On procedure and politics

Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined

Keyword Post: Answers to Questions on Election Outcomes

Following the recent election in the Canadian province of Ontario, I can see that there are a lot of people searching for very basic information about how our system of government works. While I have detailed posts answering most of these questions on this blog, I will provide shorter, basic answers to some of the [...]

Understanding government formation

There is some confusion in Canada (and elsewhere) as to how government formation occurs following a general election, particularly when an election results in a hung parliament. This post will attempt to provide a basic overview of the process. First, there are a couple of key concepts to understand and keep in mind. 1. In [...]

On responsible media

In the lead-up to the May 2010 United Kingdom general election, opinion polls showed that in all likelihood, the election would result in a hung, or minority parliament, that is, a parliament in which no single party would have a majority of the seats in the House of Commons. The last hung parliament in the [...]

Minority assumptions

At the outset of the most recent Canadian federal election campaign in March of this year, I wrote a post addressing how the concept of coalition government had become almost toxic in Canada. This phenomenon didn’t start this year – it dates back, as the posts states, to events in 2008. The Canadian media has [...]

Keyword Post: Types of Government

There have been various queries in my keyword search activity from people looking for explanations of minority vs. coalition vs majority government, and so I decided to write a brief post explaining the different types of government. In parliamentary systems, such as the UK and Canada and many other countries, the head of state and [...]

The curious matter of cabinet formation

“If we believe in democracy, surely the essence of parliamentary democracy is rule by amateurs, and most governments prove that. We call on the experts to get expert views and opinions and ideas and policy and implementation, but ordinary people are elected by ordinary people to make decisions for all of us. That’s the basis [...]

The 1985 Liberal-NDP Accord

(Note: if you’re looking for information about what types of government might emerge following a hung (minority) parliament election result, you may be interested in this post, this post and this post. Also, there was no Liberal-NDP coalition in 1985 – it was a Liberal minority government with supply-confidence support from the NDP, as will [...]

It’s all in the nomenclature

Fellow bloggers have probably had this happen to them in the past: you read an article, blog on some aspect of it, then notice something else in the article and blog about that, then on rereading either the article or what you wrote about it again, you notice something else that you feel obliged to [...]

It’s not about who wins the most seats

(Note: Not the information you’re looking for? I do try to help people as much as I can and regularly monitor key word activity on this blog to see what is bringing people here. If this post doesn’t answer your questions, please consider contacting me with details regarding what information you’re looking for, including context [...]

Lessons Learned – Part 3

This will probably be my final installment discussing some of the findings in the House of Commons Political and Constitutional Reform Committee’s Report, Lessons from the process of Government formation after the 2010 General Election. If you missed them, here are the links to Part 1 and Part 2. In this post, I will look [...]

keep looking »
  • Share |
Page 1 of 212