Today is Canadian election day. For Merikkkans who think Canada is a junior brother of the US, well, not exactly, and definitely on elections.
This piece is a mix of a primer on Canadian governance for Americans who don't understand it, a look at the state of Canada's political parties at the federal level, and some thoughts and guesses about how the election might turn out.
First, Canada is a parliamentary government, technically a parliamentary monarchy, being part of the British Empire Commonwealth, currently ruled over by the King Charles Spaniel via a governor general.
The parliamentary is the key difference. As in other parliamentary governments, whether constitutional monarchies or parliamentary republics, parliament is king, so to speak. The prime minister and members of their cabinet sit in the lower house, in this case, the Canadian Commons, named after its British progenitor.
The Canadian Senate does exist, and has more power than the British Lords, but far less than the US Senate. And, His Majesty's ministers don't sit there. (At least not by convention, I think, like in the British Lords.)
So, the party winning the Commons — or, as is often the case, forming a winning coalition government — controls the executive. Or they form a minority government, with the governor general's blessing, or the president's blessing in parliamentary republics, when deemed necessary.
In other ways, though, there are broad similarities.
As a "Westminster" government, like the U.S. is, indirectly, parliamentary members are elected from single-member districts in first past the post elections. That is just like general elections in the US (with the exception of Georgia on Senate races that I know of). A plurality is all you need in a three-party race. This is unlike, say, Germany, where the Bundestag has single-member districts but also has what are known as "overhang" seats, so the composition of the body matches, approximately, the nationwide vote for each party. It's totally unlike Israel's Knesset, where members are elected on proportional representation, and with 120 members for that little bitty country.
Back to the Westminster angle of the above, and plurality wins.
Canada has three parties — well, in a way it does. Let's look.
The Liberals, currently in power under prime minister Justin Trudeau. The Canadian equivalent of U.S. Democrats, other than Canada having national health care, brought by the Liberals eons ago. That's one party.
The Conservatives, the equivalent of U.S. Republicans. Like on this side of the border, they've become more and more MAGAt-ified, especially post-COVID. That's a second.
The New Democratic Party. Picture the Democratic Socialists of America "Roseys" being a separate party, rather than an interest group within Democrats. That's these people. They're half a party, not a full party. Untimely deaths and weak leaders have led to them imploding more than once.
Bloc Québécois. Picture something like a Confederate States of America party, but instead, wanting either greater autonomy for, or independence for, Quebec. The party is internally split on which is acceptable, and tries to figure out how to align this with the Parti Québécois. For Americans, or Canadians for that matter, or others, for that matter? Perhaps a good comp is the relationship of the BJP and RSS in India? This is also the best illustration of how loose the connection is between federal and provincial parties, which itself is a bug, not a feature, Canadians. They're one-third of a party.
Greens. More powerful, relatively, than U.S. Greens. Two current members in the Commons. Riven factionally in the past few years over Zionism, unlike U.S. Greens. They're one-sixth of a party.
That gets us to three.
(I'll interject at this point. As of Saturday, polls showed the Liberals 4 percentage points ahead of Conservatives. That said, Conservatives outpolled Liberals nationally the last two elections but were still the second party because of the consolidated nature of their support.)
There's also Canadian Libertarians, with a shadow of the interest of what the U.S. version gets. Two different Communist parties. And other smaller flotsam.
That's my mildly snarky translation.
Hugely snarky, and more cynical than I am, from within his own country? Substack, Goodreads and Shitter (unless he killed his account, which he may have) friend Adam McPhee.
And, yes, his "Whoever Wins, We Lose," is far more snarky. And, it hacked multiple Canadian Facebook friends when I posted and tagged them.
Here's the non-snarky opening grafs:
I meant to join 7.3 million of my fellow Canadians this past weekend and vote in the advanced polls for the upcoming federal election, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.
I still intend to vote on election day, but man, things are looking bleak.
I guess if I have any issues, they are: 1) Canada must not be complicit in the ongoing genocide in Gaza and must actively work to put pressure on Israel to stop it, and 2) Canada must return to building socialized housing, which is the only surefire, longterm method of bringing the cost of living down for the working class.
There really aren’t a whole lot of good options. Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look at the parties.
And, the snark comes after. I won't reference it all, but the Liberals need it. This, the last graf, is his nutgraf on the election:
The polls have been telling us that the Liberals are on track to win the election, and the only question is if they’ll cross the two hundred seat threshold, but I’m starting to think this is a Kamala Harris situation: a last minute switch-out and an utter refusal to do politics that leaves someone odious and unwanted in power. But if the first-past-the-post system blesses the Liberals one more time, I suspect we’ll be looking at more of a Kier Starmer situation: immediate unpopularity as a direct result of a refusal to do anything that might help the working class.
Indeed. Candidate and current premier Mark Carney has been a governor of both the Bank of Canada and Bank of England. Neoliberalism and globalism personified! Before Trump turned the race topsy-turvy, Carney would have been a liability, which leads one to ponder just how thin the Liberal "bench" is, perhaps in part because Trudeau chased enough off.
The first of my Canadian friends to get bent out of shape? A Nova Scotian who claims to lean NDP and even be sympathetic to Greens, but is doing strategery lesser evilism voting for Librulz. She also decried Adam for not listing enough corruption by Conservatives, and indicated he is uninformed. No, he's not, and that's not the focus of his piece.
Besides, he said this which sums up today's Conservatives:
Obviously I don’t really feel bad for the Conservatives. Seeing them eat shit is the one good thing I can imagine happening in this election, and if it happens I will happily take a few days to gloat. But unless the infighting to replace Poilievre gets particularly nasty, their party won’t break, and the problem they present will only grow worse because opposition benches are actually a better place for the Conservatives to do what they now do best: farming internet grievances and turning them into cash donations, either directly to the party or to one of their many allied social media operations.
Bingo, I do believe.
(Per Adam's intro, he claims to want to address housing, but nobody believes him. Of the parties that add up to three? I know Liberals and Conservatives are Zionist. Greens overall support Palestinians, but had a big fight over that a few years ago that led to their leader resigning, and an old leader of 13 years' tenure, Elizabeth May, coming back, NDP generally supports Palestinians, and the Bloc Québécois is a bunch of weasels. Beyond Adam, Greens are as good as U.S. Greens on the environment, NDP is squishes and everybody else is crap. On Russia-Ukraine? All of them, including Greens, are squishes from this leftist's point of view who knows the score there since the Maidan in 2014. Indeed, all global Green parties outside the U.S., I think, are toadies of the US and NATO on the Russia-Ukraine conflict. See this piece from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for more on all parties; per Adam, you can ignore the People's Party.)
Let us continue to the snarking. Next, it's the Bloc.
I won’t be voting for the Bloc Quebecois because for some reason they refuse to run a candidate in my non-Quebec riding.
How many times do I have to say this? You can’t win the pennant playing nothing but home games. The BQ should be running candidates in the rest of Canada, not so much uniting distant minority Francophone communities, but rather threatening to do Bill 101-style legislation to Calgary and Saskatoon. I mean, the Conservatives are basically the Bloc Albertois, they don’t pretend they’re going to help anyone in the Maritimes, but people in Prince Edward Island and Cape Breton still love pretending they’re on the team. Why can’t the BQ do the same?
If you're wondering what Bill 101 is? This is it. Maybe, if this DID happen, you could recruit Metis in Alberta and Saskatchewan to actually support something like that? And, I guess Adam can't be troubled to do French diacritical marks?
NDP? A mix of snark and serious issues. Kind of like me with U.S. Greens:
I probably won’t be voting for the NDP this time around.
I was a member of the party once in the past, to vote in a leadership election. Jagmeet Singh was never my candidate, but he beat the candidate I voted for by a wide margin so I thought I’d give him a chance. But now his time is up, and he’s gotta go. ...
Canada needs a party of the left, and there’s a chance that the NDP will
someday be that party. But right now they need to wake up, and the only
for that to happen is for members of their traditional base to withhold
their vote. So be it.
Side note for Merikkkans. In most parliamentary systems, because you don't have primaries for Congressmen, presidents, governors, etc., "being a member of a party" is something beyond what Merikkkans mean when they say "I'm a Democrat/Republican." It usually is an actual membership, like Freemasonry or something, with dues, etc.
Back to the main thread.
I understand. In modern times, from my knowledge of Up North, the NDP went in the tank when Jack Layton died and Tom Mulcair was elected to succeed him. And, contra anybody on Facebook who thinks he's either less than totally informed, or else biased toward Conservatives, the fact that McPhee once was involved enough with NDP politics to vote in a leadership election refudiates that.
One other thing that I would hold against the NDP? When in "confidence and supply" with the Liberals from 2021-24, they failed to ever hold Pretty Boy Trudeau to his 2015 promise to get rid of FPTP.
Greens? Even more scathing than the two full parties and the Bloc:
I will not be voting for the Green Party because I despise them. They do absolutely nothing and somehow collect six percent of the vote as if it’s rent. There is a longstanding misperception that because they all come off as hippies that they are part of the left. The Greens have never had a bigger presence in parliament, but climate change and the environment have never been less talked about than they are now.
I will say that Elizabeth May has grown on me, somewhat. She’s clearly having fun running her personality cult, and I’d certainly take hers over the wave of fringe beliefs that have been washing up on our shores in recent years. I’m tempted to give her credit as the only politician who has stood up to zionist bullying and survived, but honestly that whole affair over the Green Party leadership is so byzantine that I might be misremembering it. And anyway the stakes were so small that they count for literally nothing.
Ouch.
From where I stand, I know of the leadership tussle and how it related to Zionism. I didn't know anything about May allegedly having a "cult of personality," but I do know she led the party for 13 years, stepped down, then came back over Annamie Paul shitting the party bed with Zionism. I did not know she was born here in Merikkka. She bounced around to three ridings, in Ontario, then Nova Scotia, before being elected in British Columbia. (In Westminster systems in general, including the U.S. House of Representatives, you don't have to actually live in the district or riding you represent.) That said, Adam may be right; looking at her page, she, like Jill Stein, believes WiFi causes cancer. She also supports homeopathy. And other things. And, the Green Party is more factionalized than U.S. Greens, or so it seems — hard as that seems to be possible.
There's also the question over whether the Greens had a cheating by withdrawal strategery of sorts this year.
I also wonder if May has other "secrets," like an investment problem like Stein has here.
Anyway, for my Edmonton Green friend on Facebook who was butt-hurt over this? Given the size of Canadian ridings and that Greens, Liberals and NDP all engage in strategic voting deals, yeah, why haven't they gotten past the two-riding mark?
Ignore the People's Party. Adam does snark on it, the Canadian Libertarians and both Communist parties.
The Canadian Senate? Almost as non-democratic as the British Lords. Like the U.S. Senate, not proportional to population. Arguably the German Bundesrat is even more undemocratic. Members are appointed on a Land by Land basis by the government of each Land, and must vote in a bloc. The apportionment by Länder is not as unequal population-wise as the U.S. Senate, but it's at least as much so as Canada. The French Senate, though not as much as the U.S., has a rural-departments bias, and, unlike Canada's, or Germany's Bundesrat, has thoroughgoing powers. It, too, though, is elected indirectly. That's why I love it when people elsewhere lecture Merikkka. Tis true
that we have that nutty electoral college. But, definitely at the time,
we weren't the only place.
Anyway, my final personal angle?
If I lived in Canada and were eligible to vote?
If I were in a riding that had a Green candidate, I'd probably one-third hold my nose and vote Green. If the Green candidate were totally non-viable, but the NDP had a viable candidate in that riding, I'd probably two-thirds hold my nose and vote NDP, maybe three-quarters.
If I were in a riding with no Green but an NDP? I'd do just as above.
No Green nor NDP? I'd spoil the ballot, like Adam. In a parliamentary system with an unelected upper house, that's all you can do. You can't undervote the particular race because your riding is the only vote there is. So, if NOTA is your desire, then you have to spoil your ballot to send a signal.
Now, all of this assumes I'm not in a riding where one or another of the two Canadian Commie parties are. If they're available in a district that has neither Green nor NDP, I'll pull that lever, rather than spoil the ballot.
==
As for the result? As noted above, Liberals have a lead in polls, but that doesn't mean a lot, per recent Canadian election history. In addition, Poliviere, per a US News piece, may be closing the gap again. I will make a couple of predictions, thought.
Whether Conservatives or Liberals win, it will be a minority government.
And, the NDP will fall to 20 (or fewer) seats.
