Arpig
Posts: 9930
Joined: 1/3/2006
From: Increasingly further from reality
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quote:
How is that a big deal for you, since you don't pay taxes in Alaska or the U.S.? Are Canadian politics that fucking boring, because I never actually hear Canadians talk about their own government? Lucy got it on the nail. The few Canadian topics that have been posted get pretty much ignored, unless they have to do with something kink related. I will agree to post Canadian oriented threads if you will participate in them, however I doubt you would really be interested (because, yes compared to US politics, ours is very dull and sedate), and in a lot of cases you probably wouldn't understand what we were discussing, because despite what Brain says about Canadians and Americans being basically the same, the systems are very different, and ours doesn't make a lot of sense a lot of the time, due to it being filled with odd hold overs from the past, institutions and offices that continue to exist, but no longer serve any purpose.
Take our parliament for example, it really serves very little real function anymore, the Prime Minister (not even the cabinet) effectively rules as he sees fit, 99% of the time the Members of Parliament can be counted on to faithfully vote the party line, and if they don't then they get kicked out of the party caucus and lose the majority of their office budgets. So basically, the election decides how the votes in Parliament will go for the duration, for all practical purposes we are at the moment governed by 4 people: Stephen Harper, Michael Ignatieff, Jack Layton, and Gilles Duceppe. Between them they decide what will and what will not passed. The party leaders control their caucuses with an iron fist, nothing like the situation in the US where you have rogue Democrats opposing Obama's measures and so on. In Canada, when the party leader decides to support or oppose a measure, then all the MPs from his party will vote for or against it as appropriate. And don't even get me started on our Senate, a bigger waste of money and seat leather never existed. In the Senate, they vote the party line as well, and whenever a new Prime Minister takes over he as quickly as possible stacks the Senate with party hacks and bagmen so he can control the chamber. But the Senate, while theoretically able to overturn or refuse a bill passed by parliament, it is rare for it to do anything but rubber stamp a bill coming up from the Commons. On the rare occasions where the Senate proposes amendments to a bill, those amendments have already been agreed to by the party leaders.
Well that's enough of a hijack for now, but as you can see from the preceeding paragraph, the systems are very different, and much of what is deemed important in Canadian politics will not really seem to be so to most outsiders (or even to most Canadians). However, since the point was made, and is indeed valid, I will start posting Candian threads, and I encourage other Canadians to do the same. And I also encourage our American friends to participate in them and to give us your opinions (even if it is just to say WTF???).
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