Harper question

[Handsome Rob]

Still lurking around here in the background...

I don't follow politics enough to answer this:

I know they generally vote along Party lines, but I can't find anything that he has ever publicly whipped. Anyone know of any recent bill where he has whipped the party a la Iggy money furnace registry?

Cheers

[Mr.Canada]

Still lurking around here in the background...

I don't follow politics enough to answer this:

I know they generally vote along Party lines, but I can't find anything that he has ever publicly whipped. Anyone know of any recent bill where he has whipped the party a la Iggy money furnace registry?

Cheers

The party whips generally are the enforcers and make sure everyone stays in line. However you don't find as much disparity in the left and right parties as you do the Liberals who are more in the middle as the Liberals have MP's who are more left and right leaning respectfully.

Edited July 11, 2010 by Mr.Canada

[Topaz]

Don't know if this is what you are looking for but, when Harper had a vote as to Quebec being a nation within a nation, one of his members voted against it and then he knew he had to resign his post. The member was Michael Chan, I believe. Then there was the member from Nova Scotia who voted against the bill because it would hurt his area and he was asked to leave and sat as a Independent.

[Jack Weber]

Don't know if this is what you are looking for but, when Harper had a vote as to Quebec being a nation within a nation, one of his members voted against it and then he knew he had to resign his post. The member was Michael Chan, I believe. Then there was the member from Nova Scotia who voted against the bill because it would hurt his area and he was asked to leave and sat as a Independent.

Bill Casey...

[August1991]

I know they generally vote along Party lines, but I can't find anything that he has ever publicly whipped. Anyone know of any recent bill where he has whipped the party a la Iggy money furnace registry?

HR, you ask a very good question.

In general, most Canadian federal votes are whipped (unlike elsewhere in parliamentary democracies) and most Canadian voters (unlike in the US) don't know how their MP voted.

IME, from Alberta to Quebec, and Ontario, Canada is a "failed" democracy because ordinary people too often blindly defer to the opinion of the elected/chosen representative. (In Holland, I saw a similar deference to democratic representatives.)

I posted this on another thread:

Glenda Jackson is a Labour MP and she sits on the government side of the aisle:

"I wanted a Labor government because I didn't like what was happening to my country, and I didn't like what was happening to my fellow citizens. Anything I could have done to get the ghastly Thatcher and her odious government out," Jackson said bluntly, in a way she's clearly said before, "I was prepared to have a go at."

The first go failed. The second, in 1992, succeeded. Jackson has since served as minister of rail transport, staged an unsuccessful run for the mayoralty of London and emerged, since early this year, as Blair's most ferocious critic on the war from within his own Labor Party. She has called for his resignation after finding "no legitimate reason for a pre-emptive strike against Iraq."

The weapons of mass destruction argument earns her withering scorn. "But the government soon shifted ground by speaking not of weapons but of Saddam Hussein's 'programs.' So what were we under direct threat of? Chopped-up tons of paper? Confetti? Was that what he was going to throw at us? Scandalous."

San Francisco newspaper

----

What Garth Turner has said about Stephen Harper is minor compared to what Glenda Jackson has said about Tony Blair.

Stephen Harper is respecting Parliament, and the right of a Member of Parliament to have an opinion, to express it and to suffer the consequences before constituents. This respect extends to the right of a member to cross the floor and vote with the government. Would you want trained seals? Is that better?

We, in Canada, are confused by all this. In the past, with only a Liberal PMO Politburo, we don't know what a Duma is.

Faced with glasnost and perestroika, the usual suspects conclude the "leader is disorganized".

Link Edited July 12, 2010 by August1991