I doubt I was the only person upset and angered at the story of the 17-year-old girl in Wellington whose parents tricked her into a forced marriage. She was imprisoned at home for several months, until she escaped.

Her parents have gone back to Pakistan, but the father is reported to have said he would kill her if he saw her again.

Sadly this can’t just be dismissed as hyperbole. Canada has just had a conclusion to a trial in which a father, with help from other family members, killed his three daughters and one of his wives. This was a so-called “honour” killing. Of course honour had nothing to so with it. Secret wiretaps revealed the father saying “God curse their generation, they were filthy and rotten children,” and “To hell with them and their boyfriends, may the devil s**t on their graves.”

The 17-year-old girl in Wellington may be lucky she escaped such a fate. As New Zealanders, we need to ask ourselves what we can do to minimise this occuring in New Zealand.

You can comment over at Stuff on my thoughts on how we can minimise this.

Layton was Leader of the left wing New Democratic Party since 2003. In 2000 they won just 13 seats out of 301 with 9% of the popular vote. Layton in 2004 lifted the vote to 16% and 19 seats. In 2006 the vote went up marginally to 17% but the seats to 29 as the Liberals got thrown out.

The 2008 election saw further gains with the popular vote at 18% and seats to 37. Then just over three months ago a landmark election saw the Liberals (the natural party of Government for most of the last 100 years) fall to third place and the NDP soar to 31% of the vote and 103 out of 308 seats.

If he had lived, Layton may have become Prime Minister one day. He has always been a popular politician, beyond the support for the NDP.

The political ramifications of his death will take some time to become apparent. Canadian parties take months to elect a new leader, sometimes over a year. So the Liberal Party has no permanent leader yet and now neither does the NDP. The interim leader is 68 years old and is unlikely to become the permanent leader.

This means that PM Steven Harper will have no strong opposition until at least 2012. It also means that the Liberals may have a chance to regain support from the NDP, if the new leader doesn’t fire.

There are five “major” parties in Canadian politics. they are:

1. Conservatives (a merger of predecessor parties that often fought each other)
2. Liberals – traditional centre-left party, but business-friendly. Been in Govt most of the time.
3. New Democratic Party – a hard left party, mainly with support in Vancouver and Toronto
4. Bloc Québécois – the separatists in Quebec
5. Greens – support has ranged up to 10%, but no seats in Parliament yet

So what happened:

1. Conservatives went from 143 seats (38%) to 166 (40%)
2. Liberals went from 77 seats (26%) to 35 (19%)
3. BQ went from 49 seats (10%) to 4 (6%)
4. NDP went from 37 seats (18%) to 102 (31%)
5. Greens went from 0 seats (7%) to 1 (4%)

The Liberals have gone from being the natural party of Government to a minor party. The only consolation is the Conservatives have been there and done that previously. Their leader, Michael Ignatieff, is a former academic and never came across as a strong leader. He has lost his actual seat in Parliament, as has the BQ leader. It is not unknown for PMs to lose seats as they get swept from office, but almost unheard of for an Opposition Leader to lose his seat. I suspect Ignatieff now regrets forcing an early election.

The BQ are basically wiped out, and this is a huge blow to the separatists – but good for Canada.

Harper is the big winner. He has been pilloried by the left since he became leader. They said he was unelectable. But he has now won three elections, and increased his number of seats at each election.

Jack Layton is a big winner, and at the age of 60 is now the Leader of the Opposition. He may be the next Prime Minister also. But he will need to watch out for the Libs and BQ who will target him as much as the Conservatives.

The NDP are pretty hard left. They wish to ban private healthcare for example.

How did you feel about being caught up in the middle of an incredible scandal in Canada?

Well, given that it dominated all the questions on the Canadian side [of the press conference], it shows that universally sex sells. I don’t even claim to understand it nor could I even understand the question, given that it was in French. But it sounds interesting.

Perhaps Prime Minister Stephen Harper asked for your advice because you sacked a minister, Richard Worth, last year and didn’t tell the media why?

It wasn’t lost on me that there were similarities.

Did you pass that on to Mr Harper?

I did actually.

I always wondered with Prime Ministers talked about when thet got together. It seems is it something like this:

NZ PM: Well I had one Minister who had this thing for Asian women – he even tried sleeping with a Labour Party candidate.

Canadian PM: Ha – I can beat that. I had a female Minister who was arranging threesomes with prostitutes for her and her husband.

NZ PM: But my one used taxpayer money to fly his girls to Wellington

Canadian PM: Well my one used her own money, but to buy cocaine

NZ PM: Okay, you win

Back to Audrey’s story:

The King of Jordan came over and saw me. He has absolutely perfect English. Obviously educated in England, in one of those public schools I’d say.

A very English accent. He said to me he’s keen to come to New Zealand. He wants to bring his motorbike and drive down the South Island. He’s apparently famous for it. He apparently drives his protection people absolutely crazy.

Heh I can just imagine it – the King of Jordan hooning along the South Island. And with diplomatic immunity I’m guessing he’ll be doing 200 km/hr on the Canterbury Plains.

New Zealand does not want Canada joining negotiations for the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement because Canada wants dairy products exempted from any deal, Prime Minister John Key said in Ottawa last night.

“The sticking point is Canada wants to exclude dairy, and that would be unacceptable to us,” Mr Key told the Herald.

I did not realise how protected Canadian dairy is until I read:

Canada, which has about 13,000 dairy farmers, runs what is called a supply management framework to control supply and demand and it even runs a quota system for cows. Farmers cannot just increase their herds if they want.

Good God. Canada runs it dairy system, like NZ runs it schools!!

At the moment, the House of Commons has vastly different sized seats. This is because the Canadian Constitution guarantees provinces a minimum number of seats, being the greater of their number of Senators or the number of seats they had in 1985.

What this means is the electoral quota in each province varies greatly. Currently:

1. British Columbia 108.548
2. Ontario 107.642
3. Alberta 106,243
4. Quebec 96,500
5. Nova Scotia 82,546
6. Manitoba 79,970
7. Newfoundland and Labrador 73,276
8. New Brunswick 72,950
9. Saskatchewan 69,924
10. Prince Edward Island 33,824

The Government can;t amend the constitution, so what they are doing is passing a law to effectively increase the size of Parliament,  This will see the House increase from 308 seats to 338 seats.

The three provinces that gain extra seats are 14 for Ontario, 4 for Alberta and 5 for British Columbia. Ontario.

Alberta is heavily Conservative, while British Columbia is a stronghold for the hard left NDP and Ontario tends to vote Liberal, so the changes do not favour the Conservatives at all. It is a good example of principled electoral reform.

The other major change is to the Canadian Senate. At present Senators are appointed by the Prime Minister, effectively for life (they retire at 75). The Conservatives are proposing a term limit of eight years, so a Senator retires after eight years in the Senate.

Another step in the right direction.

If a Republican President had tried to make private health insurance compulsory, I suspect the left would have decried the reform, instead of supported it. And i guess the right would have supported it, instead of opposed it.

13 states have filed lawsuits claiming it is unconstitutional to force people to take our private health insurance. I suspect this issue will get to the Supreme Court, and you do have to think there is a reasonable chance that may breach the Bill of Rights.

What I find ironic, is that Obama’s reforms have now made the US system almost the polar opposite of the Canadian system.

You see in Canada, it is illegal in some provinces to even have private health insurance. And federally there are laws that forbid hospitals from charging private rates (even if a private clinic).

So effectively in Canada it is illegal to have private health insurance, and now in the US it will effectively be illegal NOT to have private health insurance.

One day historian George Stanley was walking with John Matheson, a Liberal MP on the committee, when he looked up and saw the Royal Military College flag and its vertical panels of red-white-red, with the college crest of a fist in the middle.

“There, John, is your flag,” he said.

Mr Matheson recalls the moment: “I remarked that Canadians would not accept a mailed fist symbol. He said, ‘No, I mean with a red maple leaf in the place of the college crest’.”

Mr Matheson was immediately taken with it, but had to sneak it into the committee room to add it to the wall alongside the other proposals.

The committee firstly rejected the red ensign 10 votes to four.

They then had to vote on Pearson’s Pennant, the red maple leaf ensign and the Union Jack or fleur-de-lis. When the latter was voted out, it was clear that the new flag would not have a Union Jack.

The Conservatives assumed the Liberals would vote for the Prime Minister’s design, and they wanted the vote to be as inconclusive as possible, so they voted for the red maple leaf ensign which, to their horror, was the unanimous choice.

The quirks of history.

I am looking forward to a NZ Blame Canada campaign, as shown above, leading to the eventual cessation of diplomatic relations, and then of course war.

It was such a trouncing that the Leader of the Liberal Party, Stéphane Dion, announced he was resigning as Leader, and elections are underway to select his replacement. These take several months as they involve party members. Anyway next week Dion may become the 23rd Prime Minister of Cabinet. How? Well it’s an intriguing story.

First of all you need to understand that the tradition in Canada is that the largest party gets to form the Government, even as a minority. They may not last the full term, but they usually get a couple of years at least of governing. On top of the the two main parties you have the New Democratic Party which is like the Alliance in NZ and generally wins seats in British Colombia in the west, plus the Bloc Québécois who win most of the seats in Quebec and are a separatist party.

Generally after every election these two smaller parties will give confidence and supply to the largest party, even though NDP is a lot closer to Liberals than Conservatives. They do not guarantee it for the full term, but if they change their mind, normally it triggers a new election.

After the October election, the Conservatives had support from both the NDP and the Bloc. It was business as normal. But the credit crisis hit, and the response from the Conservatives was to trim Government spending such as no pay incraeses for Judges, restrictions on MPs travel, cancellign Xmas bonus for publuic servants. This was bad enough for the leftwing parties, but even worse Harper’s Government announced it would save money by trimming the $27 million of taxpayer state funding for political parties.

This threat to the other parties funding base (since state funding they had become very dependent on it) was intolerable, so they got together to roll the Government on the grounds of an inadequate response to the credit crisis.

Now what they have done is not force a new election, but they have formed a Government in waiting. The Liberal, NDP and Bloc parties have written to the Governor-General announcing they wish to form a new Government being a Liberal-NDP coalition, with support from the Bloc.

The Liberal and NDP parties are usually fiercious rivals, but have put that aside to agree NDP get one quarter of the Cabinet seats in the first ever coalition between them.

But the extraordinary thing is that they have agreed to make Stéphane Dion Prime Minister despite Dion getting the worst result in history for the Liberals – just 26%. He will be PM for half a year or so until the Liberals elect a new leader.

Now this is all constitutional – Parliament can form whatever Government it wants. But is it what the Canadian people wanted or voted for? There was no pre-election possibility of NDP and the Bloc supporting the Liberals if they came second.

It also creates a headache for the Governor-General (who is flying home urgently from an overseas trip) as she has to decide what to do given the following scenarios:

1. PM Harper asks the Governor-General to prorogue Parliament until next year. The Governor-General has the legal right to refuse a request from the prime minister to prorogue, and in NZ would arguably refuse such a request as the PM can no longer demonstrate the confidence of the House. But most experts in Canada say the GG would grant the request. The prorogue would mean that the no confidence vote scheduled for Monday would never be put. Parliament only has to meet once a year, so it could be prorogued until late next year in theory.
2. PM Harper asks the Governor-General to call a new election. Again the same dilemma – does the GG follow the advice of a PM that no longer has the confidence of the House?
3. Parliament is prorogued but the Opposition Leader demands the GG appoint him Prime Minister as he has a majority of MPs supporting him. Does the GG have to wait for a confidence vote to determine that the House has lost confidence? In NZ I would say they do not, but in Canada this is new territory.

In 1926 the Canadian Governor-General, Lord Byng refused a request by Prime Minister King for a general election as Byng did not have the confidence of the House.

The bigger question is what will the public make of it. The Conservatives already have ads playing quoting a speech from Dion during the last election campaign in which he ruled out a coalition with the NDP. “You cannot have a coalition with a party that has a platform that would be damaging for the economy, period,” he says in the clip.

The Conservatives are using the lines that Dion has done a deal with the socialist and the separatists to seize power. Now that is emotive but little things can matter to people. When the three opposition leaders announced their agreement to change the Government, the Canadian flag backdrop was removed from the room of their press conference because the separatists don’t believe in Canada existing in its current form.

It is not impossible that this deal could see other provinces such as Alberta threaten to leave Canada. Also the Bloc have only promised support to the new Government in waiting until June 2010, so more elections are likely at some stage.

Also in a twist to the crisis, the NDP accidentially sent details of one of their conference calls to a Conservative MP and he taped the call and released it to the media. It revealed that the NDP had been trying to get the Bloc to agree to support a new Government for longer than previously though. The NDP are asking for Police to prosecute the Conservatives over the recording.

It is going to be fascinating to see what the PM does, what the Governor-General does and also what the Canadian public do.

The Canadian Supreme Court has rejected an appeal against a ruling that airlines must provide extra seats free of charge to morbidly obese flyers.

Canadian airlines should be able to charge what they want. Hell if an airline wanted to charge passengers based on their weight, I would support that. You pay for luggage over a certain weight, so why not people?

But this isn’t even that. This is telling airlines that if a passenger is so obese that they can’t possibly fit in one seat, then they must get that second seat for free.

How idiotic.

This is what you get when you take a good principle such as non discrimination, and apply it to extreme ends.

Interestingly in NZ, Air NZ has started charging for empty seats. How? If there are empty seats on a flight, then you can ask to be next to one for $75 on a flight to the US. Now that’s a smart idea. In Canada no doubt it would be illegal.

The Conservatives were almost wiped out in 1993, being reduced to two seats, so to win two elections in a row shows how far they have come.

The seats are:

1. Conservatives 143 (+19)
2. Liberals 76 (-27)
3. Bloc Québécois 50 (-1)
4. NDP 37 (+8)
5. Independents (+1)

The Greens lost the one seat they had picked up at a by-election and got 7% nationally. On the popular vote the Conservatives only went up 1.4% from 2006,l but the Liberals dropped 4.0%. The election was partly called to capitalise on the weak Liberal leadership. Their result of 26% is the lowest for them in the history of Canada and Stéphane Dion is likely to be rolled. I would watch Gerard Kennedy as the possible new leader.

Interestingly, compared to NZ, Dion lobbied for the Greens leader to be included in the Leader’s Debate in Canada, and her (Elizabeth May’s) performance in the debate is cited as bleeding support from the Liberals. Clark and Key may look at that with satisfaction.

Canada does have a rural/urban split. And a provincial split. In Alberta the Conservatives won all 27 seats I think. But they did not win a single seat in Toronto or Montreal and only one seat in Vancouver. Their lack of appeal in the three big cities is what stopped them getting a majority.

Pleased to see my friend Patrick Brown in Barrie increase his majority from 1,523 in 2006 to a massive 15,195. He is one of the hardest working politicians I have come across. During the 2006 campaign, in the middle of winter, he would be the most enthused about getting out door knocking every day, and keeping going until it was dark. And this was trudging through snow with the temperature 30 degrees below zero.

It looks like a status quo election. The Conservatives to win again, but as a minority Government – not a majority.

This graph from Wikipedia shows the last few weeks. The Conservatives dipped but have started to recover. The left wing NDP have done well.

On the latest poll results the Conservatives would gain 11 seats, Liberals lose 23 seats, NDP gain nine, and Bloc Quebecois gain three. But if one looks at the provincal breakdowns it is possible the Conservatives could lose seats in Ontario and Quebec as a small change can under FPP produce huge changes in seats held.

I am hoping my friend Patrick Brown will get re-elected in Barrie. The local newspaper has endorsed him, which should help.