Canadian federal election, 2006

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Category: Canada

In the Canadian federal election, 2006, Al Gore clone Paul Martin was deposed by George W. Bush clone Stephen Harper. This made pretty much all reasonable people upset.

However, Harper has only a minority government, thus he only barely holds onto power with the help of the Quebec sovereignty party, the Bloc Quebecois, whose only goal is to separate Quebec from Canada. They supported his 2006 federal budget only to be sure Harper was still in power when the Quebec provincial election, 2007 occurs. If the Bloc-allied Parti Quebecois wins that election, it has pledged to hold another Quebec sovereignty referendum - the third (there was one in 1980 and another in 1995) within its mandate. If it wins, Quebec will be a separate country, and the map of North America will look quite different. This would probably have implications for Hawaii sovereignty and Alaska sovereignty and Puerto Rico sovereignty and California sovereignty advocates, as Quebec's example has been very closely watched by all of these for a very very long time.

During that election, two party leaders (Liberal Party of Canada leader Martin and Green Party of Canada leader Jim Harris) ran extremely inept campaigns, ignoring advisors they had relied on in the previous Canadian federal election, 2004. Martin, for instance, had abandoned his focus on monetary reform and his attacks on GDP in particular, which were very overt and strong before he became Prime Minister of Canada, even as late as 2003. he had also failed to meet the 0.7% of GDP foreign aid quota he had promised to Bono, again very publicly in 2003. Harris shut down his own successful Green Party of Canada Living Platform and tried to run his party from what came to be known as the "GPC bunker", an unaccountable group of cronies close to himself. This was similar to Martin's problem, as some of Martin's aides made stupid comments to the press and a controversial series of so-called attack ads ran for the first time in Canada, accusing Harper of being much like Bush. Each drew on a quote of Harper saying something like Bush, or praising US conservatives in the past.