Hung parliaments forever!
So, if Brian Topp becomes NDP leader and wins the 2015 election, there’ll never be another majority government again:
The so-called front-runner indicated in a recent interview the first thing he would do is introduce a “Parliament Act” to “curb the power of the prime minister.”
That includes getting to work immediately on some of the biggest constitutionally significant proposals the NDP has in its arsenal: abolishing the Senate, introducing proportionality into Canada’s electoral system and limiting the powers of the prime minister to prorogue Parliament when faced with a confidence vote.
“As recent history shows, if you believe, as I do, that Parliament has strayed far away from responsible government and needs to be saved from itself to some extent, you need to do that right away, before you settle into the comfortable pillow of power and get too used to the status quo,” he said.
This is interesting. Because a majority of Canadians support keeping the system as it is — I shouldn’t be surprised if the numbers were as overwhelming as the referendum in the UK over introducing the AV system in May.
Still, I suppose that if there were a Topp majority government, he’d be able to ram it through…
Correction: there would never be a single-party majority government again. The current government of the UK is a majority government. It’s just not a Tory-only majority government.
And you know better than to phrase it that way, Ben. Come ON.
There would never again be what is commonly understood to be a majority government, and there would always be what are commonly understood to be hung parliaments.
Don’t much like it, but it’s tactically smart. Lure in all the leftist reformers, and define yourself before the Tory war room does it for you.