How can it be that the political winds are blowing right while the populace is shifting left?
There’s tremendous pressure on our political class in this country from a number of neo-conservative interest groups. “Think tanks” like the Fraser Institute, corporate lobby groups, the editors and columnists of the National Post, etc. These people tend to be very well-connected politically, and very good at using that to their full advantage.
The politics of this country frequently pits the public against its elites, who are infamous for leaping on and grabbing hold of whatever poltical and economic fashion is in vogue.
Education in Ontario, at least, is (if I am not mistaken) funded by provincial expenditures and paid out of provincial budgets.
But to answer your question, no, all public schools should be equally funded for the simple reason that a public system of education should provide the citizenry with equal services. Education’s a provincial matter, not a municipal one, and a province should, one would presume, apply the same standards of quality in all its schools. And if you want the same standards, you need to make the resources available (unlike, say, the “Leave No Child Behind” balderdash south of the border.) If you want to go to private school you can do whatever you want, but then I don’t expect to be asked to pay for it.
Note that I would naturally expect poorer provinces to draw a higher level of per capita federal spending in some areas, such as EI. As with your example of schools, the federal government should be ensuring actual federal services are as uniform as possible. That’s as it should be. Today’s equalization payments are a different matter; it’s essentially rewarding provinces for not developing their economies, and the evidence would suggest they keep the poor poor. There’s an obvious perverse incentive where you have a payment that will be reduced if a province develops a natural resource or grows a new industry.
Okay, so what, in principle, is the difference between Albertans paying a bit for education in Saskatchewan, and Torontonians paying for education in Sudbury? I mean, you can break down the obligations to provide services into provincial and federal categories, but those distinctions are arbitrary. Moreover, the biggest expense in every province is health care, which I presume you also think everyone should have equal access to, and delivery of which is mandated by federal law. How is this supposed to be possible in the absence of transfer payments unless those in poor provinces are taxed at a higher rate than those in richer provinces? Or do you think that because, due to the arbitrary historical factors that made education and health care provincial responsibilities, Albertans and Ontarians have a right to expect superior schools and hospitals than Manitobans and Nova Scotians?
Okay, so let me get this straight. Poor provinces should provide just as good education and health care as rich provinces, but without transfer payments. Which means, naturally, higher taxes in poor provinces than rich ones. But those higher taxes (which are already necessary even with transfer payments) will stifle economic growth. Do you honestly believe that the incentives for provincial governments to monkey with the equalization formulae (which I admit can be perverse) will have as deleterious effects on provincial economies as the higher taxation rates required to pay for services in the absence of tranfer payments?
Look, I’m all for trying to create structural incentives for provincial governments to develop their economies. But it should be pretty obvious to anyone that obstacles to developing the economy of Yorkton are a hell of a lot more difficult to overcome than the obstacles to developing the economy of Fort McMurray. I believe the laissez-faire solution to this problem is for some people in Yorkton to move to Fort McMurray, or some such - people should go to where the economic opportunities are (which, of course, they are doing). But this just exacebates the difficulties in providing services for the govt of Saskatchewan, who now have an even smaller tax base, but are now faced with an even higher infrastructure per capita to maintain.
I don’t know. I don’t know what the solution to revitalizing the economies of areas dependent on agriculture and fisheries is. I have a hard time believing that it’s either raising taxes or cutting services in those locations, though, and that’s what will happen if transfer payments are stopped.
Even if you wanted to expand the federal government’s responsibilities into education, equalization payments
A) Go beyond standard federal transfers, and
B) Don’t actually necessarily get spent on health care and education, ya know.
Remember, provinces can spend equalization payments on anything they like. The problem with your comparison between equalization payments and education spending on schools is that in the latter case, the province is responsible for ensuring roughly equal delivery of a service more or less directly to the citizen. In the case of equalization payments, it’s not money actually being delivered to Nova Scotians or Manitobans in the form of services.
I’m reading this as closely as I can, honest, and just not quite getting it.
What I THINK you’re asking, though, is whether I think the end of equalization payments would be better even though the short term effects would be very bad for the budgets of Nova Scotia or New Brunswick. The answer, I think, is quite obvious; it would be a tremendous shock to the economies of those provinces to just lose a few billion dollars every year. Fact is, though, that continuing the process as it currently works will just worsen the problem. I never suggested just shutting off the pipelines. However, the current system - Here’s a check, do whatever you want with it - is plainly crazy.
Well, in practice that’s what we have been doing to handle this issue 98% of the time, isn’t it? You will note that more people live in Toronto than in Cochrane, more people live in Vancouver than in Kimberley, and more people live in Montreal than in Poste-de-la-Baleine.
Sure, it’s obvious that it’s harder to develop the economy of, say, Yorkton than it is, say, Brampton. Which is why it’s kind of dumb for the government to be pouring no-questions-asked money into provincial coffers that might theoretically be used to help out Yorkton but then again maybe not. It’s quite similar to the government spending billions to bail out badly managed businesses with tax dollars taken from well managed ones… oh, wait, I’m describing Air Canada again.
Actually, I did take “end provincial equalization payments” to mean “just shutting off the pipeline”. My apologies for reading more into it than you intended.
But anyways, you seem to have missed my central point.
Let us suppose it takes $x/capita to provide health care and education at the desired level. For simplicity’s sake we’ll assume the cost is the same everywhere. Now if the average salary in province 1 is $6x, and the average salary in province 2 is $10x, then if no federal monies are involved, the taxation rate required to providing these services will be 10% in province 2, and 17% in province 1. Other things being equal, this will result in economic activity moving from province 1 into province 2, yes? So what I’m saying is that province 1, in the absence of transfer payments, will have to either make do with worse health care and education, or its economy will suffer due to high relative taxation rates. What I’m saying is that the higher taxes are going to be much worse for province 1’s economy than the perverse government incentives that result from transfer payments.
As for the “transfer payments aren’t necessarily spent on health care or education” point, I think this is largely irrelevant. Something like 7-8 out of every 10 dollars the Saskatchewan govt spends is on health care and education, and most of the rest is on highways. I presume other provinces are similar in this regard. We may therefore conclude that the vast majority of transfer payments go to health care and education.
Finally, I’m not sure you are fully grasping the consequences of encouraging people in Saskatchewan to move to Alberta. You see, it’s all well and good for individuals to go to where the opportunities are, and I’m not saying they shouldn’t. But when they do, they leave Saskatchewan with a smaller tax base, a less dense population, and even greater problems delivering health care to far-flung tiny communities. While the overall situation, looking at both provinces, might have improved, the issue of delivering services in Saskatchewan has become worse, unless every last one of us packs up and leaves. If they’re just moving from Estevan to Regina, then yes, this helps the situation to a degree. Tax revenues go up, and service delivery is more centralized. But if they’re moving from Swift Current to Calgary, then the Alberta govt’s situation becomes easier while the Saskatchewan govt’s situation becomes more difficult. Concentrating the national population in the biggest, most prosperous centres might be beneficial to the nation as a whole, but it will make the difficulties faced by “have-not” provinces even more difficult. Unless you want to completely write off those areas, I’m not sure how you’re helping the situation by encouraging the economic migration without any compensatory tax revenue sharing.
Could you explain to me how cutting back and then eliminating transfer payments is going to spur economic growth in provinces currently receiving them, please? Because I have no clue by what mechanism you are expecting it to occur.
Now, I should say that I have no problem per se with adding conditions and oversight to transfer payments, but it sounds like a lot of useless added bureaucracy to me. It seems to me it would make more sense for the federal govt to shuffle tax monies around so that provincial governments have roughly the same revenues per capita to work with, and then leave it up to the provincial voters to provide oversight. But that sounds a lot like what is already in place, aside from the fact that they aren’t actually that generous.
I meant to point this out in post #87, but got called away before I could do so. Thanks for dealing with it.
While our hands aren’t clean on this issue, it is significant in our political history that slavery was abolished through legislation, not a civil war. That means that this issue has largely dropped out of popular images of Canadian history and so doesn’t have the same resonance as in the U.S. As for why we took this route, I think it was probably that the economic factors that made slavery last for so long in the southern states were absent in the Canadian colonies. In this regard, the Canadian situation was similar to that of the northern states: moral argument had more traction because of the lack of countervailing economic positions.
My personal impression is that Horowitz’ approach is more successful in explaining Canadian political history, and that with respect to U.S. history it’s more of an interesting insight about the starting point of U.S. political culture, but by no means determinative of the issue. As your post indicates, the issue of socialism in the U.S. is much more complex than can be explained by the “Tory touch” theory alone.
This is one of the key differences between the two countries. The Depression triggered similar radicalism in the prairie provinces and the midwest states like Kansas, but the difference seems to be that in Canada, that radicalism led to the election of a socialist government in Saskatchewan that was strong enough to implement its policies. I don’t think that ever happened in the U.S. With Saskatchewan as a firm base, the CCF/NDP was able to expand into other provinces, and elect members to the House of Commons. At various times, they’ve formed the government in three other provinces: B.C., Manitoba and Ontario. They’ve also had some influence at the federal level, by forcing the Liberal party to the left on some issues, both to counter the CCF/NDP on the hustings, and in those periods when the Liberals formed minority government.
Which still leads back to the question of why it happened in the Canadian provinces but not the American states? I’m not that familiar with the state governments, but it seems to me that the checks and balances approach in state constitutions would have a lot to do with it, compared to the parliamentary system in the provinces. Wouldn’t bicameralism and separation between the executive and the legislatures in the states means that it is difficult to get major political changes from the status quo, just as at the federal level? By contrast, in a unicameral parliament, a government with a majority has a lot more power and can actually implement its programs.
True enough, but there still remain some significant differences.
First, the examples you give of major federal involvement came comparatively late in the history of the U.S., not during the formative stages of the country and its politicial culture. The statist approach of the Upper Canada conservatives came at a much earlier stage, pre-dating Confederation. I would suggest that the American political culture has never been as accepting of government involvement in the economy as in Canada, such examples as these notwithstanding.
Second, it’s true that the U.S. government does intervene in the economy - deficit spending, no matter how it’s spent, is always interventionist, since it redirects money to further a political objective. However, my impression has been that the federal interventions in the U.S. have been different in kind than in Canada - there’s been no equivalent of Crown corporations that provide significant services directly to the public, in competition to the private sectors, like Air Canada, CN, and Petro-Canada. (Amtrak is a counter-example to some extent, but I’m under the impression that like Via, it exists because the private sector is no longer interested in passenger rail travel?)
Third, can you provide any info on the proportion of government spending in the U.S. on these sorts of projects as a percentage of GDP? My impression is that when looked at as a proportion of GDP, the involvement of Canadian governments in the economy is larger than that of the U.S. governments, but I freely admit I don’t have anything to back it up with. (On this point, there is the important caveat that I wouldn’t include military spending in the analysis, but I don’t think that’s significant to the argument since the military is a traditional area of government spending in any event.)
Last, involvement in the economy hasn’t got the same popular acceptance in the U.S. the way it has in Canada. I’m thinking of Berton’s “The National Dream” and Lightfoot’s “Railway Trilogy” as examples of popular culture accepting, and to some extent, lauding government involvement.
In the United States, the distinctions between federal and state functions are constitutional. Article I of the Constitution lists the powers delegated to Congress, and all powers not mentioned, such as the general police power, are, in theory, reserved to the states. In theory. Is this how it is in Canada?
In a polysci course I once learned – rightly or wrongly – that when Canada’s constitution was drafted, some time in the late 19th Century, the drafters wanted a centralized national government, not a decentralized one on the American model; so they consciously did the reverse of what our Founding Fathers had done: They delegated certain enumerated powers to the provinces, reserving all others to the federal government. The professor added that since then, both systems have developed in directions opposite to those intended by their framers: Government in the United States has become more centralized and standardized (mainly through liberal interpretations of Congress’ power to regulate “interstate commerce” – practically any good or service that crosses a state line now can be used to invoke federal power, even if it constitutes a trivial part of a business enterprise centered in one state). In Canada, on the other hand, the federal government has progressively lost more and more power to the provinces. Is this substantially true? (This info is from a college course I took in 1983 or '84, so the picture it paints might be out of date by now.)
No, I think I did understand this, and I’d even be willing to say that at least in the short term, provinces would suffer more from ending the payments than they do from getting them. My point is not that there isn’t a potential loss here; it’s that equailization payments (not quite the same as transfer payments) guarantee that the inefficiencies and perverse incentives will continue, in theory, forever. Fixing the process and no longer rewarding inefficiency could, in the long term, solve them.
Look, New Brunswick is poorer than Alberta. It’s simply true; nothing is going to change that by the end of 2004. I would simply like to see a system whereby it might get better by, say, 2024.
If I can be very cold and calculating for a moment, the only thing that matters to me is how the preponderance of Canadians are doing. Whether they live in Saskatchewan or Alberta isn’t really of any consequence; the provincial border’s just a line.
And to continue being cold and calculating, the idea here isn’t to just screw Saskatchewan; it’s to not give Saskatchewan the perverse incentive to not develop its economy. One would hope the long term result of a better transfer system would be Saskatchewan improving its economy. I mean, I’m not trying to deny that Alberta pretty much hit the lottery with its oil reserves; I won’t pretend to believe the problem is that Albertans are hard working capitalists and Saskatchewanians are lazy bums. That’s not the case. But a system that rewards inertia sure won’t help in the long run, will it?
Regrettably, I don’t see an easy solution, either - all the ideas I keep coming up with involve changing the Constitution, which in this country is sort of like suggesting “well, we could fix everything if only you could colonize Mars and turn dog turds into gold bullion.” Attempting to change the realities of geography is not something that lends itself to easy solutions.
Northern Piper: I spend an hour trying to find budget numbers that would describe government interventionism in the USA and Canada in percentage terms, and finally gave up. I find it amazingly difficult to find what I would consider the most elementary government spending figures.
It seems to me it would make more sense for the federal govt to shuffle tax monies around so that provincial governments have roughly the same revenues per capita to work with, and then leave it up to the provincial voters to provide oversight. But that sounds a lot like what is already in place, aside from the fact that they aren’t actually that generous.
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Thanks for trying! I wouldn’t even have any idea where to start.
Sounds to me like your prof was of the centrist school of analysis. There are some flaws in his/her summary.
There’s no doubt that some of the Fathers of Confederation, notably Sir John, were strong centralists. Sir John didn’t want a federation at all - his first pick was a “legislative union” or unitary state, as in the U.K. - a single Parliament with supreme legislative power, and subordinate municipalites and counties, without constitutionally entrenched powers.
Howver, Sir John’s views did not carry the day at the Confederation conferences. The francophone delegates from Quebec, and many of the delegates from the Maritimes, were wary of a centralised government. The francophones feared linguistic and cultural assimilation, and the Maritimers feared they would be swamped by the much larger population of Central Canada. They pushed for decentralization and entrenched powers for the provinces, in opposition to Sir John. The result, not surprisingly, was compromise - a federal constitution, in which both sides of the debate at the conferences sought to insert language that would support their positions.
A lot of the political science and history in the early to mid-20th century in anglo Canada was done by academics trained and teaching either in Ontario (i.e. - the province that is the most comfortable with a strong central government because they control the single-largest block of seats in the Commons), or the anglo community of Montreal (who tend to see a strong central government as their protector). Their writings were influential, but in my opinion misleading as a barometer of overall opinion. They tended to assume the mantle of Canadian nationalism and to disparage decisions of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council which recognized provincial powers - yet they ignored that those self-same decisions were very popular in Quebec and to a lesser extent in other parts of the country. In other words, this is an area where you have to be familiar with the academic writings in both languages to gain an overall assessment of the situtation - which is that there was no unanimity on this issue, contrary to the magisterial pronouncements of the anglophone central Canadians.
With respect to the division of powers, no, your prof didn’t get it right. There are two lists of powers: one for the federal Parliament (Constitution Act, 1867, s. 91), and one for the provincial Legislatures (s. 92). The opening words of the federal list, s. 91, contain a general reservation clause of matters to the federal Parliament, called the “peace, order and good government” clause, but it is not like the 10th Amendment which reserves all non-enumerated matters to the people or the states. The “pogg” clause assigns unenumerated matters to the Parliament, if by its nature a particular unenumerated matter is a matter of national concern. If it does not meet that test, then the particular matter can be picked up by the closing words of s. 92(16), which gives the provinces jurisdiction over “matters of a purely local and private nature”.
So for example, health care is not enumerated in either list. However, it does not meet the test of national concern the courts have enunciated for pogg, and instead is largely a provincial jurisdiction under s. 92(16).
Similarly, although Parliament has jurisdiction over “the regulation of trade and commerce” (s. 91(2)), that is balanced by the provinces having jurisdiction over “property and civil rights” (s. 92(13)). The federal power has been recognised as being largely concerned with inter-provincial and international trade, while the provincial jurisdiction relates to trade within the province. The federal government has been largely unsuccessful in its attempts to persuade the courts to give a broad meaning to “trade and commerce”, because that would undercut the equivalent grant of power to the provinces. The key point is that the courts’ position on this point is heavily tied to the actual wording of ss. 91 and 92, which divided jurisdiction on this point. The fact that the drafters chose to use a list of two powers has in practice given the provinces a more secure text-based argument to defend their jurisdiction than has been the case with the states under the U.S. Constitution, at least in my opinion.
Thanks for an enlightening thread, everyone. I think I understand your situation better now thanks to the efforts of several of you Canadians. I do wish more of you had explained *why * you intend to vote the way you do, rather than treat this as a simple poll, though.
I’m also struck by the number of answers that indicate you plan to vote for a specific candidate, not the agenda his party represents. Tell me, does that reflect a general satisfaction with your government as it is, or dismissal of some party platforms as simple rhetoric that won’t get enacted?
This thread has, perhaps inevitably, gone into compare-and-contrast-vs.-the-US mode, and there may be some misconceptions involved. Northern Piper, I’m not picking on you, but I’ll quote a post of yours since it contains all the points I’d like to respond to. Nothing personal, okay?
True as far as it goes, but that isn’t far enough. I would argue that the US and Canadian governments (when it was created) in fact had similar deep involvement in their economies at the same time. The Civil War required and created a massive mobilization of industry, obviously mostly in the North but in the South as well, to support the war effort. Industries, railroads, telegraph systems, a long list were all created by government, either directly or by providing a large and guaranteed market.
The list of massive civil projects, enabled only by massive government involvement, that **RickJay ** started should not have started with the Depression. If you discount the Civil War itself, then start with the transcontinental railroad, which was already well under way before its end. That was directly a government-created and government-created effort on a massive scale, made possible by large-scale land grants and guaranteed purchase of the bonds of the “private” companies that built it. It could not and would not have happened on its own. The Panama Canal is a later example, as well - private enterprise failed, but government control succeeded.
What came before the mid-1860’s in the US was superseded in fact if not in rhetoric, so I just don’t see much difference that there was no Confederation at all then.
Different in surface appearance, yes, but perhaps not fundamentally. Major industries in the US, while private on their faces, do generally depend heavily on government involvement at the wholesale level, through such devices as oil and timber rights on federal land, building roads and dams that allow them to operate, being a customer for military hardware, and so forth.
Generally, yes. The private railroads were generally trying to kill it off as unprofitable once the Jet Age took over. It is a necessary part of the transportation system regionally, but it is under constant attack from conservatives who oppose subsidizing it, although they are willing to subsidize roads and airports.
Unless you have a good way to include indirect spending as well, I think you’re doomed there. Good luck, though.
I don’t think you can do that. We’ve had several interesting threads lately about Canada no longer accepting that, and how its proportion of GDP is far different than down here.
I don’t know what examples of US popular culture you’re comparing that too.
I do certainly think that the “rugged individualist” or “magic of private enterprise” mythos is much stronger in the US than from what I’ve seen up there, but I’d like to make sure you understand that it’s largely rhetorical. That is, as you’ve suggested, perhaps traceable to the US “creation myths” grounded in revolt against an oppressive, remote government. Our founding documents address personal rights against the government almost exclusively, with little about the responsibilities that citizenship in a democracy also entails. Our deepest popular images are about the pioneers settling the empty lands by their own efforts, fighting off the savage Indians.
Canada’s “creation myths”, as I understand them, are grounded in uniting in a single community in defense against an *external * power, with emphasis on all of its citizens having responsibilities to each other. Your pioneer-settlement story is about the voyageurs and Mounties going first, making peace and establishing trade with the Indians and creating a government structure, so the lands could be settled in an extension of that spirit of community.
Those creation myths must affect your attitudes as much as ours affect ours. But a lot has happened since the pioneer days to change them all across the continent, hasn’t it?
Just an addendum: I’ve often heard Canadians say that your country and history and economic reality would be better compared to Australia’s than to the US’s, based on size and population. Dunno if you feel the same way, but it’s intriguing.
Anyone still reading this crap has my gratitude and my pity.
I take no issue with this attitude. Indeed, I agree with it. My point, however, was not that it would be a bad thing if most Saskatchewanians moved to Calgary (heck, that has already happened), but that Saskatchewan, the region, is not going away. It will still be there, with ever lower population density, which will make it harder and harder for the provincial government to deliver services because the tax base will shrink faster than the cost of service delivery since, other things being equal, lower population density = higher cost of service delivery per capita. Now, if we merged the prairie provinces into one, this problem would go away (assuming only intra-prairie migration). Or we could transfer tax dollars at the federal level to compensate.
This is where you’re losing me. It’s not the government which develops the economy. It’s business. The government can encourage business via tax breaks, or it can invest directly in business, but that’s it. I presume you think that direct govt investment is the wrong way to go, and I quite agree. That leaves tax breaks, but it’s hard to give businesses tax breaks when you already don’t have enough tax revenues to deliver the services provided by the province nextdoor at a much lower tax rate. Why would a business choose to start up in Saskatoon, even if the tax rates are lowered to be equivalent to Calgary’s, when they’re not going to get the same level of govt services for their tax dollars? (Actually, I can think of one answer - lower cost of living translates to potentially lower wages, but that’s not anything the govt really has a hand in determining.)
This is why I don’t understand why you think eliminating equalization payments will help the situation. What, exactly, do you think that provincial govts are going to be pushed into doing by removing the perverse incentives created by the payments? Provincial governments already have all manner of economic development programs. Typically of govt programs, these frequently aren’t very effective. But that isn’t going to change.
I’ll take this up.
I gravitated to the NDP originally because their values matched my values. They were the first party to seriously discuss environmental issues and gay rights which are the two big ones for me. They’re also pro-choice, pro-social-programs, pro-Medicare (that’s our “socialized” medicine for the Americans on the board), pro-civil-liberties and anti-war.
Another thing about them – and I think this is a major difference between American and Canadian politics – is that they’re a passionately nationalist left-wing party. I sometimes get the impression that nationalism is the exclusive province of the right down there.
I did move to the Greens provincially for awhile, when I was living in BC, because the NDP of BC are more centrist than leftist, and more likely to side with the loggers’ unions than the conservationist groups.
In short, I support them because their beliefs match mine more closely than those of any other party.
Thanks, Hamish. That does underline what seems to me to be the biggest difference in our structures: You align your parties on the issues, creating or destroying them as appropriate with the times. Apparently it’s more common to change one’s affiliation there, too. We have to make our existing parties take issues seriously instead, and we’d have to change our fundamental attitudes to change our affiliation. We do, however, have a large unaffiliated or affiliated-in-name-only contingent that decides any election they decide to turn out for in numbers.
“Another thing about them – and I think this is a major difference between American and Canadian politics – is that they’re a passionately nationalist left-wing party. I sometimes get the impression that nationalism is the exclusive province of the right down there.”
It can look that way, because the righties are much more inclined to wrap themselves in the flag and demean others for not doing so. But the rest of us do not “hate America”, we just love her in a fuller, deeper, more responsible way than the jingoes do.
If your description of the NDP as “nationalist” means “believing strongly in maintaining a separate national identity against the pressures of being assimilated by the neighboring giant”, well, that’s certainly a difference, because no such issue can exist for us.
There are hardcore supporters of a party, of course. I know people who’ve never voted anything but Liberal.
But recent circumstances have strained old loyalties. The core of the current Liberal party holds very different views than the Liberal Party of the 1970s. The leader of the Conservative Party was, until recently, the archrival of the Progressive Conservative Party.
I think the problem is that you are a two-party system, and two-party systems become de facto one-party systems rather quickly.
Here in Quebec, our provincial elections have been usually a two-horse race between the seperatist Parti Québécois and the federalist Liberal Party. For years, their platforms were nearly identical. Because seperatism was the only issue, they kept getting elected year after year, because everyone was afraid of going for a third party and splitting the vote.
For various reasons (regional differences, the language issue, etc) we have a five-party system federally. This means that parties have to stake out definite positions to distinguish themselves from the others. They can’t really run on a single issue.
That’s exactly what I meant. And I understand what you mean.
I don’t know your history that well, so I’m curious: was national sovreignty an issue when you were less powerful?
We’re straying a bit afield here, but I don’t know where you get that from. The parties have no recognition under the Constitution and precious little under ordinary law, either - I think that almost forces us to have a two-party system, and in fact we almost always have had one, the Civil War and its runup excepted. Your observation about how in Quebec “everyone was afraid of going for a third party and splitting the vote” is an example of how such pressures work, on any issue.
Sure. That’s what the War of 1812 was all about: getting the world’s leading power, Britain, to finally accept that the American states really were independent and were not going to rejoin the empire.
I haven’t been following the election.
Since the last vote on quebec independence, I’ve sort of tuned out.
It sure would have been cool to have a little paris on this continent, tho.
Plus, we would’a got alberta and saska whatsit.