Canadians Go To The Polls

[bjarvis]

This morning, the Prime Minister of Canada called a snap federal election. The voters will be casting their ballots on October 14.

Yes, that's right: the Canadian election campaign will take 37 days.

Those tired of the never-ending US psychodrama of the past 2+ years still have nearly 2 months of joy.

Whatever the miscellaneous faults of both the US and Canadian system of elections, I'm hugely in favour of shorter, cheaper campaigns. If nothing else, it limits the number of forests which have to be clear-cut to supply the yard signs.

We now return you to your own regularly scheduled never-ending psychodrama already in progress.

Comments

election season

[trawnapanda.livejournal.com]

I heard on the 9am CBC radio news that the writ of election had been dropped. the FIRST thing that went through my mind was precisely your point.

Last week, the main story on the Washington Post was (McCain had just accepted the GOP nomination) "well, we're into the home stretch of the election". Hmmm, I thought, it's going to take us just over seven weeks*. We started a week into your "home stretch", and we'll have a new gummint three weeks before you do in that republic to the south of me.

* the minimum campaign time is set in the Canada Elections Act, and we always vote on a Monday for federal elections, so Parliament is nearly always dissolved on a Sunday to meet the timelines.

All that said, I'm annoyed that the Governor-General gave him the election. This PM introduced an amendment to the Canada Elections Act in this past parliament, giving us fixed election dates, saying that election dates should not be at the behest of the PM for political advantage. Yeah, right. Except when it's ME apparently. He's now saying that the legislation doesn't apply when there's a minority government. NOTHING about that was said by him or anyone else during the debate on the fixed election date provisions.

He says that Parliament is dysfunctional - how would he know? it hasn't sat all summer. And it did pass three budgets for him and all the major items in his platform. The parliament should have survived until he lost a confidence motion, or until 19 October 2009.

all that's academic now. fasten your seatbelts, it's gonna be a bumpy seven weeks.