Why Americans Should Care About Canada's Election, Despite a campaign that was the longest in modern Canada’s history, if remarkably swift by American standards, no obvious outcome has developed as Canadians vote on Monday.
Many analysts have said that Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a Conservative who has held power for almost a decade, called the vote on Aug. 2 partly in the hope that the more voters saw of Justin Trudeau during his first term as leader of the Liberal Party, the less they would like him. Early Conservative ads emphasized Mr. Trudeau’s relative political inexperience and concluded with the slogan, “He’s just not ready.”
But over the past week, polls have shown Mr. Trudeau and his party steadily increasing their hold on the lead, although not by a sufficient margin for many polling companies to predict a Liberal victory.Conversely, the New Democratic Party, led by Tom Mulcair, started as the front-runner in polls, only to fall to third during a campaign that, at times, left all three parties in statistical dead heats.But Canadians do not vote for the prime minister, nor for a political party. Instead, they elect 338 members of Parliament. Because national popular-vote numbers do not necessarily transfer directly to parliamentary seats, the fate of the New Democrats is similarly unclear.
Regardless of the three major parties’ positions in the polls, campaigners in Canada are acutely aware that the victory in Britain of David Cameron’s Conservative Party in May had not been forecast by polling firms.
While the Canadian election was initially met with summer vacation indifference, the cliffhanger ending appears to have attracted voter interest. Turnout fell to as low as 58.8 percent in 2008 and was 61.1 percent in the last parliamentary election, in 2011. But the agency that supervises federal elections reported that 71 percent more people voted in advance polls this month than four years ago. In some communities, the surge in interest created lines that persisted for hours.
For many Canadians, the election is something of a referendum on Mr. Harper’s approach to government, which, in the view of his critics, has been autocratic and often focused on issues important to core Conservative supporters rather than to a majority of the population.
The focus of the campaign has fluttered between issues including a scandal over Conservative senators’ expenses; antiterrorism measures Mr. Harper introduced; pensions; the stagnation of the country’s economy, caused by depressed oil prices; the government’s handling of refugees; the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact; and Mr. Harper’s attempts to ban the wearing of face veils known as niqabs during citizenship ceremonies.
None of the three leaders or their parties missed an opportunity to seize on that rising voter interest over the weekend.
Facing the possibility of losing power, the Conservatives placed ads that were wrapped around the front pages of daily newspapers in large cities owned by the Postmedia Network Canada Corporation. While labeled, in small type, as advertising, the pages included the newspapers’ logos, prices and promotions of unrelated stories inside.
After spending most of the campaign delivering standard election speeches in front of invitation-only crowds, Mr. Harper took a more theatrical approach in the final days before the election. At campaign stops, as Mr. Harper recited his party’s claims of what a Liberal government would cost individual families, a recording of an old-fashioned cash register bell repeatedly pealed through loudspeakers and audience members piled what appeared to be currency on tables.
While Mr. Harper, more than many prime ministers, has transformed and tightly controlled the mechanisms of government since first taking power in 2006, he portrayed himself as an outsider on Sunday.
“We do not want to go back to the days where the government ran for a handful of Liberal special interest groups and the bureaucracy,” Mr. Harper said in Newmarket, Ontario, a suburb of Toronto. “And the Liberal campaign, when you cut away all the fancy rhetoric, that’s all it is really about.”
Many analysts have said that Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a Conservative who has held power for almost a decade, called the vote on Aug. 2 partly in the hope that the more voters saw of Justin Trudeau during his first term as leader of the Liberal Party, the less they would like him. Early Conservative ads emphasized Mr. Trudeau’s relative political inexperience and concluded with the slogan, “He’s just not ready.”But over the past week, polls have shown Mr. Trudeau and his party steadily increasing their hold on the lead, although not by a sufficient margin for many polling companies to predict a Liberal victory.Conversely, the New Democratic Party, led by Tom Mulcair, started as the front-runner in polls, only to fall to third during a campaign that, at times, left all three parties in statistical dead heats.But Canadians do not vote for the prime minister, nor for a political party. Instead, they elect 338 members of Parliament. Because national popular-vote numbers do not necessarily transfer directly to parliamentary seats, the fate of the New Democrats is similarly unclear.
Regardless of the three major parties’ positions in the polls, campaigners in Canada are acutely aware that the victory in Britain of David Cameron’s Conservative Party in May had not been forecast by polling firms.
While the Canadian election was initially met with summer vacation indifference, the cliffhanger ending appears to have attracted voter interest. Turnout fell to as low as 58.8 percent in 2008 and was 61.1 percent in the last parliamentary election, in 2011. But the agency that supervises federal elections reported that 71 percent more people voted in advance polls this month than four years ago. In some communities, the surge in interest created lines that persisted for hours.
For many Canadians, the election is something of a referendum on Mr. Harper’s approach to government, which, in the view of his critics, has been autocratic and often focused on issues important to core Conservative supporters rather than to a majority of the population.
The focus of the campaign has fluttered between issues including a scandal over Conservative senators’ expenses; antiterrorism measures Mr. Harper introduced; pensions; the stagnation of the country’s economy, caused by depressed oil prices; the government’s handling of refugees; the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact; and Mr. Harper’s attempts to ban the wearing of face veils known as niqabs during citizenship ceremonies.
None of the three leaders or their parties missed an opportunity to seize on that rising voter interest over the weekend.
Facing the possibility of losing power, the Conservatives placed ads that were wrapped around the front pages of daily newspapers in large cities owned by the Postmedia Network Canada Corporation. While labeled, in small type, as advertising, the pages included the newspapers’ logos, prices and promotions of unrelated stories inside.
After spending most of the campaign delivering standard election speeches in front of invitation-only crowds, Mr. Harper took a more theatrical approach in the final days before the election. At campaign stops, as Mr. Harper recited his party’s claims of what a Liberal government would cost individual families, a recording of an old-fashioned cash register bell repeatedly pealed through loudspeakers and audience members piled what appeared to be currency on tables.
While Mr. Harper, more than many prime ministers, has transformed and tightly controlled the mechanisms of government since first taking power in 2006, he portrayed himself as an outsider on Sunday.
“We do not want to go back to the days where the government ran for a handful of Liberal special interest groups and the bureaucracy,” Mr. Harper said in Newmarket, Ontario, a suburb of Toronto. “And the Liberal campaign, when you cut away all the fancy rhetoric, that’s all it is really about.”
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