My God, I have been champing at the bit to contribute to this thread ever since I saw it, but I had to wait until catastrophic hard drive failure issues were worked out. Oh, computers, why must you be so cruel? Anyway, I hope Psudo didn't miss me too much.
Okay, so, going back a bit to the concept of parties. They're not the greatest idea in the world. They tend to take the issues every individual member cares about and kind of crunch them together in a way not unlike
shipping something via UPS. I tend to vote Democrat because the Libertarians will never stand a chance anyway, and Democrats are better than Republicans on social issues (gay rights, etc.) but I disapprove of many of their stances, including but not limited to gun control and universal health care. Were it not for the big two parties having such a stranglehold, the Libertarian option might be more viable, but even then I severely disagree with their stance on the environment.
Unfortunately, doing away with parties altogether is simply not a viable alternative. The United States did not originally have parties, but it took the first few politicians all of five seconds to realize that X guys who are idealogically close enough to sort of get along and act as one force are X times as powerful as any one member of a group of size X acting alone. You see examples of this concept even today when you hear anyone whining about third parties being "spoilers" in anything. There was a lot of overlap between the stances of one H. Ross Perot and one George H. W. Bush, and the two competing with each other split the conservative vote enough that it was arguably one of the larger factors in Bill Clinton's victory. (Of course, Bush's son would go on to avenge his father against Clinton's Vice-President in an almost exact mirror of this concept, thanks to one Ralph Nader.) In Canada, the myriad conservative parties had to quit squabbling and become
the Conservative party before they could hope to topple the Liberals.
In other words, parties exist because they
work. The only possible way to do without parties is to forcibly disband them by law. That's the only
possible way--thanks to various workarounds like unofficial endorsements and the resources it would require to chase those down, there is absolutely no
practical way to do it.
As for floor-crossing, I think that just illustrates the difference between Canadian and United States legislature. In Canada, there are essentially four decision-makers in Parliament, and the MPs serve as little more than statistics for the big guys' strength, kind of like your amount of units in a game of Risk. In the United States, breaking from party lines is more tolerated (and some people, like John McCain, even build a very popular "maverick" public image out of it.) Thus, I think there's less floor-crossing in the United States, since it's easier to work out how you feel about the issues before you start and simply vote against your party on the few mismatches, thus protecting you from everything except when you as a person actually genuinely change your mind on things, like how Robert Byrd started as a card-carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan but has now recently gotten near-perfect ratings from the NAACP.
CKA Elite 
