Thread by @kevinsky

Well, I could spend the rest of the evening explaining to idiots on twitter that Canada doesn't elect a Prime Minister, we elect a Parliament, and Parliament elects the PM.
Or I could read my book & drink my tea & resolve to send a strongly worded letter to your grade 5 teacher.

To illustrate this Tommy Douglas style, if the Cats won 140 seats, the Birds won 135 seats, & the Mice won 40 seats, then there's no legal reason why the Mice and Birds, having some common causes, shouldn't team up and form a majority coalition.

The 2 major reasons this wouldn't happen are 1. The Birds feel pretty sure that they can topple the minority Cats & win an election a year from now; or 2. The Mice and the Birds are aware that many voters will be mad bc they don't realize that's how Parliament is supposed to work

A third major reason is that the Birds or Mice or both won't budge on certain policies and the other one says forget it.
Eg if the Mice say "we insist on cancelling that pipeline" and the Birds say "Pipeline goes ahead" and the coalition dies on the table.

So a Bird/Mice coalition is pretty unlikely, since toppling the cat government and going back to voters seems like less work.

The cat party, of course, will seize on voters' failure to pay attention in Social Studies class to paint all of these options as illegal and unethical, even though they are exactly what's supposed to happen in a hung parliament.

Another option, of course, is to let the Cats have their minority government, then spend months carefully negotiating a Bird/Mouse coalition so that when the Cat government inevitably falls, they can be ready with a governing coalition then and avoid an election.

The cats will cry foul (fowl?) of course. But we literally elected all these animals to form a government and they have to try to do that.