Canadian Elections: Welcome Mr. Harper.

I went to have dinner with a few of my gaming friends last night. Interestingly enough, the conversation turned to politics, rather than gaming. In fact, aside from the talk about the best steak house in the city, the only topic was who to vote for.

In case you're not familiar with Canadian Politics, we have, supposedly, 3 main parties. The Liberals, who were in power for most of the previous years, were accused of corruption and so on. The Conservatives, who promised to use the notwithstanding clause to end same sex marriage in Canada, and the NDP (google tells me it's the New Democratic Party of Canada), who .. well, i'm not even sure what they do. There's also the Green Party of Canada, a bit of an environmentalist party, and the BQ, who wants Quebec to be an independent country.

is it scary that i know more about the minor parties than the New Democratic Party? i think so.

anyways, the Canadian Election Process is weird too. (thanks kuro5shin! no clue why you have this information, but it saved me some time) it basically work like this: The country is divided into different areas called "ridings", which should have roughly the same amount of people. Each party has candidates in the riding you can vote for. The won ridings are then tallied up, and those become seats in the parliament, the place where they argue about stuff.

i think someone's already proved it mathematically. Let's say we have 3 ridings, each with 100 people. In one riding, Liberals get 51 and Conservatives get 45, others get the remaining. In the second riding, Liberals get 10, Conservatives got 82, others get the remaining. In the third riding, Liberals get 49, Conservatives get 32, others get the remaining.

Adding it up: Liberals: 110 vs. Conservatives: 159. Who wins the election? The Liberals do, because they won 2 out of 3 ridings, a majority, despite the fact that they had LESS than 50% of the overall votes. isn't it crazy?