[LINK] "Liberals Try to Topple Canadian Government"

[rfmcdonald]

I'm starting to understand why Italians feel the way that they're supposed to feel about politics.

Canada moved closer to its second federal election in less than a year on Tuesday, after the opposition leader Michael Ignatieff announced that his Liberal Party would no longer support Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservative government.

“Mr. Harper, your time is up,” Mr. Ignatieff told a cheering crowd of Liberal politicians at a party retreat in Sudbury, Ontario. “We will hold Stephen Harper to account and we will oppose his government in Parliament.”

The Conservatives do not control a majority of the votes in the House of Commons and rely on the support of the Liberals and two smaller opposition parties to maintain power. One of the two smaller partiers, the New Democratic Party or the Bloc Québécois, would have to join the Liberals in order to bring down the government.

Bob Rae, a prominent Liberal member of Parliament, said his party would introduce a motion of no confidence in the government at the first opportunity in the Parliamentary calendar, probably in early October.

Exactly how either of the smaller parties, which are to the left of both the Conservatives and the Liberals, will respond when that happens is unclear. Last week, however, Jack Layton, the leader of the New Democrats, said that his party “would be the least likely of the political parties to support the Conservatives.”

Since 2006, Mr. Harper has maintained two governments without a majority of Parliamentary votes partly because the opposition parties were concerned that Canadians were weary of federal elections. There have been three since June 2004.