by Brian Taylor

Created on: February 01, 2010   Last Updated: February 03, 2010

An overview of Canadian politics?

In our current environment, it's almost a non-issue.

Proroguement is when a parliamentary body finds itself in a stalemate and the Prime Minister asks the Governor General if they can recess for a proposed amount of time. In other words, our minority government can't get any conservative motions passed and has, "run home to Mama." The Governor General, the Queens' representative has, twice in the last thirteen months, allowed this interruption.

Proroguement means the government has given up. Currently, we have no sitting government until after the Olympics.

While it would seem somewhat of a valid, logical argument to state that government needn't be active if there was no chance of change, there is no particular reason to feel this is our current predicament. For if the only power Prime Minister Stephen Harpers' Conservative party has is to do nothing, why would we expect anything different. Also, the conservative philosophy, with its big business first model of economics and strict, nearly fundamentalist social policy, provides its own need for resistance. To put it bluntly, Mr. Harper is not being stopped only because Liberals and Democrats are positioned opposite his party, but because his thinking is no longer popular.

The problem won't be remedied until some other party gains enough strength to topple Mr. Harper and his conservatives. This, in our current climate, seems somewhat unlikely to happen. Recent polls indicate that Mr.  Harper and Michael Ignatieff, Liberal party leader are neck and neck and no one wants to run an expensive election, just to again wind up where we were. Mr. Ignatieff, Author and Historian, is lacking support by non-Liberals due to his living and working in America and England for the last several years. New Democratic Party leader, Jack Layton, a fairly distant third position candidate, is about as likely to become Prime Minister as the other two minority  party leaders, Gilles Duceppe of the Parti Quebecois and Elizabeth May of the Green party.

I don't think there's is any doubt in Canadians' minds that the winds are blowing decidedely left and we, like our neighbours to the south will soon be shifting away from the conservative right. Ultimately, cooler heads will prevail and centrist parties will become the  future of all politics. Globalization is inevitable and should be welcomed but we are now further away from this realization than it seems. No extreme faction can serve our better interests and no inaction can avoid necessary change. Until this day comes we will continue to ride the see-saw of the right/left dichotomy, alternatively spending and saving, helping and harming, angry and apethetic.

All of this is, of course, considered without bringing up that we are a nation at war.

A nation at war with no sitting government, this is the state of Canadian politics.

Where are the cooler heads that will prevail?

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