That general election, you may or may not know, scrambled Canadian federal politics, not so much by giving the Conservative Party, so resurgent under the leadership of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and so much closer to the American right than the British right in its back-from-the-dead revival, an outright parliamentary majority, but rather in reducing the long-standing Liberal Party to just 34 of the 308 seats in Canada’s Parliament and becoming the Official Opposition on the back of a popularity wave that started, of all places, in Quebec. Continue reading Mulcair emerges as NDP leader→
Tomorrow (March 24) is a big day for anglosphere politics:
Canada’s New Democratic Party holds its leadership election to replace the late Jack Layton, who led the NDP in 2011 to defeat the Liberal Party to become Canada’s Official Opposition.
The Australian state of Queensland holds elections, where longtime Labor Party domination (since 1996) will likely come to an end in a key test for both former Labor prime minister (and Queensland native) Kevin Rudd and Labor current prime minister Julie Gillard in the wake of their Labor Party leadership showdown.
On Sunday (March 25), two more elections of note:
Senegal goes to the polls in a runoff in the presidential election, where former prime minister seems poised to overtake his one-time mentor, incumbent president Abdoulaye Wade. Read Suffragio’s coverage of the election, including the leadup to the first round, here.
The 1,200-member Elections Committee meets to choose Hong Kong’s new chief executive, which has turned into a fight between Beijing favorite Leung Chun-ying and tycoon developer favorite Henry Tang (the scandal-plagued former Beijing favorite). Read Suffragio’s coverage here.
Last week, the economic blogosphere lit up with a report from The Globe and Mail that Canada’s ambassador to Iceland would address the possibility of Iceland replacing its beleaguered currency, the króna, with the Canadian dollar. When the story broke, the speech was cancelled, but economic commentators have been discussing the possibility ever since: should Iceland replace the króna with the loonie?
In a week when Iceland also opens an unprecedented trial against former prime minister Geir Haarde over the 2008 financial crisis, it perhaps goes without saying that finance and politics go hand in hand in the tiny nation. When the crisis hit in 2008, Iceland realized how things could horribly, massively wrong in a global economy with a currency used by just 300,000 people in a country where every single bank has been wiped out virtually overnight. Continue reading We’re all a little loonie→
