Canadians will vote for a new federal parliament this coming Monday, April 28.
Given that their President wants to annex Canada, a lot of Americans might be paying closer attention than usual to this Canadian news.
Unless the World Series or NBA final are happening here, the U.S. media and the U.S. general public usually ignore events in Canada. The election on April 28 might be an exception to that rule.
There’s a good chance American news media and their readers and viewers will be curious about what we’re up to, up here in the North, in the face of looming threats from the new expansionist and Fascist regime in Washington.
But folks in the U.S. who want to understand our politics, who are not full-time political junkies, might find the way we Canadians run our elections to be strange and unfamiliar.
Canadian elections, and the Canadian political system as a whole, do not much resemble the U.S. versions.
And so, to help out, here’s a short guide to Canada’s political system and its elections for Americans (and others who might be interested).
Both countries are federations
To start with, there is one major aspect of the Canadian system with which Americans will be very familiar: Canada, like the U.S., is a federal country.
The U.S. has states, 50 of them. We have provinces, 10 all told. As well, there are three Canadian federal territories in the far north, with a status similar to such U.S. territories as Puerto Rico.
As with U.S. states, Canadian provinces have a great deal of constitutionally-defined power. For instance, health and education in Canada fall mostly within the purview of the provinces. The same is true in the U.S.
Trump plans to get rid of the U.S. federal department of education, in part, he says, because the states are responsible for schools.
Well, in Canada there has never been a federal department of education. Educating the young is an area of responsibility the provinces, especially Quebec, jealously guard.
The Canadian feds do get involved in health care – mostly through the federal government’s spending power. Constitutionally, the federal government has the right to spend its money in areas of provincial jurisdiction.
In the 1960s, Canada’s federal government leveraged its financial clout to convince all of the provinces to set up universal, publicly-funded health insurance programs.
One western province, Saskatchewan, with a social democratic government led by the legendary Tommy Douglas had gotten the ball rolling with its own provincial health scheme. The Liberal federal government used Saskatchewan’s program as a template for the other provinces.
To get all the provinces on board the feds put money on the table, lots of it. For a number of decades, the federal and provincial governments shared the cost of public health insurance 50-50. The federal government still forks over big bucks for health care, but it is now less than 50 per cent of the total cost.
Today, the provinces’ health insurance plans are all a bit different from each other. But all adhere to certain basic, agreed-to basic principles. All plans, for instance, have to be universal and portable throughout the country.
But the Canadian federal government has much more to do than fund provincial programs.
In Canada, the federal government has responsibility for a number of big and important policy and program areas. Among those are: defence, trade, foreign affairs, the national currency, communications, and all transport that goes beyond provincial borders.
Unlike the U.S., where each state has its own criminal code and where some states practice the death penalty and some do not, in Canada, the criminal law is entirely a federal responsibility.
Provinces have a role in enforcing criminal laws, but they do not get to determine what is a crime or how criminals will be punished.
A case in point: When Canada abolished the death penalty in 1976 all that was required was a vote in the federal Parliament. The provinces had nothing to say about the decision.
Non-partisan federal and provincial election agencies
When it comes to elections – again unlike the U.S. – Canada keeps the electoral processes at the federal and provincial levels entirely separate and distinct.
On April 28 Canadians who did not vote in advance will have a simple old-school paper ballot to fill out.
They will cast a single vote for one person, to fill one office, their member of the House of Commons, roughly the Canadian equivalent to the U.S. House of Representatives.
(We call a member of the House an MP, or Member of Parliament).
In this country we don’t have elections for multiple provincial, local, and federal offices all on the same day.
Canadians never have to vote for president, senator, house member, state representative, sheriff, dog catcher, school board member, city councillor, insurance commissioner, and court jester on one ballot.
We keep things simple, electorally. And so far, we have never had a situation where the losers refuse to accept the outcome.
The two main orders of government in Canada – federal and provincial – run their own elections independently of each other.
(The provinces not only run elections for their legislatures, they are also in charge of local and school board elections. But the latter are held on different days from elections for provincial legislatures.)
A huge distinction with the way such matters are handled in the U.S. is that all Canadian elections are managed and run by strictly neutral and non-partisan agencies.
At the federal level, there is Elections Canada, headed by the Chief Electoral Officer. The federal parliament created the position of Chief Electoral Officer more than a century ago.
Each province has its own agency similar to Elections Canada, each headed by a provincial chief electoral officer.
In this country’s early years, from 1867 to 1920, partisan politicians could meddle (and more) in the running of elections – as is still the case in the U.S.
It took half a century to get there, but Canada got rid of most political interference in the electoral process long ago.
On election day Canadians vote the old-fashioned way. They mark an X next to the name of their favoured candidate. That’s it, that’s all. Most ballots are then counted by hand.
We never have to wait long for the final result. If the count in any ridings (electoral districts) are close there can be re-counts, but any kind of litigation over election results is extremely rare.
The Canadian Prime Minister is just another member of the House of Commons
One reason for this simplicity is the Westminster-style parliamentary system Canada uses, based on the British system.
Unlike in the U.S., in the Westminster system, the executive and the legislative branches of government are not separate.
We have no president. The Canadian head of state (largely a ceremonial role) is the (British) King, represented in Canada by a Canadian-government-appointed Governor-General (G-G). The current G-G is Mary Simon from a northern Quebec Inuit (Eskimo to Americans) community.
The chief executive of the Canadian (or British or Indian or Australian) government is the Prime Minister (PM).
And how does the Canadian system select the Prime Minister?
Almost always, the PM is the leader of the largest party in the House of Commons. That person is also, as a rule, a member of the House. Canadian PMs normally choose the rest of the executive, their cabinet ministers, from the ranks of their party’s elected House members.
And so, the executive and legislative branches of government in Canada (and in Britain, and other countries with similar systems, such as Germany and Australia) are intertwined, not separate and distinct as they are in the U.S.
Americans are often surprised to learn that Canadians do not get to vote directly for their Prime Minister.
In fact, the Prime Minister is simply another Member of Parliament, one of the 343 MPs in Canada’s House of Commons.
The current PM is Liberal leader Mark Carney. He is running to be the MP for a riding (equivalent to a district in the U.S.) in the west end of the city of Ottawa.
When Liberal Justin Trudeau was PM, he represented a riding in Montreal. His predecessor, Conservative Stephen Harper, was the MP for a riding in Calgary, Alberta.
There are six time zones in Canada. In the past that meant, on election day, polls in the Atlantic region closed hours before did those on the west coast.
In a simpler time, before the advent of the Internet, Elections Canada could enforce a rule that made it illegal to report election results in any region until the polls there closed.
That is no longer possible. So, Elections Canada came up with a clever solution. They decided to stagger the voting hours across the country so that polls throughout the vast country open and close as near to simultaneously as feasible.
That means on election night we will fairly quickly get results from all regions, from east to west.
Again, this modus operandi represents a big difference from the U.S., where each state gets to decide when its polls open and close, and where, indeed, the entire electoral process is run by (often partisan) state officials.
The over-arching result of the Canadian way of running an election will be that well before midnight on April 28 we should know who will form the next government – and whether it will be a minority or majority government.
And what in the world is that strange Canadian creature, a minority government?
You’ll have to read part two to find out.
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