It’s been just over a year, but the Liberals’ minority government met its demise just last week. With such a short lived reign, this upcoming election looks very, very familiar. If I weren’t that brilliant, I would have thought that Paul Martin just called an election for June 28, 2004.

Let’s have a rundown of the contestants, their parties, and what they stand for in this fight for the position of the 39th Right Honourable Prime Minister of Canada.

On top of the hill for the past 12 years is the Liberal party, lead by their fearless leader and RastafarianInside joke., Paul Martin. Being in power for 12 years is no easy feat and it is expected that they will be there for at least this next round. It’s been so long that they’ve ruled Canada that I’m not quite sure what they’re campaigning on. It seems like the Liberals and Canada are now synonymous.

The thorn in their side at the moment is the so-called Sponsorship Scandal, which saw $250 million disappear from the hardworking citizens of Canada and magically find its way into the hands of some advertising firms that were friends of the Quebec Liberals. This managed to cost the Liberals a majority government, forcing them to work with those NDP communists.

In the archnemisis seat, we have the ConservativeWhich is an alliance of the Progressive Conservative party and the Canadian Reform Alliance Party, which was an alliance of the Reform party and some other party, I’m sure. party, lead by everyone’s favourite guy, Stephen Harper. Harper managed to get owned during his last attempt to oust the current government back in May by Belinda Stronach, who ran for the Conservative party leadership and ended up defecting to the Liberals a short while later, and the two Independent MPs.

It’s doubtful that the Conservatives will win since, in the wisdom of their leader, decided to collaborate with the rest of the opposition and force an election so that the Liberals wouldn’t control the timing of the election. Is it just me or does that seem a little like a kid who destroys the Apple II because the other kid is going to get to play the Oregon Trail before him?

Then there’s the guys in orange, the NDP. No doubt, Jack Layton sees himself as a sort of Viktor Yushchenko. I mean, they’re both radical guys looking to change their country and they both love orange, right? Except that no one will probably trust the NDP after they collaborated with the Libbies and then ditched them to call a winter election. Good job there.

And last, there’s the ever lovable Bloc Quebecois and Gilles Duceppe. Notice no one is ever crazy enough to attempt to form an alliance with them? That’s because the rest of the country would very likely never vote for them again and the Bloc have this hatred of Canada that’s been bred in them. The other provinces should learn from them and hate the rest of the country too. That way, we’ll get our own separatist party, threaten to leave, and watch the concessions come flying in. It’s not like we need the rest of the country anyway.

Alternatively…

Since there’s no chance that any of the other parties can hope to form any sort of government with the current perceptions that the general public has, I’ve devised an accurate assessment of each party. I shall have a peek into the source code of each party’s website and have a look at their coding practices as well as the usability of the site in Mozilla Firefox on a Linux machine.

The Liberal’s site is like many sites on found on the Internets, mediocre on the outside, disgusting on the inside. The table-ness of the design is kind of plain. A look at the source code however betrays the site’s darker origins. The site was authored in Visual Studio .NET and is sporting a very 1990s HTML 4.0 Transitional Doctype. Is even possible to be using HTML 4.0 in a transitional sort of way, here in 2005?

On the Conservative’s site, there’s a headline of note that mentions that Harper chooses parents over politicians. Is it me, or does the baby wearing the Conservative hat seem a little pissed off? Anyhow, all of the Flash on this page is pissing me off, since it obscures the DHTML rollover menu that’s behind it. Good job, Harper, how am I supposed to take a bloody look at your platform with slightly malfunctioning Flash in the way? The site runs on a proprietary content management system which spits out cleaner code than the Liberal site, but is still quite disgusting once you get to the body. It too sports an HTML 4.0 Transitional Doctype.

The Bloc Quebecois have a site reminiscent of a blog. In typical Bloc style, there seems to be a contempt for everything that has to do with English, so there is no other language available but French. This makes it hard for anyone to sympathize with the separatists, although it may give them more reason to let them go and stop making such a ruckus in Parliament. The site seems to look much better than the aforementioned ones, but the source is filled with tables and tables. I can’t find a generator meta tag, so it could very well have been coded by humans, which is something amazing, because that crap is one hell of a convoluted mess.

Finally, there is the NDP. I’ve always found that the NDP have the best looking sites. In fact, the Ontario NDP have a pretty well coded site. Unfortunately, the feds are not on the same level. From the CSS information, it looks like they’re running on Drupal, but the Doctype indicates it’s HTML 4.01 Transitional, which I guess is slightly better than everyone else. There aren’t that many tables in the markup, and they actually used heading tags for headings. Although the top navigation has those nasty nonbreaking spaces, it is in a list element.

Overall, the NDP has the best site, with the Bloc and Liberals fighting it out for second, while the unusable Conservative site gets last place.

Tags: Canada, election, Politics

This entry was posted on Monday, December 5th, 2005 at 9:27 pm and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.