Here’s a thread for the Canadian election
Today’s the day. The prediction is that the liberal will win – and that Trump bears some of the blame:
The Conservative Party had a big lead in polls…until President Donald Trump started his tariff talks and annexing Canada.
“In an Angus Reid Institute poll released on Dec. 30, the Conservatives were in super-majority territory with 45% support, compared to the Liberals at 11%. The results of a poll released on Saturday had the Liberals at 44% with a four-point lead over the Conservatives at 40%.”
Of course, are the polls correct? I certainly don’t know. But it does seem like an oddly fickle response to make Trump’s bluster the deciding factor, and it’s not as though the Conservative candidate is saying he wants Canada to become part of the US. It also seems to me like the country that elected Trudeau over and over and over isn’t suddenly becoming overwhelmingly conservative
I live in Mesa, and Canuckistanian snowbirds are many of my neighbors. Absolutely many of them would vote Liberal in the belief they are sticking it to Trump. Never mind that Carney was Justin Castreau’s chief advisor, under whom Canada dropped from par with the US to the bottom of the G-nation rankings.
Their richest province is now poorer than Mississippi.
Of course legacy media is running with “it’s Trump’s fault”. Quite aside from that, elections in Canada are not much like elections in the US.
For one, Canada is completely run by its rackets and elites, including legacy media.
For two, the people do not get to choose the Prime Minister, who doesn’t even have to be in Parliament, and does not have a fixed term.
For three, the “constitution” of Canada was not designed with a Prime Minister in mind. In the assemblage of laws and documents set down at various times that in Canada are considered to be the “constitution”, the office of the Prime Minister is hardly mentioned, much less defined.
The upshot is that citizens in Canada don’t get much say in what their government does, and they are much farther down the road that the US has been on where the government ends up selecting itself and serving its own ends.
However, they do have paper ballots and get them all counted in a very short time, so they are one up on us there. But that’s probably to be expected when elections are of such little consequence, they may as well be clean as not.
Donald J. Trump, what can’t he do?
In case it’s of interest…
The theory underpinning the Westminster governments (like the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) is that all power derives from King-In-Parliament, and that power is unlimited and absolute, bound only by physical and logical impossibility. The “constitution” of a Westminster government is the day-to-day understanding of how the components of King-In-Parliament work together to get things done. There is no one document that spells out how a Westminster government works and there’s nothing corresponding to the American constitutional amendment process; when there’s enough of a consensus the constitution just changes, and it doesn’t matter that it isn’t written down anywhere what a “Prime Minister” is or how you get one.
The US Constitution was established by the people of the United States, working through their states. That’s why the whole mechanism of Federal government is explicitly spelled out (as thoroughly as they thought they needed to, anyway). Unlike the King-In-Parliament, the people and the states are not part of the Federal government; they have created this machine and delegated it to act in their interests in circumscribed (at the time anyway) situations.
But in the Westminster governments the King and Parliament are both actually in the government doing day-to-day stuff as well as floating in the ether with absolute and unlimited power, so they can pull new governing powers out of that ether whenever they wish. The Federal government cannot in theory do this, there is a bright line between the components of the Federal government and the people-through-the-states that established it.
No one knows how extensive the powers of the people-through-their-states are, if they’re absolute and unlimited like King-In-Parliament, but whatever those powers are, Amendment X confirms that they still have any they didn’t delegate away. And one of those powers is to create and adopt new constitutions, because that has been done now twice.
And that’s why there’s an amendment process that sidesteps Congress, because the people-through-their-states can not only create and adopt a new constitution but change the one we have now.
What’s far more important than any of the theory of course, is that if the broad mass of the population tolerates the behavior of the government, it behaves that way regardless of what pieces of paper say.