For my Canadian readers

[athelind]

forthright looks for some silver linings in the election results.

Everything I know about Canadian politics, I learned from LiveJournal; I confess I'm only grasping a fraction of what's going on up there.* I do know that I read (and am read) by a lot of people in the GWNE who don't read each OTHER, so one thing I CAN contribute is CONNECTION.

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*Here's the fraction I do grasp, as well as I grasp it: new Lefty party caused a split in the votes, and some weird distortion of proportional Parliamentary procedure called "first past the post" has turned that into a Conservative majority. A "Canadian Politics For Unitistatians and Other Dummies" would be greatly appreciated.

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Comments

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Not a new lefty party - the NDP have been around since 1961, and were preceded by the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation of the 30s and 40s, which formed the first socialist government in North America.

The NDP are pretty well established. They were the constant third or fourth place guys, who managed to be very influential and win seats in every election. Tommy Douglas, perhaps the most revered Canadian politician, was NDP and CCF. And he is eminently readable:

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tommy_Douglas