Comment by Sevrene
20 hours ago
>untouchable due to Canada's parliamentary nature.
This is an odd sentence to me, I assume there’s some reasoning under there that makes sense to the writer, but it doesn’t follow to me. It feels ‘just so’ to me, like there more to this than simply they can’t do anything because parliament.
Margins in the House of Commons have been paper thin for decades, and this gives inordinate power for MPs to threaten a no-confidence motion behind closed doors.
In a province like NB where most politicians from both parties either solicits donations from Irving or are former Irving careerists(eg. the former Premier Higgs who was Irving's CFO), it gives Irving's leadership an inordinate amount of power.
My relative who owns a construction business would do something similar in Punjabi heavy ridings in BC as well - he's become fairly prominent in the Gurdawara and Mandir circuit, and because most older Punjabi Canadian voters don't really follow English language news (and in some cases cannot even speak English), they tend to defer to the candidate and party that the Gurdawara or Mandir committee makes a hukumnama for. In ridings across much of BC, there are enough of these kinds of Punjabi voters (Sikh and Hindu) that MPs will try to co-opt these committees to become their de facto enforcers for the community.
Eric Adams in NYC used similar immigrant machine politics which landed him on the FBI radar, because the old country's intel organizations continue to monitor their diasporas, and oftentimes leverage them tactically, which led him to being caught in the dragnet due to two separate investigations into Turkish [0] and Chinese [1] influence ops in NYC.
[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/02/nyregion/eric-adams-brian...
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/nyregion/adams-china-camp...
It feels like now you're saying it's not because it's parliament's nature to be like this, but rather these other factors that occure within parliaments and other systems?
Can't you unelect the MPs? Doesn't the paper thin margins increase those odds? Honestly, it doesn't sound like the issue is a parliamentry system, but rather people either aren't aware of the issues (media), or have decided (wrongly or rightly) not to care. Either way I still don't get how that's the parliamentry nature as much as it's the people's. That's kind of the point of these systems.
I don't know enough about Candaian Punjabi dispora to comment about the other stuff.
> Can't you unelect the MPs
All MPs in NB need to kiss the ring, otherwise they'll face a well funded challenger.
Furthermore, 1 out of every 7 NBers are employed by JDI and Irving Oil.
> Either way I still don't get how that's the parliamentry nature as much as it's the people's. That's kind of the point of these systems
The ability to threaten a no-confidence motion means individual MPs can have an outsized impact on the executive branch.