Canadian federal election - 2015

[politicus]

I know that hard core conservative supporters think "coalition" is a dirty word, I see no evidence that today in 2014/15 the rest of the population has a problem with parties forming a coalition. In fact I think they rather like the idea of parties working together

Look over to here in the UK to see why Coalition's terrible for trust in politics.

Then again in Australia anytime the "right" forms government it is inevitably "the Coalition" meaning the Liberal and National parties - and no one in Australia seems at all troubled by that.

The main reason the coalition doesn't work in the UK is that its a coalition of unequal partners where the LibDems allow themselves to be pushed around. If they had used their central position to say: "if we don't get this through, we will just switch to Labour", then the balance of power would have been quite different.

An NDP/Liberal coalition with the two parties being of relatively equal size could probably work. The problem is that you will likely get a Liberal landslide and a weak NDP, which is a terrible starting point - with the weaker party on the fringe and the stronger in the center. Most functional coalitions are either between equal partners or a big party in alliance with one or two smaller centrist parties.

[politicus]

I know that hard core conservative supporters think "coalition" is a dirty word, I see no evidence that today in 2014/15 the rest of the population has a problem with parties forming a coalition. In fact I think they rather like the idea of parties working together

Look over to here in the UK to see why Coalition's terrible for trust in politics.

Then again in Australia anytime the "right" forms government it is inevitably "the Coalition" meaning the Liberal and National parties - and no one in Australia seems at all troubled by that.

The main reason the coalition doesn't work in the UK is that its a coalition of unequal partners where the LibDems allow themselves to be pushed around. If they had used their central position to say: "if we don't get this through, we will just switch to Labour", then the balance of power would have been quite different.

An NDP/Liberal coalition with the two parties being of relatively equal size could probably work. The problem is that you will likely get a Liberal landslide and a weak NDP, which is a terrible starting point - with the weaker party on the fringe and the stronger in the center. Most functional coalitions are either between equal partners or a big party in alliance with one or two smaller centrist parties.

The LibDems can't credibly switch to Labour (although they could force a new election) because Labour + LibDems is short of a majority.

Also, I don't really see what's wrong from a democratic perspective that the big party "pushes" the small party around. Shouldn't the big party get a lot more say?

I wasn't speaking from a democratic point of view, but from a practical. Coalitions work when all parties in them have some leverage. Either because they are of roughly equal strength or because the weaker party (or parties) has the (credible) ability to switch sides.

[politicus]

The Lib Dems are a particularly poor case because their appeal as a centre party under FPTP rests on winning each of the other parties' voters in different kinds of constituency, they have no broad social base that they can reward with targeted measures and that will continue to back them with money or votes like trade unions, businesses, immigrants, pensioners, etc., and targetting narrow social bases, like liberal parties in Europe do, can't work under FPTP; it is hard to reward your voters when it is unclear what they want from you and when you won many of them on a permanently-oppositional basis.

Last time I checked Britain was part of Europe

[politicus]

Mulcair interview.

Reading someone say "If you want Canada to become the next Greece, vote for the NDP" in French in the comment section was a bit of a surreal experience.

You need a lot of global warming for Canada to become like Greece, so voting Conservative would seem a much more sensible way to achieve that goal.