Trego's Mountain Ear

I’m still operating on the premise that, while Canadians are malevolently well informed about US politics, we’re benevolently ignorant of how politics work in Canada.  I’m pretty sure it was Trev Edwards – an architecture student from Edmonton back in my undergrad days – that shared that observation with me.  That’s close to sixty years ago – and it was just this past month that I quizzed a couple of Canadian friends to learn that they too have senators, but Canadian senators are appointed by the Provincial Premier, and not elected.

This map shows how the election went (it’s easier to understand if you remember that in Canada the conservatives are blue and the liberals are red)

Parliament this time will be a combination of Liberals and the more liberal NDP – in Canada, the magic number for a majority is 172 – and the Liberals have 168.  That means another coalition government, where they need to keep four of the seven NDP members of parliament on board to keep the government.  It’s kind of like the Republican majority in the House of Representatives.  There, they have 218 representatives out of 435 members.  Canada, like the US, will be ran by a fragile majority. 

This time, in Canada (like every time in the US) the losing candidate, Pierre Poilievre lost his seat in parliament.  Since he’s kind of a career politician, I think that may be a bit of a problem for him.  This situation isn’t the norm in Canada – while in the US, both Richard Nixon and Kamala Harris had to return, unemployed, to California.

In Canada, the run for parliament is reported in ridings, rather than districts.  Which is interesting, since wiki tells me that riding is no longer the correct term for district.  It comes from an old English term for a third, much like the term farthing (old English for a quarter).  Like Trev said, we’re benevolently uninformed about Canada.

So what happens next?  I can recall Quebec trying to leave a couple of times – but now, staying in Canada is definitely in Quebec’s economic best interest.  I don’t expect another ‘Quebec libre’ movement anytime soon:

Life in Alberta, on the other hand, may become a lot more interesting.