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Worthwhile Canadian Blogpost

Michael Stickings has a smart and informative take on the political situation in Canada.

It’s interesting to wonder what the long-term consequences of this will be for the Canadian political system. If you look at the past couple of elections, it’s clear that the divide between the center-left Liberals and the left-left NDP is a huge gift to the Tories. In principle, a coalition could lead to better future electoral performance for both parties via tactical voting and implicit or explicit decisions about which ridings to target. At the same time, though, the CPC considers to suffer from something of a taint of extremism since it’s the descendant of a party that was formed as a further-right alternative to Canada’s traditional center-right party. Governing in alliance with the NDP could cause the Liberals to lose their centrist sheen.

Ultimately, given the nature of Canada’s first-past-the-post voting, it would probably be better to have something more like a two-party system in which the most rightwing elements of the Liberal Party defect to a somewhat-more-moderate Conservative Party and then you saw a fusion of NDP and the remaining Liberals as a proper left-of-center party.

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