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how many freaking ELECTIONS unno gonna have in such a short space a time just fi vote in the SAME leadership or the SAME kinda leadership???!
scrise!!..
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">September 2, 2009
<span style="font-size: 14pt">Liberals Try to Topple Canadian Government </span>
By IAN AUSTEN
OTTAWA — Canada moved closer to its second federal election in less than a year on Tuesday, after the opposition leader Michael Ignatieff announced that his Liberal Party would no longer support Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservative government.
“Mr. Harper, your time is up,” Mr. Ignatieff told a cheering crowd of Liberal politicians at a party retreat in Sudbury, Ontario. “We will hold Stephen Harper to account and we will oppose his government in Parliament.”
The Conservatives do not control a majority of the votes in the House of Commons and rely on the support of the Liberals and two smaller opposition parties to maintain power. Some combination of members from the two smaller parties, the New Democratic Party and the Bloc Québécois, would have to join the Liberals in order to bring down the government.
Bob Rae, a prominent Liberal member of Parliament, said his party would introduce a motion of no confidence in the government at the first opportunity in the Parliamentary calendar, probably in early October.
Exactly how either of the smaller parties, which are to the left of both the Conservatives and the Liberals, will respond when that happens is unclear. Last week, however, Jack Layton, the leader of the New Democrats, said that his party “would be the least likely of the political parties to support the Conservatives.”
Since 2006, Mr. Harper has maintained two governments without a majority of Parliamentary votes partly because the opposition parties were concerned that Canadians were weary of federal elections. There have been three since June 2004.
Mr. Harper and other Conservatives were quick to say Tuesday that Canadians were not longing for another vote this fall. The prime minister also suggested that the end of his government would harm the economy.
“Political uncertainty does not serve the country right now,” Mr. Harper said in Calgary, Alberta, the city which includes his Parliamentary district.
In his speech, Mr. Ignatieff, a former journalist who also headed a human rights institute at Harvard University, criticized Mr. Harper for eroding public health care “at a time when Americans want a public health care system,” for lowering the country’s international profile and for replacing a large federal budget surplus with a deficit.
This is the second time since the October 2008 election that Mr. Harper’s government has been in peril.
In December, Mr. Harper asked Governor General Michaëlle Jean, who represents Queen Elizabeth II as the nation’s head of state, to shut down Parliament so that his government could avoid a no confidence vote. Stéphane Dion, the Liberal leader at the time, had formed a coalition with the other two opposition parties to replace the Conservatives in power.
While the episode eroded Mr. Harper’s reputation as a shrewd political strategist, it ultimately proved worse for Mr. Dion who had already announced his resignation as Liberal leader. The party’s executive accelerated the replacement process with the unusual step of naming Mr. Ignatieff as leader in December without holding a party convention.
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ehh hee
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