Rage against the man

I'm watching what's going on in Ottawa right now with a mix of delicious irony, languid apathy, and just a little bit of excitement.

For those of you either A) Living under a rock, or B) On the other side of the border, Canada is undergoing a government crisis right now, where the ruling political party is under threat of a confidence vote.

A little bit of background on a confidence vote:
When a party is elected into power with a minority of the seats in the House of Commons, they are effectively held in check by the power of the other political parties, as combined, they hold more votes than the elected party in power.

Normally, this doesn't come into play, as each party typically squabbles like a bunch of idiot chickens at the scratch when it comes to agreeing on any political directive. That said, however, there are certain votes, called confidence votes, where members of each political party are expected forced to vote how their entire party would vote, and if it turns out that enough opposition ballots are cast against the ruling party's motion (in this case, the budget), the ruling party is then forced to step down, due to a lack of confidence.

Typically, this means that the leading party steps down and calls another election. However. It is not unprecedented for two opposition parties to form a coalition to run the country in the stead of the party that won the election. The decision of which path to take typically comes from the Governor General - an unelected person representing the Queen in Canada.
So.

Currently, there is talk of an impending coalition between two of the country's opposition parties, with support of a third, separatist party. There's been a lot of talk about how undemocratic the process is, and how this whole mess is going to ruin our country, and probably send Quebec floating off to the moon, or something like that.

All I can say is, deal with it.
Even the worst possible case scenario isn't going to result in a national crisis, unless we let it.
The way I see it, this whole fiasco is the final precipitation from the massive number of voters who didn't vote in the last election. More than 40% of the country didn't even bother in the last election, and now there's an uproar over our democratic rights being quashed by a "back-door takeover."

I honestly think our democratic rights are already rather butchered at the hands of apathy. Even with the country being run by two unelected parties, headed by a resigned and reviled Prime Minister, and then propped by a separatist party, it would largely be business as usual for the rest of us.

And provided it's not, this might just be the thing to bite the ass of the 40% who didn't vote.
So.

I'm going to watch. And I'm going to wait. Either way, it should be interesting.