I'm just curious.. that if Paul Martin got a no confidence vote .. why is he allowed to run in the election? It doesn't make much sense to me. I know I don't know the specifics about how government is run up there, so give me a break.
I asked the better half when I was up there this past weekend, but she didn't really know.
Cuz were Canadian and drink beer. :unsure:
The parliment voted non confidence in the "government" not a lack of confidence in the individual who leads it at the time though it is of course related.
In a parlimentry system we don't directly vote for a Prime Minister here like you would vote for a President. We vote for our local Member of Parliment and that is it.
We had a minority Government, meaning that the Liberals ( the party in power ) didn't really have total power in the house. The opposition ( Conservatives, NDP etc. ) had the chance to have a confidence vote meaning that if they can muster up more votes against the Liberals than the Liberals can get for themselves there would be an election called which is what happened.
So pretty much was 2001_ZTS said the confedence vote was against the current government and not the actual leader. If this election gives us another minority government then it will all be nothing but a waste of tax payer money and everyone's time.
That's the only thing the US electoral system has over ours... you can pick your local rep and then your head of state. Our head of state could lose horribly in he polls all over the country, but then as the head of a particular party they would then still be Prime Minister.
This happened back in the early 90s with Kim Campbell and a whopping two seats for the PCs.
NOS2Go4Me,Jan 23 2006, 07:33 PM Wrote:That's the only thing the US electoral system has over ours... you can pick your local rep and then your head of state. Our head of state could lose horribly in he polls all over the country, but then as the head of a particular party they would then still be Prime Minister.
This happened back in the early 90s with Kim Campbell and a whopping two seats for the PCs.
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she never won anything, she was only the PM cause of Mulroney giving it to her. Which in his defence was a good move cause #1 it gave us our first and possibly last female PM ( we're not sexest anymore! ) #2 he didn't have to lose a massive loss and go down in disgrace, but Kim sure did.