All this reminds me of the endless minority governments I witnessed while living in Italy and the individual leaders some of which were also adamant about speaking on behalf of the whole population. There were coalitions that formed and fell apart as the communist party was coaxed to join the socialist part in the eighties and create a stronger left to oppose the government and then there were other alliances that came and went. Italian tax money was spent to keep these elections going yet at times there wasn’t a sufficient majority to cause any real change in the quality of life. Is this what Canada is inheriting?

We are now in the midst of a second minority Conservative government with the country in the midst of a recession, a word that the Bank of Canada director will not mention in public but knows very well in private. I wonder how that kind of leadership is going to help the country recover as efficiently as it could if their were a majority, during these hard times. This is obviously so because smaller parties will be funnelling funds away from the larger ones and effective change is going to be less likely, based on the ineffective voice the ruling party will have in regions that he does not control monetarily. And today political strength is economically based.

Lets face it, even if one does not like to accuse any government of favouritism and gross mismanagement after the financial crisis which caused the fall the liberals under Paul Martin, it does not take a university degree to know that the same mismanagement is occurring in Ottawa which continues to send young soldiers to fight in an open ended war. Italy’s leader manages a media empire and by our standards that are a conflict of interest just as Martin’s control of Canadian Steamship Lines is also a conflict of interest. In fact his boats didn’t even dock in Canada so that Martin avoided paying any Canadian tax whereas the small guy would have been prosecuted for the same cover-up.

The political mismanagement here is being done for the love of oil, corporate favouritism and the downsizing of Canadian businesses. I would suspect that the same economic turmoil is being experienced in Italy over the same reasons and I lived there to believe that. The combined opposition against continued oil exploration, war involvement and decreasing Canadian employment is much greater than the Conservative leadership could ever hope to correct.