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Alberta Politics

kcantor said:
^
In Canada “The party with the most elected candidates forms the government. Its leader becomes prime minister. The leader of the party that wins the second greatest number of seats becomes the leader of the Opposition; their party becomes the Official Opposition or His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.”

i’m not sure that “government in waiting” is appropriate where the governing party holds a majority of the seats and a change can only occur through an election but perhaps when government is formed by a minority party that could be changed by a realignment of minority interests within the current elected members…
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Perhaps this term goes back to when Britain was a two party system and in that understated British way, yes the "wait" could be a number of years, but there was eventually a change, so the opposition needed to be prepared to govern in the future. This might be part of the reason for having a shadow cabinet.

Of course, in our history Alberta generally has had more than two parties with MLA,s until recently, but oddly no minority governments. I suppose some government MLA's could retire, start up or join another party or otherwise go. It has happened before (at least four in the Stelmach years, I recall), so a fairly small majority theoretically may not last the full term.

To mix political systems further, some countries have Vice Presidents, who often don't take power so I believe a lot of waiting there, but sometimes the unexpected happens.
 
trevorhayden said:
I am getting quite annoyed that the NDP are calling themselves the Opposition. According to Westminster convention, they are the Government-in-Waiting and members are Ministers in Waiting. How intimidating would it be for Rachel Notley to start calling herself the Premier in Waiting!
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Rachel's official title is Leader of His Majesty's Loyal Opposition.

The assumption that that His Majesty's Loyal Opposition is the "government-in-waiting" is the result of the fact that when government changes hands it is almost always the second-largest party in the House or legislature that has become the largest party and thus takes the reins of power. However, 2015 was an outlier: in both the Alberta and federal elections it was a smaller party that leapfrogged the second-place party in the assembly and became the government. Prior to the 2015 election the Official Opposition was the Wildrose Party, not the NDP. And federally the NDP was the Official Opposition prior to the election but the Liberals ended up forming government. Neither the Wildrose nor the federal NDP proved to be "governments-in-waiting."
 
TravellingChris said:
Rachel's official title is Leader of His Majesty's Loyal Opposition.

The assumption that that His Majesty's Loyal Opposition is the "government-in-waiting" is the result of the fact that when government changes hands it is almost always the second-largest party in the House or legislature that has become the largest party and thus takes the reins of power. However, 2015 was an outlier: in both the Alberta and federal elections it was a smaller party that leapfrogged the second-place party in the assembly and became the government. Prior to the 2015 election the Official Opposition was the Wildrose Party, not the NDP. And federally the NDP was the Official Opposition prior to the election but the Liberals ended up forming government. Neither the Wildrose nor the federal NDP proved to be "governments-in-waiting."
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With no third party currently having any MLA's at all, chances are if the government changes here in the future it would be to the second largest party.

Yes, 2015 was quite an unusual year. Although the third place party Federally had a history of being in government many times before, whereas the 2nd place party never had been, so that rare leap frog makes more sense considering that.
 
David A said:
With no third party currently having any MLA's at all, chances are if the government changes here in the future it would be to the second largest party.

Yes, 2015 was quite an unusual year. Although the third place party Federally had a history of being in government many times before, whereas the 2nd place party never had been, so that rare leap frog makes more sense considering that.
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Correct. 2015 was even more unusual in that we saw another Canadian first: the child of a former prime minister becoming prime minister himself. While the Americans had already had the Adamses and the Bushes (father and son presidents), this was a new development in Canada.

We also saw the NDP form government in Alberta for the first time, the last province west of Quebec which had never had an NDP administration. Rachel also made a little history herself in becoming the first child of a former Alberta party leader to become premier.
 
MacLac said:
That's our Leader folks!!!
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she’s also leader of a party that continues to nominate and endorse a long list of candidates from allan hunsperger to jennifer jones….

and for those who want to try and fall back on saying “but she didn’t read the t-shirt and neither did her staff” i would say if you want to be premier and you want your party to form government, then it’s seeing and paying attention to the details that is the difference between success and failure…
 
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kcantor said:
she’s also leader of a party that continues to nominate and endorse a long list of candidates from allan hunsperger to jennifer jones….

and for those who want to try and fall back on saying “but she didn’t read the t-shirt and neither did her staff” i would say if you want to be premier and you want your party to form government, then it’s seeing and paying attention to the details that is the difference between success and failure…
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I doubt she was so clueless as to not notice the t-shirt. Most likely she did and didn't care or didn't think others would notice.

The Smith who steps in it regularly seems to be back, after being replaced by a more careful robot or something for the few couple months.

I know the negative campaigning focused on her during the campaign has been the subject of a lot of debate, but we can't say now we weren't warned, can we?
 
Sooo…

"In many ways, we are working at emissions reduction right now," Schulz said. "Some aspects of our net-zero aspiration by 2050 are relying, maybe in some cases, on technology that doesn't yet exist."

which i think translates to “we have no idea what we want to do or how we’re going to do it” and which doesn’t seem like much of a plan yet from where i sit. :(

 
^ bwaaahaha…

so eric just just roams around the stampede randomly posing for photographs with women he doesn’t know does he?

maybe he should apologize for simply being stupid and assuming - hoping? - the rest of us are just as stupid.

on the other hand, it’s no more stupid than asking the rest of us to believe the premier “didn’t read the t-shirt and neither did her staff”.
 
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