Disadvantages Of Coalitions In Canada

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When a minority government is elected in Canada, the Prime Minister opts to form a single-party government instead of a coalition (Migneault, 2010: 2). Coalitions are governments that are formed by more than one political party, often in order to get a majority of seats in the Canadian Parliament (Migneault, 2010: 2). While coalition governments are fairly popular in Western countries, there has only been one coalition in Canada at the federal level since 1867 (Migneault, 2010: 10). Even then, the coalition of 1917 was only formed because of circumstances that were out of the ordinary; the First World War was raging on (Migneault, 2010: 10). The lack of coalition formation in Canada can actually be beneficial to the party in power (Paun, 2011: 448). Even if coalitions make it easier to obtain a majority of votes on a motion presented in parliament, they require a great deal of compromising and negotiating with members of the parties that form the government (Paun, 2011: 448). In contrast, a …show more content…

Over the years, a source of concern has been that minority governments don’t seem to last, that they can’t seem to remain in power as long as majority governments can (Bourgault, 2011: 512). Indeed, it is true that the shortest government to stay in power was the one of Meighen in 1926 whose parliament sieged for a grand total of three days before losing the confidence of the House of Commons (Migneault, 2010: 101). Be that as it may, this remains anecdotic and shouldn’t as a recurrent event (Migneault, 2010: 101). Nevertheless, it has been noted that, although majority government have commonly stayed in power for 48 months, minority government have managed to retain their place for 22 months on average (Migneault,

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