Friday, June 19, 2015 -( 12°C / 54°F & raining @ 8:09 am in our little corner of Atlantic Canada && I think today might be my ex-next door neighbor Kyle’s birthday, and maybe Rachel, who lived behind both of us’s birthday too? )-
Jassper le Boof at the gate we put up to keep him from running downstairs and disturbing Domino in the place we lived in before we moved here. He was probably between six months and a year old in this photo, still a bit gangly. But he was practicing his sensitive look.
— Okay, it’s a rainy morning. The cat had a lot to complain about in fairly long sentences, something like, “Arra mungah rungah wungah muhng muh!” And if I ever figure out what that means, I’ll be the first to tell you.
— It took almost all afternoon yesterday to back up and update one instance of WordPress here. But I backed up one whole site in the process and it might take considerably less time to update the three or four others.
— And once again, the Troggs are singing in my head, they’ve gotten a couple verses I didn’t hear yesterday or the day before into the mix.
— Canada is moving toward a Federal election which will happen sometime between now and October 19th? Unlike the USA, they don’t always know when the next election might be up here, could be anything from a month to five years after the previous federal election. And the Prime Minister does not run separately from everybody else. The leader of the party that wins the most seats in the House of Commons becomes the Prime Minister. If the winning party does not have 51% plus seats in the House of Commons they will call that a Minority Government. They do not need to form coalition governments to achieve the 51% plus mark. But- If one party wins, say, 34% of the seats and two others win 30% each with maybe the Green Party and the Parti Quebequois and some Weird Obscure Party winning the remaining seats, the two parties that make up 60% of the seats between them can form a coalition government and ‘rule’ together until things fall apart and they dissolve Parliament and call an election in about 30 days from the day that Parliament dissolves. I thought this would be the case more often than not before I came up here, I believe that’s the model in many European countries — somebody has to form a coalition that includes 50% + 1 of the seats in any given Parliament or it’s back to the polling booths? Nope, not here. If the gang with 34% in the above example gets away with it, they form what is called a ‘Minority Government’ and they have to tip toe around their rivals and play nice or face a ‘No Confidence Vote’ and if they loose, it’s time to dissolve Parliament and set elections for 30 days or so. That’s pretty confusing for somebody who was used to seeing everyone in the House of Representatives And 1/3 of the Senate up for election every two years and the President and Vice President running on the same ticket together joining them every 4 years. Senators in the USA have 6 year terms with roughly a third of them running for re-election every two years.
— Okay, so if you’re not confused enough, let me go on here- In Canada, the Senate, which is supposedly the upper ‘House of Sober Thought’ if full of people who never ran for that office. Senators are appointed by the Prime Minister. So what they’ve got now is a highly partisan wrangling committee and screaming society with those aligned with the current Prime Minister fiercely clinging to party lines and trying to out shout and out manipulate the opposition. Right now there are quite a few Senators who were appointed by the ‘sitting’ Conservatives and several others who were appointed by the Liberals, who were in charge before the Conservatives began winning minority governments and then a majority government. Those Liberals have been disenfranchised by the current head of the Liberal Party. The Conservatives ran with ‘Getting Rid of the Senate’ as part of their platform for years, until they were in the majority, and then padded the Senate with as many ‘Yes Men & Women’ as they could, and the fit hit the shan and they’re trying to throw the baby out with the bath water. The New Democratic Party (‘NDP’) is now saying they should do away with the Senate altogether. The trouble is, all the Provinces would have to agree 100% with that idea and they’d have to rewrite at least part of the Constitution to do that.
— Some voices in Canadian Politix are saying that it might be more likely that they might somehow find a way to change the Senate, to try to get it back to being what it was supposed to be and what it might actually have been, sometime in the past, the upper house of sober second thought. I remember learning about checks and balances in high school and junior high school and I think I believe that a Senate that has to agree with a lower house to approve any bill that might make it into a law of the land is probably a much better idea than having a lower house full of puppets pushing everything through that the sitting Prime Minister wants and the Prime Minister smiling and claiming to the world that he has a mandate to push his agenda down the throats of everybody in ‘his’ (or her?) land- whether they voted for his party or not, whether that law is a good idea for the greater good of everybody involved, or as is happening these days with a micro-managing manipulative slimy ice hole as Prime Minister – serves the greater good of the 1% richest ice-holes in the land and pushes everybody else closer and closer to economic and social slavery.
— Schnarr!
— And of course there are a few details that I didn’t have time to add to this confusion, but you’re already rolling your eyes and thinking it would much more fun to go get drunk or high and find somebody to have a nice sexual encounter with, so I’ll end this here.
— Congratulations, you’ve made it through another one of my Posts here. [ Insert weird smiley face of your choice in this space, you deserve it. ]
~~~~~ Jim
