ttk77
Senior Member
Rest of the world is not relevant here. We have no tradition or history of coalitions - the closest we've come in recent years is in 2008 where the Governor-General shutdown Parliament in order to avoid a Liberal-BQ coalition replacing the Con's minority
http://www.cbc.ca/m/touch/canada/story/1.748982
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news...sought-prorogation-ex-adviser/article4370133/
Harper would again argue that the GG must award the gov't to the party that wins the most votes, and without a stated agreement from the Liberal-Democrats I'd say he'd have a strong case.
As long as the number of seats from each province does not change, the provinces may go along with changes to or scrapping of FPTP. The problem though is that true proportional representation means that each vote is equal, but in Canada the smaller provinces have great representation. For example, a vote in PEI is much more powerful than one in Ontario, since in PEI 146,000 people own four seats in Ottawa (36K people per seat), while in Ontario 14 million people own only 121 seats in Ottawa (115K people per seat). The only way to make each voter equal is to crack open the Constitution and its original 1867 acts of Confederation, which would be a huge endeavour equal to changing the head of state.
We may not have had coalitions at the national level before, but we have had several of them at the provincial level.
Baring any law here in Canada that I may not be aware of banning post-election coalitions, I'm not sure why how it's done elsewhere should be irrelevant. Is Canada somehow so different that it wouldn't work here, or is it just another case of people scared of change insisting that something won't work just because we've never done it that way before?