As far as elections go, the Canadian
federal election this year seems very distant—we’ve still got a good nine
months to go before the current scheduled election day on October 19. (Which is
odd, considering that every two years when we have national elections, the hot
question always seems to be about what that election means for the elections
two and four and twenty years into the future.) And no one’s paying attention
in the US, and definitely not as much as they were paying attention to the 2014
midterms. While understandable, it’s one that Americans should be paying
attention to, more so than the British ones. We’ve kind of got this special
relationship with Canada. Yeah, Britain, we know we’ve got one with you too,
but let’s be real here—long-distance relationships can sometimes seem a little,
I dunno, let’s say distant, and besides, Canada makes much better food.
The current situation
While current PM Stephen Harper’s
Conservatives have been in power since the 2006 elections, it was only in the
most recent elections in 2011 that they have actually constituted a majority of
the House of Commons—unlike in Britain, where Conservatives weren’t able to
form a majority on their own to elect their leader as Prime Minister, Canada
has no such rule. Therefore, despite his caucus comprising only 40% of the
House after the 2006 elections, Harper has remained Prime Minister in the 9
years since.
It could very well change, however. The
2011 elections were unprecedented in the history of the Liberal Party, not
because of the size of the Conservative victory (the Tories won less than 40%
of the vote and only an 11-seat majority) but because of the size of the
Liberal defeat.* In years past the Liberal Party of Canada had been referred to
as Canada’s “natural governing party” because of its near domination of
Canadian politics throughout the 20th century, during which it held
power for almost 69 years. It’s the same party responsible for the single-payer
healthcare system we in America love so much (*cough*) and (thanks to the
party’s historic reliance on the majority-French Quebec as a bedrock of its
electoral support) Canada’s official English-French bilingualism.
Its 2011 defeat, however, was a
shellacking worse than either major U.S. political party has suffered since
1936. The former “natural governing party” was reduced to a mere 34 seats out
of the 308 in the House. This was not all to the gain of the Conservatives, who
didn’t win anything resembling a landslide. Instead, it was largely at the gain
of the New Democratic Party, which, like Britain’s Lib Dems, had historically
been the third-place finisher in every election. That changed in 2011, when the
New Democrats won over a hundred seats and became the Official Opposition (that
is, second place) for the first time in its history.
