L-P Huberdeau

The opposition has finally taken down the Canadian government. Finally? Well, at least they will stop wasting time on the topic for a while. After a first failed attempt a few months ago, they passed the vote this week. 19 months after the previous ones, an other election will be held on January 23rd, which will leave Christmas holidays with a fun spirit of political debates and flamewars. Joy! Now what will the outcome be? Probably the exact same situation as we had last week. All national surveys give Liberals the advantage for an other mandate, as a minority once again. To keep the story short, this simply means the opposition will keep stoping any decision made and lock the commune chamber for an other 4 years.

The main reason Liberals have been governing for the past 12 years without interuption is that there is simply no opposition in Canada. Here are the runner ups for the campain:

• Liberals: Was I born when someone else was there?
• Conservatives: Northern republicans. Their leader associated the prime minister with organised crime this week, with juvenile pornography during the last campain, want to ban abortion and want to revert the law on gay mariage. Popular in the West, hated everywhere else.
• New Democratic Party: No one had ever heard of them before the last campain, they focus on social measures and are being very opportunistic when it comes to dealing the survival of the government. They are getting more and more popular and they might someday be big enough to govern. Until then, they can’t really hope for more than being opposition.
• Last and least! Bloc Québecois: Also known as the only party without a bilingual website (don’t even try to change fr for en in the URL, it won’t work). A sovereignist party in a federation, the only objective is demonstrate the federation is bad. Since they are totally closed to anything outsite Quebec, they will never be more than opposition, and opposition is what they are good at. They usually get around 50% of the votes in Quebec, which makes around 15% nation-wide.

The sad part about the Bloc Québecois is that they are actually very close to NPD in terms of social measures, but their presence really stops the NPD from gaining importance.

I just returned from a presentation called The Essence of Software Engineering organised by the Montreal Chapter (ugly website, consider yourself warned) of IEEE Computer Society. The speach was given by Professor Pierre N. Robillard, from the École Polytechnique de Montréal. When I saw the announce, I thought the topic would be interesting. As a software engineering student in an other university, I was interested what is done by our rivals.

What I saw was a radically different vision of software engineering. Either he was unable to share his ideas correctly, used a voccabulary which contradicted mine or he simply goes against any form of software engineering literature from the past 3 decades.

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