Duff Conacher

Minority governments crop up with some regularity in Canadian voting history, but they are fragile flowers that do not tend to last long. Of the twelve federal minorities this country has had since 1921, their average length of operation has been one year, eight and a half months. Stephen Harper has outrun the average by a full year at this…

“Elections are a key element of any political system that claims to be democratic,” writes University of Saskatchewan professor John Courtney early on in Elections. To the politically uninitiated, that might not look like an exclusive endorsement of systems that include elected officials, but to anyone involved in political debates, no such statement can be accepted unquestioningly as a key democratic…