Smaller parties like the Quebec nationalist Bloc Québécois and the Green Party of Canada can exert their own influence over the political process.

Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe scheduled a similar motion in the House of Commons for November 23, 2006, that would have recognized " Quebecers as a nation ".

Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper tabled the Québécois nation motion the day before the Bloc Québécois resolution came to a vote.

The English version changed the word Quebecer to Québécois and added " within a united Canada " at the end of the Bloc motion.

The Liberal Party of Canada is the only genuine national political party that remains while the regionally based parties such as the Quebec-based Bloc Québécois and the almost entirely Western Canada-based Reform Party of Canada rise from political insignificance to being major political parties.

Media covering the convention quickly pointed out that if one added the word " Party " to the end of the party's name, the resulting initials were " CCRAP " ( humorously pronounced " see-crap " or just " crap ") even though it, like the Bloc Québécois, didn't actually have the word party in its name.

He has since been followed by other gay and lesbian politicians in Parliament: Bloc Québécois MPs Réal Ménard and Raymond Gravel, fellow New Democrats Libby Davies and Bill Siksay, and Liberal Party of Canada MPs Scott Brison and Mario Silva, as well as Senators Laurier LaPierre and Nancy Ruth.

Only some Members of Parliament belonging to these parties and the leaders of the Bloc Québécois have made any statements suggesting abolition of the monarchy.

In the 2008 federal election she attended a rally for the Bloc Québécois, a Quebec separatist party, because of her support for their position on the arts, and stated that she would vote for the party if she lived in Quebec.

The Bloc Québécois (, Quebec Bloc ) is a federal political party in Canada devoted to the protection of Quebec's interests in the House of Commons of Canada, and the promotion of Quebec sovereignty.

As with its provincial counterpart, the Bloc Québécois has been supported by a wide range of voters in Quebec, from large sections of organised labour to more conservative rural voters.

The Bloc Québécois formed in 1990 as an informal coalition of Progressive Conservative and Liberal Members of Parliament from Quebec, who left their original parties around the time of the defeat of the Meech Lake Accord.

A " tripartite agreement " mapping out the plan for accession to independence was written and signed by the leaders of the Parti Québécois, the Bloc Québécois and the Action démocratique du Québec on 12 June 1995.

In the 1997 federal election, the Bloc Québécois dropped to 44 seats, losing official opposition status to the Reform Party.

In a speech in front of his supporters following the election, BQ leader Gilles Duceppe claimed to have achieved his objectives, adding: " without the Bloc Québécois tonight, Mr. Harper would have formed a majority government ".

On 26 March 2011, Bloc Québécois leader Duceppe stated that Conservative leader Stephen Harper had in 2004 tried to form a coalition government with the Bloc and NDP in response to Harper's allegations that the Liberals intended to form a coalition with the Bloc and the NDP.

In the 2011 federal election, in the wake of a surge of support for the New Democratic Party, the Bloc received less than a quarter of the popular vote in Quebec ( less than 6 % of all the total votes in the elections ), lost 44 of the 47 seats it held at parliament's dissolution, and only added one seat, which had been vacated by a Bloc Québécois member six months prior to the election.

The Bloc Québécois leadership election campaign to choose a permanent successor to Duceppe began 17 September 2011 and concluded on 11 December with the election of former MP Daniel Paillé as party leader.

The states of the future Eastern Bloc were also approached, and Czechoslovakia and Poland agreed to attend.

" This is based on the 1993 " Copenhagen criteria " agreed as it became clear many former Eastern Bloc countries would apply to join ;

The Socialist Party agreed to join in the Democratic Bloc ; the popular People's Party refused.

On 15 October 2007, Our Ukraine – People's Self-Defense Bloc and the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc agreed to form a majority coalition in the new parliament of the 6th convocation.

In defeat, the French government agreed to recognize the National Bloc leaders as the sole representatives of the Syrian people and invited Hashim al-Atassi for diplomatic talks in Paris.

On 15 October 2007, the Our Ukraine – People's Self-Defense Bloc and the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc agreed to form a majority coalition in the new parliament of the 6th convocation.

Still, both parties ( under new names, Bloc for UPV and Esquerra Unida del País Valencià, EUPV, for United Left ) agreed to repeat their coalition for the 2007 regional elections, in order to secure if only joint representation, something which was at stake if they participated by themselves.

Duceppe announced the Bloc would support Prime Minister Stephen Harper's budget that same day.

At the end of November 2008, the Bloc indicated that it would support a possible Motion of No Confidence against the governing Conservatives by the two other opposition parties, and would support the resulting Liberal-NDP coalition government at least until June 2010, without actually being part of the government.

This was most opposed by the Bloc Québécois, who usually had the lowest popular vote but nonetheless won many seats because their support was concentrated in Quebec.

With the ruling Liberal Party being reduced to a minority government, revelations of the sponsorship scandal damaging its popularity to the point where both the Conservative Party and the Bloc Québécois were pressing their advantage for a snap election, the Prime Minister approached the NDP for its support.

The Bloc Québécois would not be formally part of the government but would provide support on confidence motions for 18 months.

However, the Bloc Québécois's concentration of support in Quebec was slightly larger, leaving Reform three seats short of Official Opposition status despite finishing second in the popular vote.

This campaign strategy failed, as the Bloc lost seats to the Liberal Party due to the collapse of Quebec support for the Progressive Conservative Party, whose voters shifted to the Liberal Party.

Rae took part in negotiations for the Liberals to form a coalition with the NDP, with support from the Bloc Québécois.

In actuality, a late surge in Conservative and federalist support kept the Bloc's share of the popular vote below 43 % giving the Bloc only 51 seats.

The party won 60 seats to displace the Bloc as Official Opposition, largely by building on its already heavy concentration of support in Western Canada.

The Conservatives were in favour of the deal, while the New Democratic Party and the Liberal Party were against, leaving the Bloc Québécois as the deciding party to support and for the survival of the deal.

( The Bloc Québécois had previously indicated that it would support the budget, and its passage was never in doubt.

Dubček's changes had broad support from the society, including the working class, but was seen by the Soviet leadership as a threat to their hegemony over other states of the Eastern Bloc and to the very safety of the Soviet Union.

Although the Communist Party retained its majority with 331 deputies, large support for the Democratic Bloc demonstrated the people's distrust of the Communist authorities, which would eventually boil down to Ukrainian independence in 1991.

The re-establishment of relations with the Socialist Bloc in the middle of the Cold War cost him the support of the UDN in Congress, so that he was left with no real power.

In the 1995 Quebec Referendum, Dumont joined with Parti Québécois Premier Jacques Parizeau and Bloc Québécois leader Lucien Bouchard, who wooed him and with whom he remains close, in support of the sovereigntist campaign.

After the 2007 parliamentary election the parties associated with the Our Ukraine Bloc ( named Our Ukraine – People's Self-Defense Bloc in 2007 ) lost popular support greatly while Front of Changes ( the party of former Our Ukraine politician Arseniy Yatsenyuk ) and Strong Ukraine achieved good results in polls for the next Ukrainian parliamentary election and in the 2010 local elections ; so did All-Ukrainian Union " Svoboda ", a party who can not be placed in the above mentioned two major movements.

A series of events during and after World War II exacerbated tensions, including the Soviet-German pact during the first two years of the war leading to subsequent invasions, the perceived delay of an amphibious invasion of German-occupied Europe, the western allies ' support of the Atlantic Charter, disagreement in wartime conferences over the fate of Eastern Europe, the Soviets ' creation of an Eastern Bloc of Soviet satellite states, western allies scrapping the Morgenthau Plan to support the rebuilding of German industry, and the Marshall Plan.