Torontoist made its endorsement of a party in the federal election today. I wrote it.

If you’re not Canadian, you might not appreciate how unbelievable the last of this set of best-case scenarios is:

For the sake of comparison: you see that 43 in the Liberals’ Conservatives’ best-case scenario for the New Democrats? 43 seats is the most the New Democrats have held in any Parliament ever.

(via Threehundredeight)

A while back I said that Canadian politics was less interesting than Rebecca Black. Apparently somebody decided that this merited a truly horrible combination.

And of course Jack Layton doesn’t merit a mention. It’s probably because of the moustache.

(h/t Carl Sack)

I’m liveblogging the Canadian federal election debate over at Torontoist.

So, you may have heard that Canada has an upcoming election! Or not. It’s entirely possible you didn’t hear about it at all. It’s understandable, what with Japan and Libya and Rebecca Black and all.¹ Anyway, a lot of people have asked me to explain this election to them, as I am the only Canadian they know who’s willing to talk about our country’s politics rather than just rattle off a string of obscenities, which is the de facto Canadian answer to most political enquiries. So here we go!

So why are you having an election, anyway?

Traditionally, Canada has an election when one of two things happen: either the current government says “okay, time for an election,” and we go ask the Queen if we can have an election², or the current government loses a vote of confidence, which is when the Members of Parliament all vote and say “this government sucks, we want a new one” and then we have to go ask the Queen if we can have an election. In Canada, most confidence votes are the annual budget vote, but in this case what happened was that a Parliamentary government committee found the government to be in contempt of Parliament for withholding crucial information³ about the costs of various bills and purchases it wished to pass, including a crime bill and the cost of some new fighter jets.

So this means that the current government will be turfed out?

Probably not.

Wait, what?

It’s like this. Canada is basically a four-party system.⁴ The Bloc Quebecois make it near-impossible for any party to get a majority since the Bloc will usually get around fifty of Quebec’s seventy-five seats, which means any other party, to get a majority, has to win 155 of the remaining 258 seats. That’s a pretty big benchmark to beat. Secondly, the NDP, our socialist-pinko party, at any time has about 20-36 of the remaining seats. The NDP will never be the head of a government; much like the Liberal Democrats in the UK, their ultimate goal is to reform the electoral system so that they get twenty percent of the seats to match the twenty percent of the vote they usually get.

So basically your options for actually running the country are the Conservatives or the Liberals.⁵ The Liberals got turfed out after a scandal in 2006 involving the misdirection of government advertising funds, and the Tories have been in power ever since, mostly because there’s one party competing for right-wing votes and three competing for left-wing votes, and basically the Tories haven’t done anything really amazingly offensive to alienate centrist voters yet because Canadians really don’t expect anything at all out of their government any more, and it would take a screwup of massive proportions for the Tories to really shock the centre out of… “complacency” isn’t quite the right word. Let’s go with “despair.” So far, the Tories have managed to weather proroguing the government, cabinet ministers doctoring reports, a whole lot of ethnic and racial slurs from backbenchers, numerous unpopular spending cuts, misuse of government funds for political purposes and a bunch of other things.

Wait, if they’re so bad, why don’t people vote Liberal instead?

Well, here’s the thing. For Liberal Party leaders, after Jean Chretien retired,⁶ we went from “capable right-hand man who’s not very inspiring” in Paul Martin to “intelligent man but boy he talks funny” in Stephane Dion, and got clobbered both times at the polls. Then, for some reason, the Liberal Party decided to shoot itself in the head and put Michael Ignatieff in charge, because what the party really needed was a soulless husk of a man leading it, I guess. Ignatieff has spent the last couple of years mostly knuckling under to any challenge Stephen Harper has put forth, mostly because Michael Ignatieff is a useless limpdick, but also because Ignatieff is firmly on the centre-right side of the Liberal Party and doesn’t really have economic views that are wildly dissimilar from some Tories when you get down to it. People might not like Harper, but generally it looks like we were all willing to wait for Ignatieff to go away. Unfortunately, he has not done this.

Then how come Ignatieff didn’t knuckle under this time?

There are three theories regarding this.

1.) Michael Ignatieff felt the contempt hearing was just too great a disregard of Canada’s political tradition and its public to let slide. This is probably the least likely option.

2.) Michael Ignatieff has been playing political rope-a-dope, or so he thinks, and will attack the Tories with every single scandal since 2006 and make them look really really bad. This is quite possible. I’m not sure how Ignatieff is going to get traction with stuff he couldn’t be bothered to use the first time around,⁷ but then again I never went to Harvard.

3.) Michael Ignatieff has realized he is a useless limpdick and wants to bow out of the Liberal Party gracefully so he can go back to college and be revered again, and can do so by getting his ass kicked in an election. This is also quite possible.

So the Tories are going to win?

Probably a minority government, yes.

Wait, don’t they already have that?

Yes.

So they’ll be happy with that?

Oh, heavens no. See, this is the third election where the social conservatives who represent the bulk of the modern Tory party have put up with what they consider a relative moderate as their leader. Never mind that Stephen Harper is easily the most right-wing prime minister in Canadian history: the fact that he represents himself as moderate offends them. But they’ve put up with it because they’ve been told that Harper represents their only chance at a majority government, and then they can pass anti-same-sex-marriage bills and anti-union bills and anti-whatever-they-don’t-like-this-week bills once they’ve got their majority.

But they’re only willing to let Harper have so many kicks at the can, and the grumbling within the party is getting more and more pronounced. For a long time there was a sort of belief that another moderate, like Jim Prentice or Peter MacKay, would take over when Harper left, but the socons have been quite clear that more moderate than Harper is a no-go, which is probably why Jim Prentice recently announced his retirement from politics to go run a bank.⁸ The socons want one of their own running the party, a Jason Kenney or the like. And if they don’t get their majority this time around, it’s entirely possible they’ll decide to go for it.

So this is essentially a “which leader would you like to stick around” contest for Ignatieff and Harper?

Probably Jack Layton as well.

Why? Is he unpopular too?

Actually Layton’s quite popular, but he’s been fighting prostate cancer for about a year. If the NDP don’t win – and they won’t – Layton will probably have to step down at some point to concentrate on his health. He will never admit this, because Jack Layton is the political equivalent of a bull terrier, but it’s true. For the NDP, this election probably has quite a bit to do with elevating the bench players so that Layton can step down and not leave the party rudderless.

So to sum up: this election won’t change anything except political organization of the various parties?

Not unless something crazy happens, but then again, part of politics is that you never know when something crazy will happen.

1. Yes, I think it’s entirely fair to describe Rebecca Black as more interesting than Canadian politics to the world at large. [↩]
2. Really. [↩]
3. Or, if you like, lying. [↩]
4. Yes, we have the Green Party too, but they don’t count and everybody knows it. [↩]
5. The Liberals, despite their name, are centrist. [↩]
6. It is worth explaining that Jean Chretien embodied one of the central principles of Canadian politics, which is that for all that the world thinks of us as nice and polite, we inevitably vote for whichever political leader seems like the most capable bastard. Chretien was a ridiculously capable bastard. [↩]
7. “But this time he’s GONE TOO FAR” is not really a great political rallying cry. [↩]
8. Well, that and the money. [↩]

Toby S.: What do you think the odds are that the shenanigans unfolding in Wisconsin will have any lasting effect on US internal politics?

About even, I think. It’s still too soon to tell whether the uprising that’s begun in the midwest over anti-union shenanigans is going to have staying power. If it does, you’ll see lasting effect. If it doesn’t, you’ve seen the last gasp of the labour movement until they need to start really rioting again, which should probably come when corporations reintroduce company towns or similar abusive practices – give it twenty or thirty years and it’ll happen.

Menamebephil: What do you think of David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’? Do you see it as a workable scheme?

No, not really. I see it as a clever marketing attempt to sell social service cuts. Now, elements of the Big Society idea are workable in certain areas: youth centres, for example, could probably be run primarily on a volunteer basis (if they weren’t already, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find that that was the case). You’d need some paid staff, but volunteers could pad out the ranks and make the centers more cost-efficient. But the fact that occasionally there are areas where volunteerism can make for more efficient operation of social services doesn’t make it a universal plan.

Moreover, the fact that a lot of this volunteerism will almost certainly be church- and religious charity-driven makes little economic sense if you think about it, because rather than giving churches a tax break and then asking them to organize social services, you could instead just tax them and pay for it yourself, which would almost certainly be more efficient, but I doubt the Tories are interested in that sort of efficiency.

anthony: a) what will it take to have the green party to elect a member
b) how do you think the regional loggerhead will solve itself
c) how do we prioritize cities in the current canadian political context
d) what will it take to get ignatieff into the pmo

A) The other parties spontaneously dissolving.
B) Massive malfeasance on the part of a given political party that inspires populist outrage nationwide.
C) I have no idea. If anybody else does, let me know.
D) This assumes we want Ignatieff as Prime Minister, you realize. Honestly, I’d almost rather see Gilles Duceppe in there.

Silent g: What are your thoughts on Mayor Flounder 100+ days in?

In a shocking twist, he has turned out to be a stupid joke of a man whose smarter brother is really running the show and everybody knows it. I know: you’re totally surprised!

Magic Love Hose: If you had to recommend one single book on how Canada first implemented its single-payer health care system, which would you recommend?

There isn’t really a definitive history book on the topic, to be honest, mostly because it’s pretty straightforward. The Wikipedia entry gives you most of the basics you need to know.

I was going to do another answering-questions post last night but then some news happened and Torontoist asked me to write about it so I did.

The CRTC did something bad, but not quite as bad as the other bad things they’ve done recently, so a lot of people didn’t hear about it. I have attempted to correct that at Torontoist.

Multiple readers have asked that I show support for a democratically elected government in Egypt, and to say that the alternative is not between Hosni Mubarak and Iran II: Radical Islamic Boogaloo. Which is obbviously the case. So here is a pretty decent Youtube making the rounds that sums up a lot of imagery from the Egyptian revolution (does it have a color-coded name yet? Get on that, Egyptians).

Personally, I tend to think that “new Egypt” will probably end up politically resembling Turkey more than anything else, and that would be entirely okay.

Also, the recent CRTC decision to meter internet usage in Canada is bullshit, moneygrubbing of the worst kind. Here is a second Youtube. Featuring George Strombopoulos, who, and I say this as someone who has poked fun at Strombo on a regular basis in the past, is really becoming a national media treasure. The petition of which he speaks is here; if you’re Canadian you should go sign it right now if you have not already.

And if you sat through all that, here is a reward.

(Well, it made me laugh.)

Torontoist asked me to do that thing I do regarding Hizzoner Rob Ford, who on his first day in the job decided he wanted to kill an $8 billion transit extension that was almost entirely funded by the province and federal government in favour of a single subway line that would cost the city more than three times as much.

So that is what I did.

I’m almost getting sick of writing about Rob Ford and his demented, dishonest mayoral campaign, but what the hell, really.

Even non-Torontonians should see that Youtube. It’s amazingly bad. Watch it, and then realize that Ford is the frontrunner in an election for one of the largest governments in Canada.

So Toronto’s mayoral candidates had their seven billionth debate last night and, as always, I was watching.

Including liveblogging municipal debates for Torontoist.

Another Toronto mayoral debate, another liveblog.

Non-Torontonians who think I am overselling Rob Ford’s general level of buffoonery: I am really, really not doing that at all.

Torontoist asked me to write about Rob Ford being Rob Ford, so I did.