Easing Back In

I like it! And Canadian artists are always there, it's just that our countrymen tend to overlook all but the really big names.

you know, we as a country tend to over look most things canadian, while they know all about what goes on down here. it makes me feel so uninformed. i mean, i could hardly attempt to discuss canadian politics at a level like lyle does ours. we americans are so ethnocentric.

Well, our politics and our ecomony seems to have a bigger impact on them than the reverse, so we blow it off. I don't even understand their political system when I read up on it. I need a class!

i know, maybe we should do some sort of cultural exchange program. that might be a fun way to learn about our neighbors to the north! actually, when i was in college we used to listen to a radio program called "as it happens" which was done by the canadian broadcasting company. it came on after "all things considered" and i loved it. it was good to hear another perspective on the news. now i get bbc radio, which is ok, but i loved that other one more.

That's a fabulous idea. I wonder if some of our CP friends from up north could school us!

that's exactly what i was thinking!

Well, that sounds like an invitation ... or a challenge, one of 'tother ;-)

First, as to the knowledge gap, yes the main reason for that is that the US is obviously a bigger and more important country so not just Canada but everybody in the world knows a lot about US politics.

That said, Canada is traditionally the US's biggest trading partner so a big part of your economy hinges on what goes on here so, arguably, if there's one country the US should know more about, it's probably Canada.

As to the dynamics of the Canadian politics, there are a four major points to remember. First, there's the nature of the parliamentary system. Take the US system and take away the presidency and the senate, so that the guy who runs the country is the House majority leader - that's parliamentary system in a nutshell (technically, there is a senate in Canada, but its vestigial and no one pays attention to it. It's a left-over attempt by the Brits to recreate a House of Lords here but it didn't really take).

Second, Canadian politics has always been considerably more left-wing than yours. The transparently named Liberal Party has been in power more than any other, there is a socialist third party (NDP) that consistently wins a chunk of seats and even the Conservative Party in Canada is nowhere near as far-right as the Republican Party.

Third, the Canadian federation is much much more regional than the US, with CDN provinces wielding much more power than US states. Governance of the country is sort of an ongoing negotiation between the federal government and the provinces, sort of like it was in the US in the pre-civil war "states' rights" era.

The major regions are:

British Columbia - similar to California and Washington state Prairies (Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba) - formerly agrarian but increasingly very very resource rich Ontario - industrial heartland, the traditional engine of the CDN economy, but it rises and falls depending on how much stuff they can sell to the US, which right now isn't much Quebec - more on that later Atlantic Canada - New England style; used to be miserably poor fishing economies, recently doing better due to offshore oil

The fourth major factor is, of course, Quebec which regards itself as being a distinct nationality and occasionally threatens to separate. They are, in fact, totally different from English Canadians except for their tastes in beer, hockey and maple syrup. Lately, separatist sentiment has waned and Quebeckers seem more content to view themselves as a quasi-independent nationality within a larger federation. However, in federal elections they continue to vote overwhelming for the 15-year-old Bloc Quebecois, a nationalist party. The Bloc is technically separatist but not hard over on it; their main appeal to Quebeckers is that they "stand up for Quebeckers rights in Parliament".

The existence of the Bloc wickedly screws up the Canadian parliamentary system. Stable government in parliamentary systems depends on one party winning over 50% of the legislative seats. The Bloc controls so many seats that none of the other major parties has a hope of winning a majority of seats. In other parliamentary systems in the world, that would mean that someone would have to form a coalition. However, the Bloc refuses to "sell out" in such a way (plus no other party would sign a deal with separatists) and the NDP, for some reason, are restricted by their party constitution from signing coalitions. So the country is now hobbling along with so-called "minority governments"; the biggest caucus is the government, but they don't have enough votes to pass anything on their own, causing endless classic legislative gridlock.

I probably lost you a couple paragraphs or so ago so I better quit. I'm open to questions, though, if I haven't yet bored you silly.

Sorry about the run-on sentence under regions. For some reason wordpress got rid of my line breaks and won't let me go back and edit the comment. The regions are BC; Prairies; Ontario; Quebec; Atlantic. Please imagine semi-colons at the appropriate spots.

what is the role of the prime minister? is he the same person as the house majority leader? do the three parties run for office in each of the regions (aside from the quebec bloc) so that each party has seats representing each region?

i may be remembering wrong, but when bill clinton was first elected president, he did so without a 50% majority. the popular vote was split three ways between him, bob dole and ross perot. of course, he won all the necessary electoral college votes, so it didn't really matter.

Yes, the Prime Minister is essentially analogous to the House majority leader. He's just a regular representative who happens to be the leader of the largest caucus in the House. No one votes for him directly except for the voters in his constituency (he represents a local district just like all the other members of the House.)

All the major national parties run candidates in every constituency in the country, so you pick what party you want running the country by voting for the appropriate candidate. And that's the only vote you have on a parliamentary ballot. If you happen to personally like the candidate of another party but still want your party elected to government, tough luck... there's no way to split your support in British-style parliamentary votes (other parliamentary systems, like the German, do provide for this.)

Furthermore, there's nothing legally binding about a candidate's party affiliation. It can happen (and has happened) that a candidate can run for one party, get elected under that banner but then opportunistically switch to another party the day after the election. But this tends to piss voters off and the guy's chances of getting re-elected decline considerably.

Clear as mud?

so there is no single federation-wide candidate on the ballot like we have a presidential candidate? also, who selects the prime minister from the caucus--the caucus members after they've been elected? do you have state governmental bodies like we have state houses?

i find this fascinating and appreciate your tutelage!

Sorry, I had a hectic week and missed this follow up question.

No, there is no federation-wide candidate on the ballot, just your local candidate. That's the sucky part of parliamentary systems, although it has other strengths.

Way back when, the Prime Minister used to be selected by the caucus, but things have gotten slightly more democratic since then.

Before I get into that, though, I should make clear that, unlike presidential systems, parliamentary parties have established leaders who lead the party win or lose. For example, we would now say that Obama is the leader of the Democrats, but after January who is the head of the Republican Party? The answer isn't clear cut, right?

In parliamentary parties, the party leader continues on no matter what. If he doesn't become PM, then he becomes Leader of the Official Opposition, or leader of one of the third party caucuses.

The party leaders are elected by card-carrying members of the party. There's no such thing as voter registration. The various parties have various ways of electing leaders (one-member-one-vote; delegated conventions, etc.) but basically it comes down to a process of which guy can sell the most membership cards before the deadline. The process is not particularly well regulated and only recently has the government electoral office played any role in them at all. They've typically been viewed as an internal process of the parties themselves, even though they have national consequences. But that's slowly changing.

Likewise, there is no established method for getting rid of a party leader. All the parties have provisions to hold leadership review votes at their conventions, but the rules for doing so are all rather mushy. Generally, if it gets to the point where enough people in a party are rebelling against a party leader, he usually does the right thing and steps down.

But this is the area where things get weird. I've often found it's just as difficult to explain Canadian party mechanisms to Americans as it is for Americans to explain the primary system to foreigners. It's just one of those cultural things that are hard to explain unless you understand them intuitively.