https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/21/world/canadian-general-election-justin-trudeau/index.html
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/10/trudeau-canada-election-liberals-new-democrats.html
For being as close as it is, Canada remains a mystery to most Americans. They might dismiss it as "America, but nicer", however they may be surprised to find that it's actually a fully functioning democratic state where elections were just held on Sunday October 20th. So what makes this election important?
Canadian elections differ from US elections, because they have a parliamentary system, where voters select politicians for seats in parliament, who then vote on the prime minister. While this process differs from the American system, the campaign process ends up similar, with each party's candidates campaigning themselves.
The liberal party's incumbent prime minister Justin Trudeau was again selected as prime minister of Canada, however with only a minority of seats in parliament supporting the Liberal party. Out of the 338 seats in the House of Commons, the Liberals only secured 157, under the 170 needed for a majority, and the 184 secured by the party four years ago.
This now changes the Canadian political field, as the Liberal government will have to lobby other parties to gain a majority for each decision it wants to make. This will likely push Canadian politics to the right as the Liberals will have to compromise with the Conservatives (125 seats in parliament) to get anything done.
How do the Canadian and American systems compare and contrast? What will these changes mean for global politics?
4 comments:
Trudeau was a bit of a single-issue candidate, focusing a lot of his efforts during the 2015 election on appealing to the pro-marijuana camp, and a lot of Canadian skeptics (or at least the conservatives that I've talked to) will say that the only reason his party won the 2015 election was because Trudeau was able to successfully bank off popular support for this issue. Now that marijuana is fully legal in Canada, Trudeau's single-issue agenda has given way to a more conventional social liberal policy line. Trudeau and his party, the liberals, tend to be center-left on economic and social issues, favoring higher taxes to fund social welfare programs and solid support for social justice initiatives, which include greater protections for Canada's indigenous peoples and protecting Canada's extremely ambiguous abortion policy (abortion is for all intents and purposes fully legal in Canada, but there's pretty much no legislation on the issue). This moderate policy line, combined with the wearing-off of Trudeau's marijuana campaigning, has made the liberals sort of "stale" in the Canadian public consciousness: more conservative elements are frustrated over his relatively expensive social welfare policies and high tax rates and social democratic (think a bit left of the liberals, Jagmeet Singh's New Democratic Party) groups are irritated over the slow speed and relative inefficiency of the moderate liberals' social welfare and social justice policies. For the foreseeable future, we can see a lot of low-level frustration within Canada on the left and right with the moderate liberals' policy line within Canada (basically the same as popular discontent with the government/ruling party in every democracy) and not much change in Canada's impact abroad.
I think what’s most interesting about the Canadian election process is that the prime minister is chosen from parliament rather than public votes (although to be honest, the American system isn’t completely based off of public votes either with the electoral college superseding the popular vote). As to whether this system is better, I think it is a toss up dependent on the corruption level of parliamentary members (although I assume this is most likely not a problem). Obviously parliamentary members are more educated on governmental issues, and so are probably more qualified to choose a minister who can execute these policies; however, private interest and lobbying probably affects the validity of this method. As you stated in your summary, the lack of majority by the Liberal party will mean more compromising within parliament. Whether this will have ramifications on Canada’s current socioeconomic system is yet to be seen.
I agree with Carlos. I think that voting for parliament members does increase the chance that the prime minister is being elected by educated and politically informed persons. In American politics, you would hope that members of the House and Senate are also educated and politically informed, but I have less confidence in them than I do in Canadians (they're just great, honestly). I don't know a TON about the corruption of Canadian politics, but I think that would be something interesting to look at. As for how this affects global politics, I don't think it will do much. I know that Canadians are very interested in American politics, especially during the 2016 election, but that's about it.
What I find interesting about the Canada Parliament is the mix of multiple parties (I think there's five or six of them) that all have seats, as opposed to the two-party system with a handful of independents that we have in the US. The problem with the binary system is that it makes it difficult to move forward when things are pulled in two directions. However, I don't know how effective a party can be in advancing its agenda if it only has, say, a tenth of the seats in parliament. The logic is, if two parties have large minorities, those parties would have to appeal to those smaller ones in order to gain a majority. And while I understand that, and that it creates broad compromise which is generally considered a good thing, I'm concerned that if you have one party, and then an alliance between multiple parties, it feels like that would eventually devolve into two parties. The way to prevent that would be to shuffle those coalitions on an issue by issue basis, and that feels like it would undermine the point of party philosophy. It seems to be working in Canada, though, but I feel like binarism may be an inevitable outcome in any party system, given enough time. There's usually two kinds of people, people who want to change the status quo, and people who don't.
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