Canada may have elected the Conservatives - or we may have never voted them in to power at all. It's tough to tell because they cheat in every election.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_and_Out_scandal

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Canadian_federal_election_...

I also think it's deceptive that they call themselves the Conservative party I bet older people may think they are the Progressive Conservatives but they are not it's two radically different political parties with similar names. I consider the current Conservative (Party of Canada) to be nothing more than the Reform Party reborn, for those who don't know Reform was like Canada's Tea Party.

The last election was supposed to change it all it seemed like everyone wasn't going to vote Conservative and there was even a massive push to get young people to vote which seemed to be working. Then the bottom fell out and the Conservatives were not just voted back in but a majority! I say it's the Boomers.

And all it took was some country-wide election fraud[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Canadian_federal_election_...

That's a bit of a stretch. A federal court found that electoral fraud had taken place in 6 out of 308 ridings, and did not affect the outcome of the election in any of those ridings. Meanwhile 12 ridings would have needed to change hands to change the outcome of the election.

If I match-fix a game in a sport championship but I would have won the whole thing anyway because I beat the next opponents, do I get punished or is it fine ?

When a group of politicians ask to be in control of a country and to be trusted with all of its power and responsibilities, and they have proven to be lying and cheating to those they represent, is it ok because the end result wasn't affected ?

I realize the analogies there are not all that good, but honestly whether or not it did have an impact doesn't matter, the fact is that it did happen.

This is false. The Conservatives put a stop to the per-party funding based on votes a long time ago.

> , so any amount of election fraud is essentially stealing funding from another party.

...but this was true when the elections happened. That's extra evil, I hadn't thought of it that way.

Without changing the whole thing, I don't understand why a system like this doesn't use a two turn election, unless one gets 50% of votes +1 in the first turn, a second turn happens when you can only vote for the two who had the more votes in the first turn. Conservatives would have never won in that situation, and that shows a huge problem in the system as-is. To take a poor analogy it asks people what is there choice between 3 shades of blue, or bright red. Most people agree on blue, but they differ on which exact shade of it, and red end up being chosen. If you had given the choice between blue and red, blue would have won absolutely because people who votes blue 1 were still very much in favor of blue 2 or blue 3 if the alternative was red.

Anyway, good luck to my friends in Canada

What counts is how many MPs you get voted in, including the leader who's going to become the PM (see footnote). Let's say there's 100 counties, then you need to win 51 to have a majority government and you can basically pass any law because MPs tend to follow party lines. A minority government is when you get less than 51 MPs, in which case you always have to ally yourself with another party if you want to pass a law, or just form a coalition.

Note: If the leading party's leader isn't voted in, he can swap with another MP. It almost happened in Québec with Jean Charest.

Everyone knows he sucks; Other parties get a lot of hype, and the future seems bright.

But when the results come in, Conservatives always win.

I just don't get it man.

Split vote on the center/left (liberal, ndp, green), and liberal leaders who lack intellect or charisma or both.

No, it doesn't. In all 3 of those elections more than 60% of the voters voted against Harper; he only won because there is only one right-wing party but 4 major left-wing parties.

Plurality voting is a sham.

Of course one would hope and expect that a government would govern in alignment with it's agenda. It's hard to imagine that the core of the agenda was "badly manage a digitization process to destroy priceless knowledge while not really saving any money"

Presumably many of the people who voted for Harper will want the incompetent underling responsible dealt with, if for no other reason than to prevent the management of their actual agenda from coming into disrepute.

It seems though that it only may be possible at election time. A few years prior to the election in which the Conservatives gained a minority, the Liberals and the NDP attempted to form a coalition government and the Governor General (The queen's representative in Canada) ended up proroguing parliament on Stephen Harper's behest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prorogation_in_Canada#History