1. James Travers, “Quebec Tax Breaks Could Blow Up in Harper's Face,”Toronto Star, March 22, 2007.
2. For an insider's account of the Progressive Conservative Party-Canadian Alliance Party (formerly the Reform Party) merger that founded the Conservative Party of Canada in 2003 and took power in 2006, see Tom Flanagan,Harper's Team: Behind the Scenes in the Conservative Rise to Power(Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007). Harper is the new party's first and only leader to date.
3. “There's No Reason for a Federal Election Now,”Globe and Mail, April 16, 2007, A12 (editorial).
4. See Arend Lijphart, “The Political Consequences of Electoral Laws, 1945–1985,”American Political Science Review84, no. 2 (June 1990): 481–496; Arend Lijphart,Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and Consensus Government in Twenty-One Countries(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); and Joseph Willey, “Institutional Arrangements and the Success of New Parties in Old Democracies,”Political Studia46, no. 3, special issue (1998): 651–668. While “Duverger's Law” associates plurality elections with two-party systems, William Riker notes that the “extreme decentralization of Canadian government” facilitates the founding of new parties that can win power in the provinces. These parties subsequently can elect third-party MPs whose presence may prevent a majority government in Ottawa. William Riker, “The Two-Party System and Duverger's Law: An Essay on the History of Political Science,”American Political Science Review76, no. 4 (December 1982): 760.
5. Michael Gallagher, Michael Laver, and Peter Mair,Representative Government in Modern Europe, 4th ed. (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2006), 389.