Background
With most extempers worried about how the U.S. elections are going to turn out , many might have missed the news about the Canadian elections that happened last Tuesday. The Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, the leader of the Conservative Party, called the elections in the hopes that he could lead his party to a majority of seats in the Canadian parliament. The Conservative Party had ruled the country for the last 32 months, but had done so from minority status, which makes it difficult to survive votes of no confidence and pass budget and other procedural matters.
Building majority governments has grown difficult in Canada where a parliamentary system that does not use proportional representation has grown skewed because the country has seen a political shift from a two party structure to a five party structure. Harper’s Conservative Party is part of this political shift, created in 2003 in a merger between the Progressive Conservative Party and the Canadian Alliance.