I don't know, a confidence is a confidence. What kind of a confidence is a confidence? A confidence is a confidence and when you have a good confidence it's because you're confident.
Here is the aforementioned Andrew Coyne and his Government by Technicality.
...A government that truly commands the confidence of the House does not have to invoke such legal niceties. It stands ready to face the House at any time, secure in the knowledge that a majority of its members support its program. It does spend weeks on end hiding from the House, for fear that its awful secret will be exposed: that it is not actually a government, in the constituitional sense, at all, but merely a gang of press-releasers in temporary possession of the Treasury; that the Prime Minister is not the Great and Powerful Oz, but just an old man pulling the levers.
You don't need me to tell you to read the whole thing.
I liked the conclusion of John Ivison's piece.
...The Liberal plan appeared to be to string out debate on the Budget for weeks and then blame the opposition for the subsequent July election.
Those plans may now lie in ruins, after some of the power and authority of office ebbed visibly across the floor of House last night. The Martin bandwagon, once unstoppable, is now without wheels and up on bricks.
If it is Wednesday (and Monday and Friday) it is Chantal Hebert:
This morning, Prime Minister Paul Martin is one procedural fig leaf away from being an emperor with no clothes.
...Since last night, his minority government has a foot in the grave.
...By necessity, the game of hide-and-seek the minority government had been playing with the opposition parties to delay the inevitable moment when it would submit to a vote on its survival will have to come to an end.
Here is MP Solberg's take the day after.
... wonder what our friends from Zimbabwe will think when they hear that Prime Minister Martin and Team Liberal have refused to recognize Parliament's expressed desire that Parliament be dissolved and that a general election be held. I know that Scott Reid and my friends in the PMO have already thought of this but I strongly recommend that, should the opportunity arise, Paul refrain from lecturing President Mugabe for his failure to respect democracy. Paul might also scratch that line in his stump speech about the democratic deficit being his, "number one priority". Just trying to help.
Canadian Press headlines that the Government will likely bring forward it's own confidence motion. Strange that nowhere in the article does it say they will - it just says they should
or more to the point, that they have to.
...Without a demonstration that it actually does have the confidence of the Commons, the government could find itself unable to govern. "The Official Opposition is in a defeat-the-government mode," says Antonia Maioni, a political scientists from McGill University. "Government gets paralyzed."
"You've got to have a working legislature," says Allan Tupper, a political scientist from the University of British Columbia.
..."They will be under some pressure to introduce a confidence motion themselves very shortly," she says. "Either that or to put the budget implementation bill to a vote.
"They have to demonstrate in some way that they have the confidence of the House."
Tupper agrees:
"They've got to go forward with their own confidence measure or with something on the budget. But it can't be neither."
Without such a motion, the government could be hamstrung, says Maioni.
...Tupper said the government probably has the tougher ride from those questions.
"There's probably a bigger backlash against clinging to power than to bringing the government down prematurely."
