CTV.ca has a budget hub for the festivities on Feb. 23. One of my stories for it is When budgets fail, minority governments fall.

Here's an excerpt:

There are two ways to trigger an election by having your budget defeated -- the planned way, and the unplanned way.

For the 1979 Progressive Conservative minority government of Prime Minister Joe Clark, it was the latter.

Clark took the feisty but ill-advised approach of governing as if he had a majority with his 136 MPs (the Liberals had 114, the NDP had 27 and the Social Creditistes had five).

"I think that was their first mistake," Lawrence LeDuc, a University of Toronto political scientist, told CTV.ca.