the right for women to seek recourse from the courts for pay equity issues."

Checked it out, and I couldn't see the source of the claim in wiki. If this is true, though, I stand corrected and shocked.
Edit: I also couldn't find a source in the wiki article about the strike suspension, even though the article claims it as well.

Interesting about that funding stuff. Why are the Conservatives so wealthy, and why are the Liberals broke? The Liberals, after all, were in power for 10+ years, while the Conservatives were hardly on the map during that time. What changed?

As for those fringe parties, well their non existent public support means they hardly get any money anyway, so so what. For the better, too, since then we don't have to have the Family Values religious types pushing pamphlets in our face or Karl Marx worshipers on the other end...

 

[tmc]

The Liberals are poor for two reasons. First, donations went way down during the scandals and due to internal splitting between Chretien and Martin camps, and have yet to fully recover from those. They were at the top for a while, and while it worked they were indeed rich (while the conservatives were quite poor, especially before the two parties merged...the Canadian alliance basically depended on the public subsidies to stay alive, which is why it's ironic to see now the conservatives trying to remove this funding). Second, they've had a lot of spending lately, with many election campaigns, leadership races, etc. There's been a lot of internal action in the Liberals that other parties haven't seen.

The Conservatives are wealthy because, one, they're not as broke as the Liberals, and two, their donations have gone up with Alberta's wealth and with the merger of all right-wing parties, while the left is still broken up in various parties (Alberta is rich, and is full of conservative supporters, which translates into lots of donations).

 

[GeorginaS]

And then he tried to cut funding for the other parties, remove right to strike for federal employees, freeze their wages and remove equity between men and women.
That's what he proposed as a minority leader. Imagine if he had had a majority...


They still got more of the vote share than the conservatives. As such, they're entitled to form the government if they agree to form a coalition.

And cutting funding would have effectively bankrupted all other parties save the Conservatives.

Thank you, tmc, for injecting the reasoning and rationale behind the introduction of the idea of the coalition formation in the first place. The open post represented it as a power-play by the Liberals and NDP existing in a vacuum. And that not being the case, it was a tad annoying.

 

[NeoDevin]

The open post represented it as a power-play by the Liberals and NDP existing in a vacuum.

Conservative propaganda has convinced a lot of Canadians that that is the case.

 

[Danger]

I think that it's time to introduce the 'First Danger Law of Politics': Anyone possessed of the type of mentality needed to run for public office is unfit to hold it.

 

[GeorginaS]

Anyone else think that putting Ignatieff in charge of the Liberals is going to help any of this?

 

[mgb_phys]

Leaders who can write (or even read) in charge in the US and Canada - what is the world coming to.