Reader Mail - Excitement up north

Maple Leaf writes:

Canadians will elect new government on June 28

Also, here's a good column on some of the background (although I think mainstream Republicans would disagree that the Conservative's ideas are theirs): Why call an election now?

So I guess I should provide my own background comments again. Six months ago, when Paul Martin first became Prime Minister, there seemed little doubt that when he called an election, he would win it easily. However, since then, the two right-wing parties joined together to form one Conservative Party of Canada, and chose a new leader who, while not the most exciting man in the country, has a lot of strengths which former conservative leaders lacked. (Remember that I mentioned the possibility of all this happening last year on a former blog.) Also, the government was found to be funnelling hundreds of millions of dollars to friendly ad companies, who in turn kicked-back money to the Liberal Party. This scandal has heavily damaged the government, and their poll numbers have been dropping for months. The latest polls from this weekend have them below 40%, with the Conservatives around 30% or even higher. The numbers are especially bad for the Liberals in Ontario, which has over a third of the seats in Parliament. This means that for the first time in over ten years, the Liberals are in danger of losing a general election, although a more likely scenario would have them winning a minority government (which hasn�t happened in more than twenty years). While this may sound promising to you Americans (especially since the Conservatives are far more pro-American), the Liberals are more likely to try to form a coalition with the socialist NDP than with the Conservatives, meaning that the government could swing further to the left. My own prediction right now (and I will humbly point out that I won my class’s election pool in 2000, hitting the seat distribution almost perfectly) is that the Liberals will probably win a majority, but that it will be razor thin, and one or two by-elections could put them into a minority. But that could easily change in the next few weeks, especially if people get pissed off about having to vote during their summer vacations (it's happened several times before). I’ll keep you posted with all the fun details.