Ileia wrote:I wanna hear bout Canadian politics.
Well currently Canada is run by a minority Conservative government. "Conservative" in Canada is of course quite relative, although they're certainly my least favorite party. In actuality they're just slightly right-of-center, and well to the left of the US Democrats for example, although they do have a tendency to play along with the Americans. Thus the current government's commitment to stick in Afghanistan.
Before that the Liberals, which are basically a centrist party, were in power, but they fucked things up with weak leadership and some unclear corruption scandals. The liberals hold a fairly large minority in the government as well.
The two parties that suddenly became important, because the Conservative minority government needs at least one other party to support all their bills, are the NDP and the Bloc Quebecois. The Bloc is basically a French Nationalist party and are only relevant in Quebec, but it seems the Conservatives have been sucking up to them, thus prime minister Harper's recent approval of a declaration that Quebec is a "nation within Canada". The NDP is a social democrat party, a lot like your typical European social democrat parties. They're keen on welfare, social services, free education, minority rights and labour rights. I guess they'd be the sort of "Liberals" that American conservatives are so horrified at.
These are the only represented parties, with NDP having only a few seats. There's some parties that are always on the voting ballot but have yet to get a seat - including the Green Party, the Marijuana Party, the Marxist-Leninist Party and the Canadian Communist Party.
I've tended to vote NDP and Green variously, mostly based on who is likely to make more noise about certain things (like proportional representation, stance on war, or education funding) in the nearest election, but I'm not at all in agreement with either of them on everything. At one point about a year ago, I was seriously considering joining the Communist party, but ultimately decided they were dumb and too far absorbed in silly social issues instead of the more over-arching economical ones. I also have to confess to voting Liberal once to deliberately try to keep the Conservatives from power.
All in all though, I'm really disappointed in "democracy" here. The system is such that my views count for shit here. I'll keep putting in my ballot for NDP and/or Green in the future, but I've given up hope that I'll see any regime that tackles the severe and total economic fuckover that I believe is in the books for the larger capitalist society, Canada included.