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.
- Yes, I think it’s entirely fair to describe Rebecca Black as more interesting than Canadian politics to the world at large. [↩]
- Really. [↩]
- Or, if you like, lying. [↩]
- Yes, we have the Green Party too, but they don’t count and everybody knows it. [↩]
- The Liberals, despite their name, are centrist. [↩]
- 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. [↩]
- “But this time he’s GONE TOO FAR” is not really a great political rallying cry. [↩]
- Well, that and the money. [↩]
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50 users responded in this post
As long as we’re listing the failings of the Torys, let’s not leave out:
1) Deciding that getting 35% support of the 40% of Canadians who voted gave them a supreme mandate to change the fundamental laws of mathematics and science (the long-form census idiocy, which I hope gets brought up again).
2) Constantly demonizing the idea of a Liberal-NDP-BQ “coalition” as some kind of Satanic death cult, when he was quite happy to make sweet, tender coalescence with the BQ when it suited his purposes.
3) Giving Toronto a G20 we didn’t want, positioned so as to guarantee maximum social & economic damage to the city.
And on and on and on.
Some good points, although the post as a whole would have been a lot more interesting if you had embedded a Rebecca Black video. I guess you can’t do that until Friday, though.
I am so emailing my Dad (a long-time Red Tory voter) a link here. Well done.
— Steve
Aren’t the Tories blue here in Canada? I could have sworn the Liberals were the red ones. NDp is orange, Green is green, and the Bloc’s colour is irrelevant.
“Red Tory” is generally indicative of a (Progressive) Conservative viewpoint that is a little more progressive than conservative, i.e. left-leaning. See Wikipedia for examples.
Yes, Jonathan, Tories are blue in Canada, as they are most places. Red Tories are centrist/centre right voters that tend to vote Conservative. ie: Tories who are more like Liberals than the general population of their party.
Jonathan, “Red Tories” was (and I lament the past tense) the nickname for moderates in the Progressive Conservative party who held views not terribly far from those of the Liberals, whose party colour is red. The Conservatives are indeed blue.
— Steve
“The Liberals, despite their name, are centrist.” It seems that way in the U.S. sometimes, too.
Parliamentary government always sounds so strange to me. Party leaders are a difficult concept to grasp fully, since we have nothing equivalent here. But I’m sure our system (whatever it’s called) sounds just as weird to you guys. (And I can certainly point out a lot of flaws.)
I usually hate Left-Wing nuts more than I hate Right-Wing nuts for some reason, but everything I’ve heard about your current Tory government has been bad, especially that crime bill (take it from an American– mandatory sentences are always a disaster).
Ha. An excellent explanation.
Also, they want to build huge expensive megaprisons even though the crime rate is falling, to deal with all the “unreported crimes”. What fun!
To really understand this election, you need to see Stephen Harper for what he really is…the SCARIEST PM in Canadian history! http://www.FireHarper.com
“Not unless something crazy happens, but then again, part of politics is that you never know when something crazy will happen.” One can only hope.
You forgot to mention that Harper has staff from Bush’s reign of terror.
[…] Christopher Bird explains the upcoming Canadian election to non-Canadians. […]
If/when Ignatieff goes, expect Justin Trudeau to sweep in.
I’m a die-hard, dyed-red-in-the-wool Liberal, so I’m probably gonna wind up voting for him anyway (mostly because our local Liberal MP is a pretty stand-up guy), but oh, man, Ignatief is such an arrogant prick, I’m seriously tempted to vote NDP this time ’round.
Harper lost the few shreds of respect I had for him when he prorogued Parliament to avoid being put out of office by a coaltion government, on the heels of making over a dozen Conservative Senate appointments (including Mike Duffy, essentially the Canadian equivalent of Bill O’Reilley or Sean Haggardy), despite calling the Liberals to the dirt in the last election for doing essentially the same thing (though they made more appointments in this move than the Liberals did during their entire term of office). Besides, I really can’t trust a politician who uses Federal funds to run attack ads on their opposition throughout their entire frikkin’ term.
Oh, if only Brian Tobin hadn’t retired when he did. Hey, maybe the Liberals can woo Danny Williams….
Surely Arthur Meighan was “the most right-wing prime minister in Canadian history”? Or arguably Macdonald?
@MaryWarner: Actually, you do have equivalents to our party leaders. The Speaker of the House of Representatives is essentially our Prime Minister, while the minority leader of the House is equivalent to our Leader of the Official Opposition. The big difference is that we have a much weaker Senate and Executive, which is a good thing (for us) since they aren’t elected.
Red Tories are not simply Conservative Party supporters who are a little more centrist/moderate/closer to the Liberals. That’s more than an oversimplification, it’s outright wrong.
True red Tories combine a strong belief in traditional Judeo-Christian values with a sense of communitarianism and a suspicion of big corporations. A red Tory might simultaneously oppose equal marriage rights for gays and lesbians while being in favour of higher corporate taxes and more spending on social programs. By contrast, a neo-liberal Conservative like John Baird might well be in favour of gay marriage while calling for lower corporate taxes and much less government spending.
Most of ex-Reform Party supporters combine extreme social and economic conservatism. It would be correct to say that the modern Conservative Party of Canada is really three parties in one, except that there are barely any red Tories left in the party, so it’s really just a mix of neo-liberals and social conservatives–making it a lot more like the U.S. Republican Party than like the old Progressive Conservative Party under John Diefenbaker, Bob Stanfield or Joe Clark.
As my comment I’m going to rattle off a string of obscenities, because that does sum up how I feel about this and the last few elections.
Harper’s been in power since 2004, not 2006.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_federal_election,_2004
Wow. I feel like an idiot and a big idiot at that. I am familiar with red Tories. Thanks for not mocking my stupid, stupid question.
@ Leo: No, Harper has led the Conservatives since 2004 (and the Alliance since 2002), but he’s only been PM since ’06.
I sure hope Red Tories don’t have to oppose gay marriage and embrace “Judeo-Christian values.” I’m not a huggy type, and more importantly, that adjective gives me hives.
Great summary, explaining to this expat Cdn WTF’s going on.
To me, Harper’s biggest flaw aside from arrogance is his rampant climate-change-denialist stance. Canada likes to think of itself as nice, but the pollution it’s generating and enabling (think tar sands) is shameful.
Unfortunately, little will change til the voting system actually represents the public opinion of the voters who participate, so I suppose you can count me as NDP until Canada takes on some form of proportional voting system.
Question for clarification here. I’ve asked this before, but I’ve never really gotten a satisfactory answer.
How the hell do you snow-people chose your party leaders, anyway? Is it just a matter of convincing all the other MPs of your particular stripe that you ought to be the one to by PM?
I live in a border state, and have a bunch of friends up north of the Liberal persuasion, and the nicest thing I’ve ever heard any of them say about Ignatieff is that he’s useless. More common is ‘I will not vote for the Liberals if it means Ignatieff in the PM chair where he can further destroy our brand and our principles, I will vote NDP and/or suffer through Harper until he implodes first.’
Now, in the US, the question would be ‘Why the hell do the rank-and-file keep nominating him, then?’ because to become the guy who represents your party in a major election and gets to sit in the big chair, you have to win through in a primary where all the ordinary voters approve you. Even sitting Presidents need to do this.
But it kinda seems like Ignatieff doesn’t need to give a flying fuck what the, you know, actual Liberal VOTERS think of him in order to continue being their standard bearer. So who the hell puts him in charge, anyway? How does THAT work?
You think “this time he’s GONE TOO FAR” is a piss-poor rallying cry, this election cycle in New South Wales has had nothing better against the Liberals (our centrist-conservative party also) than “don’t write them a blank cheque.” so, you know, don’t vote for them TOO HARD, just in case they get FUNNY IDEAS.
Hey, at least you aren’t in Australia.
Here, the Liberal party, despite their name, are actually the conservatives.
And are rapidly marching right-wards, followed only slightly less quickly by the so-called ‘leftist’ party, the Australian Labor Party.
*sigh*
HTML fail. *sigh*
(fixed. –MGK)
How the hell do you snow-people chose your party leaders, anyway? Is it just a matter of convincing all the other MPs of your particular stripe that you ought to be the one to by PM?
Party leaders are elected by the party membership (people who pay the party for a membership card); there are periodic leadership reviews (ie, basically conventions where delegates vote approval or disapproval), but leaders normally serve as long as they want. There were only two Liberal Party leaders between 1887 and 1948.
Should add, the circumstances surrounding Ignatieff’s ascent are somewhat different; he was voted in by caucus as interim leader in the midst of a parliamentary crisis, and then basically acclaimed at the convention (though there’s no doubt he would have won in a straight convention too, given his opponents).
It’s also fair to say that Iggy was expected to be more impressive than he has turned out to be. “He’s educated, obviously intelligent, respected, and a good speaker. He’ll pull us from the Stephane Dion mire!”
Ha!
@SC – Re: your comment on the immanent rise of Justin Trudeau. Definitely the case.
If Ignatieff loses, I expect a Liberal Leadership convention. Trudeau will have to work hard to NOT be seen as one of the strongest contenders going into that convention.
Should Ignatieff pull off a win, Justin will probably get a high-profile cabinet post, and if he doesn’t crash and burn, it will set him up to be the likely successor when Ignatieff steps down as party leader.
I admit that I grew up during his father’s time as PM, and had my political “Coming of Age” during that period. Whether one loved him, or one hated him – and there was almost no middle ground – his passion for Canada was one of his defining characteristics. If he passed that passion on to his son, and I believe he did, then if and when Justin gains the Liberal leadership, there will be a generational change in the party, and in the politics of Canada, just as there was when his father became PM.
@SC
You have to pay money to be a member of a political party in Canada? I did not know that.
I think you have to pay to join a party in most countries. The US is very unusual, maybe unique, in the way our parties work. Here in the States, party membership is entirely self-identified– if you say you’re a Republican or a Democrat, you are, no matter what your political views may be. In other countries, parties have more control over who their members are and they can kick out politicians who vote against the party on some issue they consider important.
And as far as I know, the US is the only country in which parties don’t actually choose their candidates, since we usually use primaries.
It’s all just a quirk of history. Organised parties were invented in the 19th Century, and they were invented separately in Britain (and maybe other parts of Europe) and the US. Before that, it was just informal factions. The rules for how parties work were just improvised gradually over time, and the US and Europe ended up with very different systems. And then everybody else except the US just adopted the European forms (or the Leninist type of party organisation in less democratic countries).
@Murc to join the Liberal Party it’s $10 a year, considering getting a membership so I can vote when new leadership is picked.
I don’t know about the other parties but I suspect its about the same amount.
@Mary-
Not entirely true. You can’t just SAY you’re a Democrat or a Republican to be one. You have to register as a Democrat or as a Republican. However, said registration is entirely free.
I’m curious as to your rationale that the parties don’t actually choose their candidates in the U.S because of our primary system. A primary is the purest form of party-driven candidate choosing; it broadens the field of decision-makers from men in the proverbial smoke-filled rooms to literally every party member in a geographical area.
@Murc
Except it doesn’t really. It only allows those wealthy enough to run on their own to run, or those with the financial support of the party to run. So you’re still left with smoke-filled room dude.
@Sivi-
Parties do not typically bankroll primary candidates in the U.S, nor do they endorse primary candidates.
Individuals (politicians, prominent private citizens, etc.) will often endorse primary candidates, but they do not speak on behalf of the party. In fact there’s a long tradition (not an absolute one, but its there) for party leadership to stay the hell out of contentious primaries.
@Murc- In some states (like IL), anyone can vote for any party in the primaries, whether you’re a registered member or not. You just show up, show your ID, and tell the precinct worker which party’s ballot you want.
Sure, most folks just take “their” party’s ballot, but there can be quite a bit of aisle-crossing, as it were, in order to try to make a lousy candidate win the other party’s primary.
Heck, at least in Canada you don’t get the spectacle of the PM actually driving to the papace to ask the Queen in person to let you have an election.
On party Membership, yeah in general you have to pay to be a full member of a political party. For example here in the Uk the party membership are as follows:
Lib Dems (Centerist party): 65,861 as of the Nov 2010 Presidential Election
Labour (Left Wingers): 177,559 members, plus 2,747.030 affiliate members (Mostly trade unionists) – as of the September 2010 Leadership election
Toreis (Right Wingers): 198,844 as of the 2005 leadership election
(Note that these are the total number of ballot issued in the respective elections. In general that’s how many members the parties had when the electorate was detirmined for that election, so may have changed (The Tories will certainly have changed as that’s an old election result)
As for electing a leader, each party has a different method. For us Lib Dems, the parliamentary Party chooses candidates (who must get the support of a certain number of MPs), who go to the full membership for an elcetion by AV. In theory there is a leadership election within a year of the general election, but it is very unusual for anyone other than the present leader to run in it.
The Tories have a series of rounds of vote only within the MPs, eliminating weaker candidates, until there are only two candidates. These then go to the party in a straight election.
Labour have, welll…
Each candidate has to get 12.5% of the MPs supporting them. They then go on to the ballot. There are three constituencies; the party membership, the affiliates who are mostly unions, and all MPs & MEPS. each of these gropus get equal weighting, so that the 2.7 m affiliates are equvalent to the 177k members, and also to the 271 elected officilas. The election is also run under AV. As the MP/MEPs have trheir vote published after the fact, it is actually possible to calculate the if six people had changed their vote at the last leadership election, the result would have been different (and it’s possible to identify the six people!)
Also quite often parties will reduce their subscription fee before an election to drive up numbers – you could become a Labour member for £1 ($1.50) last year if you were under 25.
If Her Majesty doesn’t like the candidates running over there, Can she do something about it? 😀
Hey, you never know – something awesomely exciting could happen like at the Australian Federal Election! Politics here haven’t been so entertaining since Mark Latham (great sledger, horrible leader).
“If Her Majesty doesn’t like the candidates running over there, Can she do something about it?”
Any power she still has to do so would be taken away from her if she ever actually used it.
So it’s hard to give a yes or no answer.
Just to keep things even here and to help the economy…
http://i.imgur.com/757PM.png
A jobs ad for a ‘social media company’ for writers to ‘make up facts and statistics’ as long as they can ‘repeat specific talking points’.
I’m sure it’s just to stir up some excitement and dialogue in our country, eh?
Here’s a suggestion to all Canadians:
Don’t vote Republican.
Signed, Americans.
Just saw on the news Harper pledges to abolish the long gun registry. You know, the one all the cops say is a good thing.
This after abolishing the long-form census, which every scientific and business group says was something we needed.
Does Stephen Harper have some kind of pathological grudge against long things?
This has to be the best run-down of Canadian politics I’ve ever seen, so thanks! Even though I’m Canadian, I’ve never really understood our politics. I’m pretty sure I know more about American politics than ours.
“I’m pretty sure I know more about American politics than ours.” – Actually, I think most Canadians know more about American politics than most Americans. We compare and contrast our system with theirs on a regular basis, where the Americans don’t do that with anybody else’s.