The 2015 Canadian federal election, explained:
http://www.vox.com/2015/8/6/9109669/201 ... l-electionThere's a big debate happening tonight, and it has nothing to do with Donald Trump or the Republican primary. While Americans wait for the 9 pm GOP showdown, Canadian political junkies (and US-based fans of Canadian politics) will be tuning in to the Maclean's National Leaders Debate, the first debate of the Canadian federal election of 2015. Pitting longtime incumbent Stephen Harper against two relatively unseasoned rivals, it's essentially the launch of a campaign season that could bring unprecedented change to Canadian politics.
Topping the polls right now is Thomas Mulcair and his New Democratic Party, a left-wing party that's never led Canada and whose victory could meaningfully alter the US political dialogue around trade and pipelines.
1) What is Canada?
Like so many of the world's other trouble spots, Canada is an artifact of British imperialism cobbled together without regard for geography, linguistics, or religion.
The product of a mid-19th-century merger between a couple of British colonies and some land conquered from France, Canada remains a land divided both regionally and linguistically. Slightly more than one-fifth of Canadians speak French as their mother tongue, and tend to align themselves politically with the more left-wing currents associated with France rather than the English-speaking world. And Anglophone Canadians are themselves divided between the poor provinces of Atlantic Canada, the industrial and metropolitan core in Ontario, and the resource-intensive economy of the west.
Canada also contains a significant population of First Nations people, who are not quite as politically disenfranchised as their American counterparts, as well as the vast and largely empty spaces of the Yukon and Northwest Territories.
But the current election, in many ways, marks the muting of ethnic and regional tensions that dominated Canadian politics from the mid-'80s to the early 21st century. Both Quebec separatism and western-specific grievance politics have vanished as forces in Canadian politics, giving way to a more straightforward left-right ideological conflict. The loser in the process seems to be Canada's Liberal Party, the party that has traditionally stood for Canadian national unity in the face of centrifugal pressures.
2) Who is running in this election?
There are three major parties contesting the election:
1) The Conservative Party of Canada has only existed in its current form since 2003, but has governed since 2006. Stephen Harper is the only CPC prime minister — indeed, the only CPC leader — in Canadian history, and he is running for yet another term. He's been in office for a long time, but his first couple of ministries were minority governments in which the Conservatives were the biggest party but couldn't pass bills without some support from one of the opposition parties. That necessity made it easier to bridge gaps between his party's more centrist and right wings, which hasn't been the case since they won a majority in 2011.
Harper is hurt by a Canadian economy that suffers from low global commodity prices, and by the inevitable staleness that comes from serving in office this long. He is helped by a badly divided opposition.
2) The New Democrat Party is the official opposition in the current Parliament and stands as an analog to the Labour Party in the UK or a social democratic party in continental Europe.
The New Democrats stand for left-wing politics and an alliance with labor unions. Traditionally, they've been a small third party — active in provincial politics in a handful of places but never in serious contention to lead the Canadian federal government. Their strategy for influencing policy has been to try to win some seats in Parliament and then hope that nobody has enough seats to hold an absolute majority. Under those circumstances, even a relatively small bloc of NDPers could push policy one way or the other.
This all changed in the 2011 election, which saw political support for the separatist Bloc Québécois vanish, suddenly leading to the election of a huge clutch of New Democrats from French-speaking districts ("ridings," as they are called in Canadian). That helped boost the NDP into an unprecedented second-place finish, which has laid the foundation for them to define themselves as the real alternative to Harper.
3) The Liberal Party of Canada has traditionally been the dominant party of Canadian politics and features a wishy-washy center-left ideological positioning similar to that of the moderate wing of the US Democratic Party.
But the Liberals have also traditionally been the party of Canadian bilingualism and binationalism. It's the party that Quebecois who don't favor independence vote for, and the party that in English Canada stands for the principle that Francophone Canadians deserve recognition as a distinct and co-equal society within Canada. The high salience of regional and linguistic politics in the 1990s greatly advantaged the Liberals by fracturing non-Liberals into multiple parties — Jeffrey Simpson, an influential Canadian journalist, labeled this era a "friendly dictatorship" — but the unification of two different center-right parties into the Conservative Party of Canada and the rise of the NDP have left it squeezed in the middle.
3) What time is the Canadian election?
The Canadian Federal Election will be held on October 19, 2015. The debate on August 6 will be the first debate of the campaign, and the 11-week span between the August 2 beginning of the campaign and the October 19 election is the longest in Canadian history.
4) Wait, 11 weeks is considered a long campaign?
Yes. In most democracies outside the United States of America, it is traditional to take long — years-long, in fact — breaks between election campaigns so that members of the legislature can focus on legislative work, government ministers can focus on governing, and opposition party leaders can work on their alternative program. Actual campaigns take place during bounded periods of time.
In Canada, the way it works is that while Parliament is sitting, there is no election. A campaign begins when the governor-general (the largely ceremonial head of state who serves as the queen's representative in Canada) dissolves Parliament at the request of the prime minister. Dissolution of Parliament could be invoked as a response to some political crisis, but in the case of the 2015 Canadian Federal Election it was done in advance of a scheduled election. The campaign is going to be long because Prime Minister Stephen Harper dissolved Parliament well in advance of the scheduled election, a perfectly legal but somewhat norm-violating move.
5) This is a lot of Canada talk, where's my music break?
My personal favorite Canadian song is "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead" by Stars, which deals with such Canadian themes as heartbreak, longing, and the struggle to pronounce the French word for "bridge."
Canada's music industry thrives in part due to protectionist regulations demanding that Canadian broadcast media dedicate a certain share of their time to "Canadian content" (what that means exactly is spelled out in complicated regulations), thus ensuring that Canadian artists always have a local toehold and aren't drowned out by Americans. This weird video mashing up a Drake song with videos of Canadian "heritage minutes" is arguably more archetypically Canadian than the Stars tune, since it involves both Drake and Inuit.
6) Why did Harper want such a long election?
Typically, a campaign would be short for one of two reasons. Either it is called in response to a crisis, so it has to be short, or else it's been called at what the prime minister thinks will be an advantageous moment, so he wants it to be short.
But in this case, Harper was going to have to run for reelection during a tough 2015 economic climate driven by global commodity prices, so there was no ideal timing. Meanwhile, a long campaign serves the interests of the Conservative Party because of the way the Canadian campaign finance system works.
Spending during an election season is restricted, but parties can spend more in longer campaigns than in short ones. Yet beyond legal restrictions, the parties are also limited by their ability to raise funds. The Conservatives have a much more robust fundraising capacity and thus a long campaign with a high spending cap gives them an advantage. The Liberals and the NDP will be hoarding their resources to run ads in the closing weeks of the campaign. The Conservatives will match them late, but also rule the airwaves singlehandedly early on.*
7) I'm not Canadian — should I care about this at all?
Well, I bothered to write this, so obviously I think you should.
Here are a few reasons why:
Even though nobody talks about it, the US-Canada economic relationship is extremely important, and Canada — not China or Mexico — is our largest trading partner.
An NDP win could throw a major wrench in the works for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, as Mulcair is promising to take a tougher line on provisions related to Canadian agriculture policy.
Last but by no means least, the NDP opposes the Keystone XL pipeline, meaning a Mulcair win could be the end of America's most tedious energy debate.
Who are the main candidates for prime minister?
The Conservatives are running the incumbent, Stephen Harper, who is also the only person to have ever been a Conservative Party of Canada candidate for prime minister. Throughout the 1990s, the Canadian right was divided between the more moderate Progressive Conservative Party and the more hard-right Reform (later Canadian Alliance) Party. Harper came up through the Reform ranks, but spearheaded a merger that involved moderating some of the party's stances.
The Liberals are running Justin Trudeau, whom you may feel like you dimly remember from the 1970s, but you are actually thinking of his father, Pierre Trudeau. Justin Trudeau is charismatic by the standards of Canadian politics, and has a strong family legacy to trade on, but he's considered a bit of a lightweight. He's young, and unlike many of his other colleagues in the Liberal Party he didn't serve in the last Liberal Cabinet that preceded Harper's first government. On the other hand, he is a very good-looking man.
The NDP's leader is Tom Mulcair, who has a beard befitting the leader of a historically marginalized left-wing party. His predecessor and the architect of the NDP's surge to become Canada's number-two party was Jack Layton, who had a mustache. Layton died in the summer of 2011 shortly after his electoral triumph, and it initially appeared that his departure from the scene would throw the party into chaos. Mulcair, however, has emerged as one of Canada's most popular politicians. Unlike the vast majority of his NDP parliamentary colleagues, Mulcair also has some practical experience in government, having served as environment minister of Quebec.
9) Who is going to win?
I sure do not know. Fortunately, Canada has its own version of Nate Silver, Éric Grenier, whose website is called ThreeHundredEight rather than FiveThirtyEight because there were 308 ridings at the time he founded it. According to Grenier's poll aggregation, if the election were held today, the NDP would secure 33 percent of the vote to 31 percent for the CPC to 26 percent for the Liberals.
But Canada uses a first-past-the-post system to elect members of Parliament (it's just like how we elect House members), so votes don't translate precisely into seats. Grenier says this would lead to a tie between the NDP and the CPC at 127 seats apiece, well short of the 170 needed for a majority. That could mean a minority government, or it could mean a coalition — most likely between the NDP and the Liberals.
Yet things could change a great deal between now and election day, especially because of tactical considerations. This is the first time in Canadian history that an NDP prime minister has looked like a plausible outcome, so current backers of the third-place Liberals may find themselves pushed to vote either for or against Mulcair. And, of course, we have yet to see the impact of tonight's debate or the soon-to-arrive barrage of Conservative ads.
* Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated why a long campaign plays to the Conservatives financial advantage.
