👟Canada’s New Shoes👟

Good morning and welcome back to my blog. It’s been a long 104 day hiatus but alas, I have returned. I have been asked to give an opinion, an explanation, and a representation in this post. The big picture here has everything to do with the Canadian government and our recent federal election. A quick backstory, 6 weeks ago Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called for the Governor General to dissolve parliament in order to hold a 2021 election. In 2019, Trudeau won his second term as leader of a minority government, meaning he lacks enough seats in the House of Commons to have a majority. His plan of action to gain the missing seats was this election. While he did come out the other side with a win, he had not obtained the majority and therefore left a large population of Canadians dissatisfied and angry at the waste of $610,000,000. Personally I believe that there is really only one option left for Trudeau.

The Canadian government is a parliamentary democracy, a constitutional monarchy, and a representative democracy. That seems like a complex system but I understand it much more than I will ever understand the USA’s electoral college. To jog your memory, or even just introduce the concept to you, I’ve linked a video explaining parliamentary democracy (in BC) below.

Now what I mean when I say we’re also a representative democracy is very simple. The 5/6 Canadian parties stretch across the country and have representatives in each of our ridings. There are 336 ridings across the country, each with a representative for each party (minus the Bloc Québécois which is typically Quebec driven.) It’s safe to assume that my liberal representative (re-elected on Monday) is very different from one in Manitoba or New Brunswick. The representatives are focused on working with the citizens in their riding, not the entire country, making it difficult to judge and dismiss parties as a whole during federal elections.

Source: nsnews.com

The part of our government that defines us as a constitutional monarchy comes from the fact that Canada is still apart of the British Commonwealth. This simply means that our head of state is none other than Queen Elizabeth II. While the monarchy doesn’t have any real power over our government (thanks to our constitution,) we do need a representative of the Queen to sign off on things such as federal laws.

WikiImages / Pixabay

Now that that’s all cleared up, back to my opinions on the way the election played out this past Monday. Personally I’m not happy with the result. I was hoping for some change in Canada and not a complete waste of millions of tax-payers dollars. For the past nearly hundred years Canada has been voting either Liberal or Conservative and this lead to years of strategic voting throughout the country. The only real way we can stop the rivalry between those parties is to bring in a new one. I personally support the NDP and while I’m underage and can’t cast my own vote I don’t see the need for strategic voting anymore. Perhaps my most controversial opinion, one that I’ve talked about with some adults in my life, is that if Trudeau really wants the majority government, why not combine with the NDP? The parties have very similar beliefs and while they tend to have drastically different action plans, politics and democracy is about the betterment of the country and population overall. While I’m not a politician I don’t see why this isn’t a viable option. The NDP has enough seats to make the Liberals a majority, and if they chose to combine I think that we’d finally reach a good balance between the handing of a lot of major issues.

The result of the election was scarily similar to the last election in October of 2019. The numbers differ ever so slightly. The Liberals gained one seat, the Bloc two, the NDP one. The Conservatives lost two and the Greens lost one. The election was so similar and possibly the worst thing about it is that minority governments don’t typically last more than 2-3 years. Usually they try to take more power than they have and the government collapses and the need for an election is evident. We have managed to make it not even a full 2 years into Trudeau’s government (his second term) before he called this election, and there was nothing wrong. All in all this election really frustrated me and seemed extraordinarily pointless. Perhaps the only good thing I saw was the student vote in my riding electing the NDP. That makes me very excited to see how our government develops in the near future when myself and like minded people can vote.