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Comment by kitcar | Hacker News Reader

A little more context: What's not mentioned in this article is that the Liberal party, currently in power, has a minority government, and therefore needs the support of either the NDP (left of the Liberal Party) or the Conservatives (right of Liberal Party) to get things done. NDP was pushing for extending the financial aid, which is likely a significant political reason why the liberals chose to extend CERB (in addition to not wanting a massive number of evictions to occur all at once...). Here is some more info on the give-and-take going on: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/cerb-bill-impasse-1.5605937

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Funny that you should not mention the Bloc Québécois, which was instrumental in supporting the minority government in its early days, and still is lending its support for specific issues. The fact of the matter is, the liberals have three different political parties to play against one another, not merely two.

It's complicated, and it definitely helps the liberals.

You are correct, I did a poor job of summarizing the linked article and should have mentioned the Bloc's role in negotiations as well. Unfortunately I can no longer update my original comment now but am glad you highlighted this, I agree the only point I was trying to make is there is more than one moving part here.

Your point is correct. There is no way the Liberal gov wants to get a fight at this point with both Conservatives and NDPs.

As much as it pains me to say, the liberals are in a relatively strong minority position right now. If there were a non-confidence vote, they would likely come back in a stronger position. The NDP is in about the same position they were before, but the conservatives are in a pretty bad spot. Their leader is stepping down, but no replacement has been chosen yet.

Yeah, the Liberals have gained a ton of support from their handling of the virus. In a normal situation they'd call an election at this point to gain a majority, but that would be an incredibly bad look in the middle of a pandemic, obviously. If the other parties took down the government and forced an election though, most of the blame would fall on them, and I'd expect the Liberals to clean up.

> needs the support of either the NDP (left of the Liberal Party) or the Conservatives (right of Liberal Party) to get things done

That's simply not true. They can do anything they want without the agreement of any of them. Check the seats, you missed some.

How do you figure? The liberals currently have 157 seats out of 338, they need the support of at least one other party on confidence motions (that party could be the Bloc as well)

He seems to have missed the difference between a majority and a plurality.

How did I miss anything ? I'm saying they can get majority without the NDP and PCC.

Yes. It can be the bloc. That's what I was saying. He said no way without NDP or PCC but that's false.

Time to bone up on your high school civics lessons!

Time to learn that an opposition party has more seats than NDP and is not the PCC.

OP said the LPC needs NDP or PCC to get a majority but it is not true at all.

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