Does Canada have any history of coalition governments?
There’s the one in 1917 when a lot of Liberals left the Liberal Party to join the Conservative Party to form a new Union Government. That wasn’t really a coalition. That was more people leaving their party. That wouldn’t technically qualify as a coalition. When you see coalition governments in other countries, it is where different members of cabinet are from different political parties and it’s all parcelled out. Right at the cabinet table, you have different political parties. It involves a lot of complex negotiations. We have never seen anything like that in Canada, except for that little Saskatchewan example. There may be other examples in distant history but certainly nothing in recent history.
