Quote:
Originally Posted by transplant99
However...he was elected leader of his party...meaning he is the sitting PM just as he was vefore the lection.
That is a mandate...weak? yes, but it is still his.
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True, though he's leader of the party elected by the party members.
To me that's always been a basic flaw in our system; people vote as if they're voting for a leader, but the way the system works it's an indirect thing not a direct thing.
We've had past cases where the leader and thereby PM changed without an election. The right thing to do is for the leader to call an election and seek a mandate.
So as you say the mandate is quite weak, weak enough that in my mind the word mandate wasn't even appropriate, but that's just semantics.
All the other elected officials also have their mandates and I guess this whole thing could be viewed as them exercising their mandates.
To me it doesn't matter if you think that Harper forced this by treating it if he had a majority (not a bad idea since he probably didn't think a coalition was a viable option they'd consider) or if this is simply a ill advised ill timed power grab, either way the timing of it really sucks.