What he means is, you can have your MP (Member of Parliament) say any fool thing to get himself elected (for the most part, they tend to not contradict their party leaders though), say something like decreasing the GST by 2%. Bang, they get elected, and should their party be asked to form the government, and said party later decides to up the GST by 2% instead, then this member would have to vote for the raise, or else be expelled from the party. This is all because of the whole Vote of No Confidence thing. If the governing party introduces a bill, and the bill is defeated (provided it's not a free vote, but those don't tend to happen when the government has a majority), then the government must dissolve and a new election must be held. So naturally, if you vote against party line, they get upset.
Ah, you Americans would love the Canadian system. I've lost count of the number of political parties we have. Each constituency is pretty much guaranteed a Liberal, a Progressive Conservative, and an NDP candidate. And then, depending on if you're east or west of Ottawa, you'll have either a BQ candidate or a Reform party candidate. And then there are the various minor parties (The Green Party, the Natural Law party - Yogic Flying, it's all the rage! - the Pot Party, etc), and the independent candidates. So we're talking 6 + candidates per constituency, and it's a plurality vote. So, we end up with a party that had maybe 40% of the popular vote controlling 60 to 70% of the Seats in the House of Commons. Which is why we get a leader like Jean Chretien threatening to cram Kyoto down our throats without even consulting his First Ministers, and those damn grits are gonna NEP us Albertans all over again.
And don't even get me started about the Senate!
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Ah, but Verisign has nothing to do with the .org TLD anymore. That's PIR: http://pir.org/
What he means is, you can have your MP (Member of Parliament) say any fool thing to get himself elected (for the most part, they tend to not contradict their party leaders though), say something like decreasing the GST by 2%. Bang, they get elected, and should their party be asked to form the government, and said party later decides to up the GST by 2% instead, then this member would have to vote for the raise, or else be expelled from the party. This is all because of the whole Vote of No Confidence thing. If the governing party introduces a bill, and the bill is defeated (provided it's not a free vote, but those don't tend to happen when the government has a majority), then the government must dissolve and a new election must be held. So naturally, if you vote against party line, they get upset.
Ah, you Americans would love the Canadian system. I've lost count of the number of political parties we have. Each constituency is pretty much guaranteed a Liberal, a Progressive Conservative, and an NDP candidate. And then, depending on if you're east or west of Ottawa, you'll have either a BQ candidate or a Reform party candidate. And then there are the various minor parties (The Green Party, the Natural Law party - Yogic Flying, it's all the rage! - the Pot Party, etc), and the independent candidates. So we're talking 6 + candidates per constituency, and it's a plurality vote. So, we end up with a party that had maybe 40% of the popular vote controlling 60 to 70% of the Seats in the House of Commons. Which is why we get a leader like Jean Chretien threatening to cram Kyoto down our throats without even consulting his First Ministers, and those damn grits are gonna NEP us Albertans all over again. And don't even get me started about the Senate!