[Chrissi]

I guess I'm really out of touch with what Canadians want, because I seriously didn't think that the conservatives would win this one. I couldn't understand how anyone could vote for them after seeing the debates. Oh man. The poorness of Harper in those debates was painful - he couldn't look at the camera and was constantly staring at some random spot in front of him on the table, maybe his hands...

I also expected the green party to get at least a few seats, I mean, honestly, there was a lot of fuss about them this time around and HOLY **** Elizabeth May did absolutely wonderfully in the debate, she totally shone above everyone else - she's the only one who knew what she was talking about.

Either Canadians are idiots or they didn't watch the freaking debate, which makes me sad. Green deserves more.

And yes, the liberal/conservative choice this time was like trying to choose between a pussy and an asshole. It was pretty stupid. Freaking strategic voting. I don't think anyone wanted Harper or Dion, but people were cockblocking Dion by voting Harper, and Harper by voting Dion, and if everyone would just ****ing vote what they want instead of voting strategically, maybe NDP would have won or something. Christ.

Canadian Politics for Dummies:

I'll give a brief explanation of the Canadian electoral system: it's first past the post (like the US) but the winning party is determined by the number of "seats" they hold, not the proportion of the vote they hold. The ideal situation for a party is to earn more than half the seats and have a majority government. Each seat represents a riding - a small (or sometimes large) geographical area usually defined by city lines or, in the case of large cities like Toronto, split into areas. Toronto has like, I dunno, 10 ridings or something, but all of Nunavut (if you don't know what that is, go look it up) is only one riding because there are lots of people in Toronto and barely any people in Nunavut.

There are 304 or 308 (I forget and I'm too lazy to look it up) ridings in Canada and each represents a seat in the house of commons. In each riding, the proportion of votes is tallied and the representative (a member of a party, conservative, liberal, etc) with the most votes earns the seat for that riding in government. That representative represents you and your local geographic area in government.

What this means is that the proportion of Canadians who vote for a certain party is a pretty useless number when it comes to determining what party is elected. What matters is how many seats a party earned, out of the 300something available - how many of your party members succeeded in their riding and are now representing the riding in government? They earn a seat by getting the most votes in the riding.

If one party (conservatives, for example) earns more than half the seats (over 150-something), it's called a majority government - they have the support of (hopefully) most canadians, but even in this case, you could have far less than half of all Canadians showing support, since, look at this:

Let's make an imaginary Canada with three ridings.
If Riding 1's votes turn out like this:

Conservatives: 34%
Liberals: 33%
Green: 33%

Riding 2's votes:

Liberals: 34%
NDP: 33%
Green: 33%

Riding 3's votes:

Conservatives: 34%
Liberals: 33%
NDP: 33%

You can see that the liberals got more votes overall than the conservatives, but the conservatives would still win government because they won in 2 ridings and the liberals won in 1. 2 vs 1, majority government, we have a conservative PM.

So it's a pretty weird system. I really think a mixed proportional representation would be much better but oh well.

The good thing about it is the conservatives don't have ALL the power. The liberals have that one seat. That means that they share in the decisions in government! They've got a guy in there. But they don't have as much power as the conservatives with 2 seats.

Note: the above may be subject to errors since I am not a political scientist, but it should be roughly correct and can give people an idea of what's going on in Canada.