History UsefulNotes / CanadianPolitics

UsefulNotes/{{Canada}} is a federal parliamentary democracy within a constitutional monarchy. The head of state is the sovereign, currently [[UsefulNotes/HMTheQueen Queen Elizabeth II]] (since 1952), who is represented by the Governor-General, a currently vacant position[[note]]Chief Justice Richard Wagner is serving as the acting Governor-General until a new one is appointed[[/note]]. The head of government is the Prime Minister, currently Justin Trudeau (since 2015).[[note]]The role of Deputy Prime Minister of Canada, currently Chrystia Freeland (since 2019), has no standing in Canadian law. It is not an equivalent to a Vice President, but rather is a way for PMs to show trust or favour to a member of the Cabinet.[[/note]] Any citizen at least 18 years old may vote in any election, with two exceptions: the Chief and Deputy Chief Electoral Officers.

UsefulNotes/{{Canada}} is a federal parliamentary democracy within a constitutional monarchy. The head of state is the sovereign, currently [[UsefulNotes/HMTheQueen Queen Elizabeth II]] (since 1952), who is represented by the Governor-General, currently Chief Justice Richard Wagner (2021-). The head of government is the Prime Minister, currently Justin Trudeau (since 2015).[[note]]The role of Deputy Prime Minister of Canada, currently Chrystia Freeland (since 2019), has no standing in Canadian law. It is not an equivalent to a Vice President, but rather is a way for PMs to show trust or favour to a member of the Cabinet.[[/note]] Any citizen at least 18 years old may vote in any election, with two exceptions: the Chief and Deputy Chief Electoral Officers.

UsefulNotes/{{Canada}} is a federal parliamentary democracy within a constitutional monarchy. The head of state is the sovereign, currently [[UsefulNotes/HMTheQueen Queen Elizabeth II]] (since 1952), who is represented by the Governor-General, currently Julie Payette (since 2017). The head of government is the Prime Minister, currently Justin Trudeau (since 2015).[[note]]The role of Deputy Prime Minister of Canada, currently Chrystia Freeland (since 2019), has no standing in Canadian law. It is not an equivalent to a Vice President, but rather is a way for PMs to show trust or favour to a member of the Cabinet.[[/note]] Any citizen at least 18 years old may vote in any election, with two exceptions: the Chief and Deputy Chief Electoral Officers.

* The '''Governor-General of Canada''', currently Julie Payette (since 2017), is the representative of the Sovereign, appointed in theory by the Sovereign and in practice by the Prime Minister, and has a mammoth assortment of powers, ranging from the ability to dissolve Parliament, appoint Senators, Supreme Court Justices, all high-ranking bureaucrats, and the Prime Minister and Cabinet, though they must keep the approval of the House of Commons. (S)He is also Commander-in-Chief of the [[UsefulNotes/CanucksWithChinooks Canadian military]]. However, these powers are bound by a large amount of unwritten convention, and are almost never used except on instruction from the Prime Minister — the last time they were, in 1926, the resulting “King-Byng Affair” resulted in a massive public outcry that ended in the re-election of Prime Minister W.L. Mackenzie King, whom Governor-General Lord Byng had rejected.[[note]]Mackenzie King was Prime Minister despite the fact that his Liberal Party didn't even have the most seats in the House of Commons. When he tried to ask Lord Byng to dissolve Parliament after it voted against his government and call an election, he refused and appointed Conservative leader Arthur Meighen as PM instead. Meighen fared no better, so an election was called, which Mackenzie King handily won.[[/note]] The Governor-General is, in theory, supposed to be chosen by the Sovereign from a list of candidates chosen by the Prime Minister. For some time now, the Prime Minister’s list of Governor-General appointees has been exactly one name long.

* The Green Party made further progress compared to the 2015 election, though perhaps not by as much as they had hoped. Having picked up Nanaimo-Ladysmith from the NDP in a by-election earlier in the year, and with their pro-environmental policies proving a hit with voters, many polls were putting them near-equal to the NDP, leading to hopes for a breakthrough. In the end, they nearly doubled their nationwide popular vote share, but ended up with just three [=MPs=] (the third beat the Liberal incumbent in Fredericton, which contains the eponymous capital of New Brunswick); while still a very respectable performance considering the party's size and resources, it ended their hopes of being possible kingmakers in the new Parliament. Afterwards, long-time party leader Elizabeth May announced her retirement from the position, though remains as an MP.

* The Conservatives, after two years of poor polling numbers following the 2015 election, quickly began to regroup after Andrew Scheer's (MP for Regina-Qu'Appelle) election as party leader in 2017 and led in the polls at various points in 2018 and 2019. However, they could not maintain said polling leads for very long, and entered the election polling roughly equal numbers to the Liberals. In the end, their campaign was hurt by various factors -- in particular, a platform that was accused of appealing a little too stridently to the party's western base while offering little to the more populous Ontario and Quebec, being caught off-guard by the Bloc's resurgence in Quebec, and Doug Ford's provincial Conservative government in Ontario suffering a steep decline in popularity during 2019 -- resulting in them actually winning the nationwide popular vote by 200,000 votes[[note]]Mostly off the back of winning a number of absurdly huge majorities in Alberta (where they won 33 out of 34 seats), Saskatchewan (all 14 seats), and rural Manitoba (all five southern Manitoba seats outside Winnipeg and two that extended into Winnipeg, from which they'd been shut out in 2015). By contrast, the Liberals won a lot of closer races in Ontario, Quebec, and to a lesser extent, British Columbia.[[/note]] and winning almost as many seats as former Prime Minister Stephen Harper did when he won his first mandate in 2006 (121 vs. 124), but falling 36 seats short of the Liberals and thus not being able to form a government due to no other party having the numbers needed for the Tories even to overtake the Liberals, much less hold a majority in the Commons. It was the first "wrong-winner" federal election since 1979, when the Liberals won the most votes but the then-Progressive Conservatives won the most seats. Scheer announced his resignation as leader several weeks after the election, leading to a new leadership election in August 2020. While former Progressive Conservative leader Peter [=MacKay=] was initially favoured to win, he ended up being heavily defeated by Erin O'Toole (MP for Durham); while this was attributed partly to [=MacKay=] running a lacklustre, complacent campaign, it has also been interpreted as a mandate for maintaining the social conservatism that marked Scheer's leadership, plus the latter stages of Harper's tenure as PM.

* The Conservatives, after two years of poor polling numbers following the 2015 election, quickly began to regroup after Andrew Scheer's (MP for Regina-Qu'Appelle) election as party leader in 2017 and led in the polls at various points in 2018 and 2019. However, they could not maintain said polling leads for very long, and entered the election polling roughly equal numbers to the Liberals. In the end, their campaign was hurt by various factors -- in particular, a platform that was accused of appealing a little too stridently to the party's western base while offering little to the more populous Ontario and Quebec, being caught off-guard by the Bloc's resurgence in Quebec, and Doug Ford's provincial Conservative government in Ontario suffering a steep decline in popularity during 2019 -- resulting in them actually winning the nationwide popular vote by 200,000 votes[[note]]Mostly off the back of winning a number of absurdly huge majorities in Alberta (where they won 33 out of 34 seats), Saskatchewan (all 14 seats), and rural Manitoba (all five southern Manitoba seats outside Winnipeg and two that extended into Winnipeg, from which they'd been shut out in 2015). By contrast, the Liberals won a lot of closer races in Ontario, Quebec, and to a lesser extent, British Columbia.[[/note]] and winning almost as many seats as former Prime Minister Stephen Harper did when he won his first mandate in 2006 (121 vs. 124), but falling 36 seats short of the Liberals and thus not being able to form a government due to no other party having the numbers needed for the Tories even to overtake the Liberals, much less hold a majority in the Commons. It was the first "wrong-winner" federal election since 1979, when the Liberals won the most votes but the then-Progressive Conservatives won the most seats. Scheer announced his resignation as leader several weeks after the election.

UsefulNotes/{{Canada}} is a federal parliamentary democracy within a constitutional monarchy. The head of state is the sovereign, currently [[UsefulNotes/HMTheQueen Queen Elizabeth II]] (since 1952), who is represented by the Governor-General, currently Julie Payette (since 2017), the head of government is the Prime Minister, currently Justin Trudeau (since 2015) and alongside with the Prime Minister is the Deputy Prime Minister of Canada, currently Chrystia Freeland (since 2019). Any citizen at least 18 years old may vote in any election, with two exceptions: the Chief and Deputy Chief Electoral Officers.

Each province’s representative of the Sovereign is appointed on recommendation from the Governor-General; in a province, this officeholder is called the Lieutenant-Governor,[[note]]Though they now represent the Queen directly, back when Canada was created, they represented the Governor-General and were an instrument through which the federal government could veto provincial legislation; this is now only done if a provincial law is infringing on the federal government's responsibilities.[[/note]] and in a territory, the name is Commissioner.[[note]]Commissioners are appointed by and represent the federal government and not the Queen directly. They used to be powerful administrators who ruled territories directly, before the federal government curbed their powers and instituted democratically elected governments for the territories. Now, like the lieutenant governors, their role is mainly ceremonial.[[/note]]

Provincial responsibilities include transportation, health, education, and administration of justice. This last includes (as mentioned above) the adjudication of disputes in private law — contract, tort, wills, trusts, estates, etc., which is to say, most of the actual work that law actually is. Also, in practice, denouncing unfair treatment from the federal government, whether there's substance to the accusation or not, is a major responsibility of premiers (as demonstrated by one of the page quotations).

UsefulNotes/{{Canada}} is a federal parliamentary democracy within a constitutional monarchy. The head of state is the sovereign, currently [[UsefulNotes/HMTheQueen Queen Elizabeth II]] (since 1952), and the head of government is the Prime Minister, currently Justin Trudeau (since 2015). Any citizen at least 18 years old may vote in any election, with two exceptions: the Chief and Deputy Chief Electoral Officers.

American-style social conservatism is conversely regarded as a fringe view, with the conservative politicians focusing on fiscal issues. Indeed, this was a bone of contention for some of more [[MoralGuardians moralistic]] Conservative [=MPs=] under Stephen Harper and remains an issue for the Conservative Party post-Harper. Canadian conservatives tend to be fiscally conservative, supporting low taxes and local control, while remaining much more socially liberal and secular compared to their American counterparts. Their closest relatives on the U.S. right are libertarians like UsefulNotes/RonPaul and Gary Johnson.

The Northwest Territories and Nunavut operate using a [[NoPartyGiven nonpartisan]] consensus government model, unique to these territories: the premier and speaker are then chosen from among the elected [=MLAs=], who are all officially independent of political parties. This is similar theoretically to the U.S. state of Nebraska’s non-executive legislature and most municipalities in Canada. This nonpartisan model is supposedly based on the traditions of the Inuit and other peoples indigenous to the territories. [=MLAs=] in Nunavut and the NWT may be affiliated with federal parties privately, however, and should they pursue federal politics, align with a federal party; at present, the three territories are represented by [=MPs=] from the Liberal Party (Yukon and NWT) and NDP (Nunavut) in the House and "Independent Senators Group" (Yukon and NWT; all senators appointed by Justin Trudeau during his first mandate got this designation automatically) and Conservative Party (Nunavut) in the Senate.

Intergovernmental relations are so important in Canada that since 2003, a permanent body called the [[https://canadaspremiers.ca Council of the Federation]] comprising all the subnational first ministers has met intending to promote such co-operation and mutual advancement. One reason the Harper government lost much of its support (and its mandate, eventually) was that people thought it (''especially'' Stephen Harper) had come to denigrate the provinces' needs, [[NotSoDifferent just like its predecessors for some time before]]. Notably, Justin Trudeau named himself minister for intergovernmental affairs in his first cabinet, [[HopeSpot suggesting to many at the time that he took the issue more seriously]] than Harper; however, [[HereWeGoAgain relations between the Liberal federal government and Conservative provincial governments soured]] in a matter of years. Some people accused Trudeau of trying to [[AuthorsSavingThrow pander to the West]], in large swaths of which his name was mud, when he reassigned Intergovernmental Affairs to Chrystia Freeland, formerly trade and foreign minister (she was born in Alberta but represents and lives in Toronto), after the 2019 federal election, though [[https://www.macleans.ca/politics/what-chrystia-freelands-real-role-will-be/ many other people called that hogwash]]. Several premiers have also assigned themselves that portfolio in their territory/province.

Canada also has a very short election cycle, which can, in theory, occur at any time. Due to a fixed election date law passed in 2009, federal elections usually occur on the third Monday in October in the fourth calendar year after the previous poll. However, if the government falls in a non-confidence vote, elections can occur outside the usual time, which often happens in minority government situations sooner or later. A non-confidence vote occurs when a supply bill — that is, a bill dealing with the spending of money — is defeated, and reflects that the Parliament no longer believes that the Prime Minister is an effective leader. Essentially, it’s the legislative equivalent of [[YouHaveFailedMe "We’re firing you."]] This can force an election, and the Prime Minister can ask the Governor General to dissolve the government at any time — it is expected, but not legally required, that if it has not been at least six months since the last election, the GG may simply ask the leader of the next-largest party to try to form a government rather than saying HereWeGoAgain Once government is dissolved, the election cycle normally lasts five to six weeks, during which candidates campaign and stump for votes.

A variation of the normal election cycle ''almost'' occurred in December 2008 when the Liberals, NDP, and Bloc Québécois drew up a formal agreement to topple the ruling Conservative minority government in a non-confidence vote just six weeks after the election and ask the Governor-General to install them as a majority coalition government without triggering another election. While such an act is perfectly legitimate in a parliamentary democracy, it is quite unorthodox in Canada and the Conservatives countered by delaying the vote until January and launching a media blitz characterizing the act as a [[InsistentTerminology “coup d’état”]], banking on the assumption (proved correct) that [[ViewersAreMorons many Canadians didn't know how their government actually worked]]. The uncertainty of the Great Recession and the fact the coalition would have required the support of the separatist Bloc Québécois and made the unpopular Stéphane Dion the next Prime Minister even though his Liberal Party had just suffered its [[CurbStompBattle worst vote-share (26%) since 1867]] also made the idea troubling even to many who understood its constitutionality, and the idea died in December when the Liberals replaced Dion with Michael Ignatieff and backed down.[[note]]Conveniently for the Conservatives, it also obscured [[{{Hypocrite}} Stephen Harper's participation in a similar pact with the NDP and Bloc]] after the Liberals fell from majority to minority status after the 2004 election.[[/note]]

In federal politics, the [[PowerTrio three major parties]] are the centre-right/right-wing Conservative Party (the "Tories"), the centrist/centre-left Liberal Party (the "Grits"), and the left-wing/social-democratic New Democratic Party (NDP or "Dippers"). Historically, the Liberals and Conservatives have been the two major parties and the only ones to govern, although both have suffered periods of [[TheRemnant electoral collapse]] (the Conservatives from the mid-1990s to mid-2000s; the Liberals from the mid-2000s until 2015). The NDP was for a long time [[TheChewToy a perpetual third/fourth party]], but has been an important force in Canadian politics, [[TheLancer propping up minority Liberal governments]] in 1972–74 and 2004–05 and frequently [[TheSmartGuy raising policy concerns]] that Liberal governments took forward. The Green Party, while still small compared to the big three, is increasing in visibility and mainstream support and won its first seat in the 2011 election. There are many other smaller parties (Marijuana Party, Communist Party, etc.), and a few [[RuleOfFunny frivolous yet funny ones]] (most prominently the Rhinoceros Party).

The Liberal Party has had a truly remarkable run in Canadian politics: in the last century, the Liberals have spent more time governing Canada than the Communists have governing Russia, and they were in charge for 80 of 110 years between 1896 and 2006; small wonder that the Liberals are sometimes referred to, both as praise and as condemnation, as Canada's "[[NothingCanStopUsNow natural governing party]]". It didn’t hurt that the Liberals have frequently adopted various minor parties’ most popular policy proposals and then claimed credit for them, such as the postwar welfare state originally proposed by the NDP or, conversely, the drastic spending cuts of the 1990s advocated by the Reform Party. These policies were implemented by Liberal governments, but the third parties played no small part in getting the ball rolling for them.[[note]]As Milton Friedman said: “The way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.”[[/note]]

In the 2011 federal election, the NDP, largely by [[LandslideElection gaining major support in Quebec]] — where they had never before been a contender — had a third of the seats in the House of Commons and [[DidntSeeThatComing became the Official Opposition for the first time in their history]]. This development was also responsible for the demise of the Bloc Québécois, who fell from long-time dominance in Quebec to TheRemnant of only ''four'' seats, [[HumiliationConga not enough to qualify them as an official party]]. The Liberals, for the first time in ''their'' history, [[MyGreatestFailure fell to third-party status]]. The Conservatives, for [[TheBusCameBack the first time since 1988]], were elected to a majority government. Finally, [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking the Green Party won its first-ever seat]] in Parliament, with its leader Elizabeth May being elected in the B.C. riding of Saanich-Gulf Islands. This polarized Canadian politics to an unprecedented degree, as the NDP is further to the proverbial left than the Liberals are on most issues, and the current Reform-derived Conservatives are further right than the Progressive Conservative Party that preceded them.

[[FromBadToWorse As if that wasn’t enough drama for one year]], NDP leader Jack Layton, whose popularity played a significant role in the NDP’s newfound success, died of cancer a few months following the election. Nycole Turmel was appointed the interim party leader, and Thomas Mulcair was elected as the new leader in April 2012. Since the NDP had never previously held Official Opposition status, the leadership race faced greater scrutiny than ever before, primarily due to the fact that the NDP could plausibly be selecting an individual who might become the country’s next Prime Minister.

However, 2015 had another shift in store. After the longest election campaign since the 19th century — 78 days, which may seem quaint to [[UsefulNotes/AmericanPoliticalSystem other countries]] — the balance of power shifted ''again'', though unlike the previous election, many noted this to be more of a [[StatusQuoIsGod return to a previous equilibrium]]. In a stunning electoral win and borderline CurbStompBattle, the Liberal Party of Canada more than ''quintupled'' their seat count to 184 seats from 34, an electoral upset unprecedented in Canadian history, making Justin Trudeau the new Prime Minister, having won several seats in every province as well as sweeping the Atlantic provinces and all three territories. The Conservatives were reduced to 99 seats with several influential ministers losing their seats. Finally, the NDP dropped back to 44 seats, a substantial disappointment after having been the Official Opposition, losing several seats they thought were very safe for them to the Liberals. Little changed for the Bloc Québécois, which rebounded slightly to ten seats in the Commons, while Green Party leader Elizabeth May retained her seat in British Columbia.

* The Liberal Party, despite having flown high in the polls during the first two years of Justin Trudeau's (MP for Papineau) national leadership, began to stumble in 2018 for various reasons including the unpopularity of Kathleen Wynne's provincial Liberal government in Ontario, a series of gaffe-prone state visits, and most damagingly, the emergence of the SNC-Lavalin scandal and Trudeau's alleged attempt to cover it up by firing Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould and later expelling her from the party.[[note]]Short version: A large Montreal-based engineering firm that had committed [[CorruptCorporateExecutive many ethical transgressions]], most famously in UsefulNotes/{{Libya}}, had lobbied the government to introduce a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) as a legal option that would allow it to [[KarmaHoudini escape legal consequences for its actions]] [[KarmaHoudiniWarranty temporarily]]. That paid off, but when Wilson-Raybould declined to offer SNC a DPA, Trudeau and his staffers lobbied her ''personally'' to try to change her mind, which contradicted the principle of prosecutorial independence.[[/note]] The scandal caused the Liberals' poll numbers to tank at the start of 2019, and it looked odds-on that Trudeau would not be re-elected. However, they managed to recover and just barely held onto power at the election, albeit being reduced to a minority government, with 157 out of 338 seats. Ironically, Justin Trudeau's father, UsefulNotes/{{Pierre|Trudeau}}, met the same fate at his first re-election in 1972.
* The Conservatives, after two years of poor polling numbers following the 2015 election, quickly began to regroup after Andrew Scheer's (MP for Regina-Qu'Appelle) election as party leader in 2017 and led in the polls at various points in 2018 and 2019. However, they could not maintain said polling leads for very long, and entered the election polling roughly equal numbers to the Liberals. In the end, their campaign was hurt by various factors -- in particular, a platform that was accused of [[PanderingToTheBase appealing a little too stridently to the party's western base]] while offering little to the more populous Ontario and Quebec, being caught off-guard by the Bloc's resurgence in Quebec, and Doug Ford's provincial Conservative government in Ontario suffering a steep decline in popularity during 2019 -- resulting in them actually winning the nationwide popular vote by 200,000 votes[[note]]Mostly off the back of winning a number of [[LandslideElection absurdly huge majorities]] in Alberta (where they won 33 out of 34 seats), Saskatchewan (all 14 seats), and rural Manitoba (all five southern Manitoba seats outside Winnipeg and two that extended into Winnipeg, [[BackFromTheDead from which they'd been shut out in 2015]]). By contrast, the Liberals won a lot of closer races in Ontario, Quebec, and to a lesser extent, British Columbia.[[/note]] and winning almost as many seats as former Prime Minister Stephen Harper did when he won his first mandate in 2006 (121 vs. 124), but falling 36 seats short of the Liberals and thus not being able to form a government due to no other party having the numbers needed for the Tories even to overtake the Liberals, much less hold a majority in the Commons. It was the first "wrong-winner" federal election since 1979, when the Liberals won the most votes but the then-Progressive Conservatives won the most seats. Scheer announced his resignation as leader several weeks after the election.

* The NDP continued their slow decline that began at the 2015 election, losing further ground. In 2017 the party elected Jagmeet Singh, then deputy leader of the Ontario NDP, as leader, making him the first person from a visible minority (as a practising Sikh) to lead a Canadian political party.[[note]]Singh wasn't the first Christian NDP leader: David Lewis, who led them from 1972 to 1975, was an atheist who was raised Jewish.[[/note]] While Singh's installation as leader was initially well-received, the NDP's polling numbers gradually slumped in 2018 and early 2019, as voters became increasingly sceptical of Singh's ability to lead the party (it didn't much help that he didn't initially hold a seat, only winning Burnaby South in a by-election just eight months before the national election). The election campaign, and especially the official leaders' debates, saw Singh finally come into his own, leading to hopes that he might be able to replicate former leader Jack Layton's polling surge in the 2011 election. However, it ended up proving too little, too late,[[note]]It probably didn't help that while Justin Trudeau has become a somewhat divisive figure, he's still nowhere '''near''' as overwhelmingly disliked as then-Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff was in 2011.[[/note]] and between their support in Quebec largely returning to the Bloc (BQ leader Blanchet won his federal seat of Beloeil-Chambly from an NDP incumbent, for example) and voters elsewhere voting Liberal to keep the Tories out, they ended up winning just 24 seats, their weakest electoral performance since 2004. They at least held the consolation of being the {{kingmaker|Scenario}}s in the new parliament, with Trudeau being dependent on their support to remain as Prime Minister.

Provincial politics tends to have the Conservatives, Liberals, and NDP as the primary parties as well, though there are exceptions: both Saskatchewan's Saskatchewan Party and B.C.'s Liberal Party are in practice [[EnemyMine mergers of provincial Liberals and Conservatives]] in opposition to both provinces' powerful NDP, Alberta conservatives saw a decade of [[AHouseDivided division]] between the more conservative Wild Rose Party and the old Progressive Conservatives before they reunited in 2017, and Quebec politics is [[MindScrew just plain weird]] because it includes a secessionist-federalist spectrum in addition to the typical left-right and authoritarian-libertarian spectrums.[[note]]It features the slightly left-leaning, separatist Parti Québécois (PQ), the slightly right-leaning, federalist Quebec Liberal Party (PLQ), the centre-right, autonomist Coalition Avenir Québec ([[FunWithAcronyms CAQ]]), and the openly socialist and separatist Québec Solidaire. In practice, however, the provincial parties in Quebec all have moderate and extreme factions, united more by their position on the sovereignty question than anything else. The CAQ claims to eschew the entire federalism-separatism debate, and has lately been poaching voter support and [=MNAs=] from the Liberals, the PQ, and the defunct ADQ. One thing to note: Quebec is somewhat to the left of Canada in general, notably on social issues, and as such, the Quebec Liberal Party is very similar to the federal Conservative Party. Indeed, former Quebec premier Jean Charest rose to prominence as a Cabinet minister in the 1980s Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney, and even became the party's leader after the 1993 wipeout, before becoming leader of the Quebec Liberals.[[/note]] The NDP does frequently win in provincial elections, especially in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia where, for historical reasons, they're the only major left-wing party in a two-party system and thus viable contenders for government by default.

Alberta is also an interesting case. Since ratifying Confederation in 1905, its government has changed only four times: one during the Depression, one after popular premier Ernest Manning (father of Reform Party founder Preston Manning) resigned and was succeeded by the much less able Harry Strom, and the latest being because of falling oil prices that resulted in an increasingly unpopular NDP majority government's replacement with a Conservative one (led, incidentally, by [[HesBack Jason Kenney]], a former federal minister in the Harper government). From 1971 to 2015, a string of PC leaders [[LandslideElection won a majority in every election]], to the point where Alberta was routinely considered a one-party state, and it was [[SeriousBusiness only half a joke]].[[note]]Until the NDP lost government in 2019, Alberta had never gone back to a party after voting it out of power and the Conservative Party had the longest string of elections, the only comparable run being the 1935–71 Social Creditors, whom the [=PCs=] had themselves eliminated. This trend is also technically guaranteed in the future now since the [=PCs=] and Wildrose have merged into the "new" United Conservative Party.[[/note]]

One significant difference when it comes to individual politicians compared to the United States is that there is no equivalent in Canadian constitutional law to the “natural-born citizen” requirement for President and Vice-President, and in general Parliament (and some of the provincial legislatures) will have a higher number of naturalized immigrants than jurisdictions in the United States. As of February 2010, there were more Muslims sitting in Parliament (all of them foreign-born, including one who was a veteran combat pilot in the Pakistani Air Force) than had ever been in Congress, as well as 15 Sikhs, most of them immigrants as well. Four prime ministers (including the first, John A. Macdonald, and most recently John Turner, PM for less than three months in 1984[[note]]He succeeded Pierre Trudeau when the latter resigned the Liberal leadership, and in that fall’s election, the Progressive Conservatives [[CurbStompBattle cleaned his clock]].[[/note]]) were born outside Canada, albeit all in the United Kingdom. The previous two Governors-General (Adrienne Clarkson and Michaëlle Jean) were also immigrants (from China — well, UsefulNotes/HongKong[[note]]Clarkson, born Adrienne Poy, was married to the English-born academic Stephen Clarkson from 1963 to 1965 and retained his name after their divorce.[[/note]] — and Haiti, respectively). As well, following the 2015 election, five ministers are immigrants to Canada, including the first Sikh to command a regiment in the Canadian Forces ([[http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/11/06/harjit-sajjan-defence-min_0_n_8486412.html who is a major badass]]).[[note]]Fun fact: There are currently more Sikhs in Canada's cabinet than in India's.[[/note]]

The half-ton gorilla in contemporary Canadian politics has been "national unity". A VocalMinority of Quebecers want Quebec to leave Canada and become an independent country, while many non-separatist Quebecers believe in Quebec having rights to greater autonomy. There have been two referenda on independence, in 1980 and 1995, both of which lost: the first with 60% of the vote, the second with [[DecidedByOneVote 50.6%]] of the vote.[[note]]As it happened, then-Quebec Premier Jacques Parizeau shot off his mouth in a SoreLoser concession speech at this loss, complaining about how “money and the ethnic vote” thwarted him, which has apparently made getting “winning conditions” for a third independence referendum so far impossible.[[/note]] The Parti Québécois keeps threatening to call another one, though it hasn’t had another majority since 1995 with which to try.[[note]]In September 2012, the PQ won a governing minority, with 54 of the Assembly’s 125 seats; however, they lost 24 of those seats in the election of March 2014, including that of Premier Pauline Marois.[[/note]] The other federal parties take various positions on how to respond to this, which frequently involve special concessions for Quebec.

The environment has also become a [[{{Pun}} hot]] topic of late. The Green Party has put environmental regulations at the center of their platforms, the NDP and Liberals also support reforms, and the Conservatives are more cautious, but still interested in, at minimum, seeming like they care. The Harper Conservatives’ environmental platform in government was largely to follow the United States' lead, and because the U.S. didn’t seem to be doing much of anything, Canada didn't either. In fact, under Harper's government, no provinces save Québec reached their targets under the Kyoto Protocol and a few even increased their greenhouse gas emissions since the PM simply refused to follow the Protocol's targets. It remains to be seen what the more explicitly pro-environment Liberal government will do on that file. In the meantime, the provinces are generally content to sit and bitch at each other about who gets what money. This has been described as “exactly like UsefulNotes/TheEuropeanUnion, just with more land”.

What, [[BewareTheNiceOnes you think Canadians are polite and honest all the time]]? In one of the earliest national scandals, back in 1873, John A. Macdonald was accused of taking bribes in relation to the funding of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

Two of the more recent scandals are the “sponsorship scandal,” where large sums of money earmarked for national-unity advertising programs in Quebec were used improperly (read: given away to friends of the then-ruling Liberal Party), and the “Airbus affair,” wherein then-Prime Minister Brian Mulroney stood accused of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from a German arms dealer as kickbacks on the purchase of Airbus jets for Air Canada, which the government owned at the time. More recently, in 2013, several senators (some Liberals, but mostly Conservatives) were accused of claiming excessive amounts of expenses, particularly living expenses,[[note]]Senators must own property in the province they represent, but they can claim expenses if their primary residence is more than 100 kilometres from Ottawa. This led senators to [[LoopholeAbuse designate small cabins in the middle of nowhere as their "primary residence"]] in the province they represent, allowing them to claim expenses for the large houses and luxury condos in Ottawa where they actually live.[[/note]] and are being investigated by the RCMP. When the Senate ordered them to repay the money, some did so while others went to court. This led to [[HereWeGoAgain another round]] of discussion regarding Senate reform, which almost inevitably change very little.

Sex scandals are rarer than in the States. Despite stereotypes that Canadian politicians are better behaved in this respect, it is just more probable that the Canadian media are less likely to report on it and/or the Canadian populace less inclined to care. Two notable exceptions are the Gerda Munsinger case, which embarrassed the federal government of John Diefenbaker and prompted the resignation of a federal Cabinet minister, and the Colin Thatcher case, which centered around a former minister in the Saskatchewan provincial government who was arrested and convicted of the [[StuffedIntoTheFridge murder of his wife JoAnn]] after she divorced him for [[YourCheatingHeart his numerous extramarital affairs]].

Two more recent cases of what could be described as "sex scandals" have happened within the past few years. One involved the ''very'' public 2005 breakup of two prominent Conservative [=MPs=], Belinda Stronach and Peter [=MacKay=], who had been dating, when Stronach defected to the Liberals for a Cabinet post — which she lost the next year after the Liberals lost an election — leading to a stunned-looking [=MacKay=] standing on his farm talking about how “at least my dog is loyal”, and a narrow aversion of an election in the now evenly-divided House (since the government can’t fall on a tie, and Stronach’s defection got them up to parity). It also led to a massive variety of ribald jokes at Stronach’s expense from prominent Conservatives, the most notable of which is then-Alberta Premier Ralph Klein's assertion that “[[NoTrueScotsman She didn’t have a Conservative bone in her body]] … okay, [[DoubleEntendre maybe one]],” many of which naturally [[CrossesTheLineTwice proved controversial in their own right]]. The other involved Maxime Bernier, then the Foreign Affairs Minister dating a woman with connections to a chapter of the Hell’s Angels and actually leaving important classified documents lying around her apartment followed by their mysterious disappearance.

In February 2010, Conservative cabinet minister (for the status of women!) Helena Guergis was accused of throwing a hissy fit at the Charlottetown airport, located in Canada’s smallest province, P.E.I. The minister allegedly threw shoes across the security screening area and banged on a security door. When media and the Liberals asked for the security tapes, CATSA (the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority) could not provide them (many suspect [[ExecutiveMeddling Conservative meddling]]). Prime Minister Harper stood by her for a while (in the face of public information), then rumours began to rise that Guergis had been letting her husband, a former cabinet minister, use her office to promote his business. Apparently some photos surfaced of the two in a [[DenOfIniquity shady strip club]] with [[HookersAndBlow cocaine and, reportedly, “busty hookers”]]. Guergis was then [[YouHaveFailedMe expelled from cabinet by Harper]], [[YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness expelled from the Conservative Party caucus]], and [[OhCrap became the subject of an RCMP investigation]] (all thanks to ''private'' information). Even after the RCMP cleared Guergis of wrongdoing, she [[TheAtoner continued to sit as an independent MP]], but lost her seat to the Conservative challenger in the subsequent election. This led to the joke that Harper began standing behind his ministers because it was [[CaughtWithYourPantsDown easier to push them under a bus from there]].

The more recent ‘robocall’ scandal had its roots in the 2011 federal election. It came to light that ''someone'' was sending automated ‘robocalls’ (and, in some cases, targeted live calls) to non-Conservative or ex-Conservative voters in a number of different ridings, falsely directing them to incorrect polling stations or otherwise harassing them into not voting at all. Elections Canada got wind of these incidents via complaints from the public, and since the scandal broke they have accumulated over ''[[UpToEleven 31,000 reports]]'' of similar calls from across Canada. In the most high-profile case, in the Ontario riding of Guelph, [[MediaWatchdog Elections Canada]] has traced at least some of the calls to a subsidiary of an automated calling company in Edmonton, which in turn was contacted both by the Guelph Conservative campaign as well as a disposable mobile phone registered under the alias “Pierre Poutine” of “Separatist Street” in Joliette, Quebec. (The “Pierre Poutine” name was likely [[LineOfSightName taken from an independent food caterer]] in Guelph, while the “Separatist Street” location was probably a crude attempt at a TakeThat to the Quebec independence movement.) In another riding where voter suppression tactics have been alleged (Nipissing–Timiskaming), the Conservative won by just ''eighteen votes'', and this was far from the only close riding across the country, potentially making the difference between a majority and minority government. The opposition NDP and Liberals [[StatusQuoIsGod rather predictably reacted with outrage]], while the Conservatives [[IWasNeverHere naturally denied any responsibility]], though a low-ranking Conservative staffer from the Guelph campaign has since resigned his position at the office of a Toronto-area MP. Spinoff allegations have included voter registration fraud as well as illegal campaign financing. Federal opinion polls registered minimal impact as a result of the ‘robocall scandal’; a federal judge offered the Tories a not-quite-absolution in April 2013.

On the municipal level, in May 2013, reporters from the ''Toronto Star'' and gossip website ''Gawker'' reported that they had viewed and been offered a video showing Toronto Mayor Rob Ford [[DrugsAreBad smoking crack cocaine]] and making homophobic slurs. Though Ford had a well-documented history of mild to belligerent public intoxication, he [[SuspiciouslySpecificDenial denied and evaded questions]] for several months — until, in October 2013, [[SeriousBusiness the Toronto police]] reported that they had recovered a deleted copy of what appears to be that same video from a hard drive seized in an anti-drug raid. Ford then changed his story and admitted to “probably” having used crack cocaine in the midst of a “drunken stupor,” while blaming the media for not asking the right questions (which they had, and he had ignored) and claiming [[ImplausibleDeniability that he was not an addict]]. With Ford and several of his associates and assistants now under police investigation, Toronto City Council [[EnemyMine banded together]] to strip him of most of his powers (at least those which they could remove under provincial laws) along with his staff and budget, and shift them to the deputy mayor. Rob Ford responded by [[NeverMyFault playing the victim of a “coup d'état” while proudly going on to contest the 2014 municipal election]]. Not long after losing most of his mayoral powers, [[HereWeGoAgain another crack video surfaced, this time with screenshots]], forcing Mayor Ford to enter rehab. [[TenMinuteRetirement He continued to run for Mayor upon leaving rehab]], but a hospital visit revealed an abdominal tumor. Mayor Ford withdrew from the mayoral race, opting to run for his old Ward 2 seat on City Council. He died on March 22, 2016. Rob’s brother Doug (the then Ward 2 councillor) submitted his papers to run for mayor with one hour to spare before the nomination deadline. In the end, John Tory became mayor … but Doug Ford got the last laugh by becoming premier of Ontario in 2018, a position Tory had run for in 2007 as leader of the Ontario Conservative Party and lost.

** Following the election of Justin Trudeau's Liberals in the 2015 federal election, the new government pledged to reform the way in which [=MPs=] were elected, following a public consultation. When the public consultation and Commons committee work failed to yield a consensus (arguably by design), and public sentiment ran to electoral methods that Trudeau and his Cabinet did not favour, the Liberals [[ILied abruptly dropped]] the idea.[[note]]People noticed the coincidence that had the 2015 election been held under some form of proportional representation, the Liberals would have received roughly 15% or 50 seats ''less'' representation and been reduced to a minority government. As an unrelated coincidence, that was about as many [=MPs=] as were elected with absolute majorities of the vote in their respective ridings.[[/note]]

** In practice, the Senate is often useful to prime ministers as a means of rewarding cronies, [[KickedUpstairs getting troublesome allies out of the way]], and keeping their own mark on Parliament long after they have lost election or left politics themselves. More recently, due to public concerns over patronage as well as occasional scandals over fraud and improper expense claims, there have been calls to reform or even abolish the Senate. The Liberals have generally supported the status quo, while many New Democrats want to [[YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness abolish the Senate altogether]], and the Conservatives (historically strong in the West) have usually supported an elected Senate. However, after the 2015 election returned Justin Trudeau's Liberals, a small but significant reform was initiated, with senatorial appointments being turned over to an independent commission to select experts [[AsskickingEqualsAuthority based on merit]]. This has drawn criticism from some provinces, particularly (as expected) the western ones, for failing to do anything about the lopsided distribution of seats; to this, the government has replied that even if it wanted to do that, it couldn't, as that would require a constitutional amendment that could essentially never pass without the consent of at least one Atlantic province, whose influence would be correspondingly diluted ([[SarcasmMode good luck with that]]).
* The '''Governor-General of Canada''', currently Julie Payette (since 2017), is the representative of the Sovereign, appointed in theory by the Sovereign and in practice by the Prime Minister, and has a mammoth assortment of powers, ranging from the ability to dissolve Parliament, appoint Senators, Supreme Court Justices, all high-ranking bureaucrats, and the Prime Minister and Cabinet, though they must keep the approval of the House of Commons. (S)He is also Commander-in-Chief of the [[UsefulNotes/CanucksWithChinooks Canadian military]]. However, these powers are bound by a large amount of unwritten convention, and are almost never used except on instruction from the Prime Minister — the last time they were, in 1926, the resulting “King-Byng Affair” resulted in a massive public outcry that ended in the re-election of Prime Minister W.L. Mackenzie King, whom Governor-General Lord Byng had rejected.[[note]]Mackenzie King was Prime Minister despite the fact that his Liberal Party didn't even have the most seats in the House of Commons. When he tried to ask Lord Byng to dissolve Parliament after it voted against his government and call an election, he refused and appointed Conservative leader Arthur Meighen as PM instead. Meighen fared no better, so an election was called, which Mackenzie King handily won.[[/note]] The Governor-General is, in theory, supposed to be chosen by the Sovereign from a list of candidates chosen by the Prime Minister. For some time now, the Prime Minister’s list of Governor-General appointees has been exactly [[YouAreInCommandNow one name long]].
** An event in which the GG ''can'' become critical is if the Prime Minister starts to show signs of [[JumpingOffTheSlipperySlope getting dictatorial]], at which point the Governor-General, as representative of the Sovereign, can deny Royal Assent to bills that violate fundamental liberties. [[GodzillaThreshold If need be]], as the Governor-General is also the Commander-in-Chief, they can order the army to depose the PM by force.

The Prime Minister is the head of the Canadian government for all intents and purposes; you must be chosen as your party’s leader on top of being an elected representative, in a manner strikingly similar to the Speaker of the House in American politics. Due to the nature of the Westminster-style parliament, Canada’s executive branch is purely ceremonial, so the usual executive powers are devolved to the office of the Prime Minister and their Cabinet, who are also sitting [=MPs=] (or rarely senators). Canadians do not vote for the Prime Minister directly, however; instead, they vote for the Member of Parliament in their riding only (though if their MP is a party leader, ''then'' they can say they're voting for a potential Prime Minister). The party with the most seats in the House of Commons forms a majority government, when they control more than half the seats, or a minority government, when they control less than half the seats,[[note]]Usually, but not necessarily, they still have more seats than any single party. For instance, Liberal Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King retained power after one election [[EnemyMine with another party's support]] even though the Conservatives had more seats.[[/note]] and the Prime Minister is then appointed by the party itself.[[note]]Theoretically, whenever where there is a minority government, some of the other parties could get together and form a coalition government if they can get a simple majority of the House’s membership onside with them (meaning, practically, that those parties must have more than half of [=MPs=] between them). However, this has never happened formally since Confederation; the one time it seemed like this might happen, in 2008, it was kiboshed by the ruling Conservatives’ clever exploitation of EaglelandOsmosis and general distrust of the separatist Bloc Québécois. For all intents and purposes, the “Unionist Party” that ran in 1917 was a coalition between the governing Conservatives and members of the Liberal Opposition who supported the Government’s plan to impose conscription to muster manpower for Canada’s [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarI war]] effort.[[/note]]

In practice, Canadians know what candidate a party will nominate for Prime Minister during the election cycle: by [[LikeYouWouldReallyDoIt so-far-unbroken]] convention, it is the party leader. In the readily possible event that the Prime Minister loses his/her riding, a junior member of the party will typically resign his/her seat for the party leader to win in a by-election, as the Prime Minister is normally expected to have a seat to serve in the government.[[note]]Although it is possible for a prime minister to serve without holding a seat in the House of Commons (see John Turner, 1984), a prime minister without a seat would face public concern about their democratic legitimacy.[[/note]] This happened as early as the 1870s, after John A. Macdonald’s Conservative government collapsed over the Canadian Pacific Railway scandal (see below) and he lost his own seat in Kingston, Ontario. From 1878 to 1882, he represented the riding of Victoria, British Columbia, since he couldn’t get elected in the part of the country he came from.

Intergovernmental relations are so important in Canada that since 2003, a permanent body called the [[https://canadaspremiers.ca Council of the Federation]] comprising all the subnational first ministers has met intending to promote such co-operation and mutual advancement. One reason the Harper government lost much of its support (and its mandate, eventually) was that people thought it (''especially'' Stephen Harper) had come to denigrate the provinces' needs, [[NotSoDifferent just like its predecessors for some time before]]. Notably, Justin Trudeau named himself minister for intergovernmental affairs in his first cabinet, [[HopeSpot suggesting to many at the time that he took the issue more seriously]] than Harper; however, [[HereWeGoAgain relations between the Liberal federal government and Conservative provincial governments soured]] in a matter of years.

* The Progressive Party, an agrarian party with members from all over the political spectrum as we know it, who got established in the early 1920s when the Conservatives were going through a period of electoral weakness, and even became the second-largest party for a while. They quickly fell back into obscurity when it turned out the party's members' views were a bit too diverse for them to put forward a coherent platform, though remnants of the party would later merge with the original Conservative Party (who had been wrecked as an electoral force due to their poor handling of TheGreatDepression) to form the Progressive Conservatives.
* The Social Credit Party, who started out as a right-wing party focused on the western provinces in the 1930s, before becoming more focused on Quebec nationalism in the 1960s. Probably the most extreme right-wing of the "mainstream" parties who have achieved any parliamentary representation in Canada, to the extent that the party held openly anti-Semitic policies until the mid-1950s, while their most famous leader, Réal Caouette, made the headlines for proclaiming UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler and UsefulNotes/BenitoMussolini to be his political idols, and trying to downplay UsefulNotes/TheHolocaust by claiming that the Nazis only killed Jews who were also a burden on society. After Caouette's death, neo-Nazis took over the party in the 1980s, resulting in it rapidly collapsing.
* The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, who can be considered the forerunners of the modern New Democratic Party. They were formed in the mid-1930s, and went on to hold a fairly decent amount of seats in the two decades ahead, before being forced to regroup and re-form as the NDP after the CCF were all but wiped out in the 1958 election. Saw an unexpected comeback in 2018: when NDP MP Erin Weir was ejected from the party, he relabelled himself as a member of the CCF, though he didn't seek re-election the following year.

* The Liberal Party, despite having flown high in the polls during the first two years of Justin Trudeau's (MP for Papineau) national leadership, began to stumble in 2018 for various reasons including the unpopularity of Kathleen Wynne's provincial Liberal government in Ontario, a series of gaffe-prone state visits, and most damagingly, the emergence of the SNC-Lavalin scandal and Trudeau's alleged attempt to cover it up by firing Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould and later expelling her from the party.[[note]]Short version: A large Montreal-based engineering firm that had committed [[CorruptCorporateExecutive many ethical transgressions]], most famously in UsefulNotes/{{Libya}}, had lobbied the government to introduce a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) as a legal option that would allow it to [[KarmaHoudini escape legal consequences for its actions]] [[KarmaHoudiniWarranty temporarily]]. That paid off, but when Wilson-Raybould didn't want to offer SNC a DPA, Trudeau and his staffers lobbied her ''personally'' to try to change her mind, which contradicted the principle of prosecutorial independence.[[/note]] The scandal caused the Liberals' poll numbers to tank at the start of 2019, and it looked odds-on that Trudeau would not be re-elected. However, they managed to recover and just barely held onto power at the election, albeit being reduced to a minority government, with 157 out of 338 seats. Ironically, Justin Trudeau's father, UsefulNotes/{{Pierre|Trudeau}}, met the same fate at his first re-election in 1972.
* The Conservatives, after two years of poor polling numbers following the 2015 election, quickly began to regroup after Andrew Scheer's (MP for Regina-Qu'Appelle) election as party leader in 2017 and led in the polls at various points in 2018 and 2019. However, they could not maintain said polling leads for very long, and entered the election polling roughly equal numbers to the Liberals. In the end, their campaign was hurt by various factors -- in particular, a platform that was accused of [[PanderingToTheBase appealing a little too stridently to the party's western base]] while offering little to the more populous Ontario and Quebec, being caught off-guard by the Bloc's resurgence in Quebec, and Doug Ford's provincial Conservative government in Ontario suffering a steep decline in popularity during 2019 -- resulting in them actually winning the popular vote by 200,000 votes[[note]]Mostly off the back of winning a number of [[LandslideElection absurdly huge majorities]] in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and rural Manitoba; the Liberals by contrast won a lot of closer races in Ontario, Quebec, and to a lesser extent, British Columbia.[[/note]] and winning almost as many seats as former Prime Minister Stephen Harper did when he won his first mandate in 2006 (121 vs. 124), but falling 36 seats short of the Liberals and thus not being able to form a government due to no other party having the numbers needed for the Tories even to overtake the Liberals, much less hold a majority in the Commons.

* The NDP continued their slow decline that began at the 2015 election, losing further ground. In 2017 the party elected Jagmeet Singh, then deputy leader of the Ontario NDP, as leader, making him the first person from a visible minority (as a practising Sikh) to lead a Canadian political party.[[note]]Singh wasn't the first Christian NDP leader: David Lewis, who led them from 1972 to 1975, was a Jewish atheist.[[/note]] While Singh's installation as leader was initially well-received, the NDP's polling numbers gradually slumped in 2018 and early 2019, as voters became increasingly sceptical of Singh's ability to lead the party (it didn't much help that he didn't initially hold a seat, only winning Burnaby South in a by-election just eight months before the national election). The election campaign, and especially the official leaders' debates, saw Singh finally come into his own, leading to hopes that he might be able to replicate former leader Jack Layton's polling surge in the 2011 election. However, it ended up proving too little, too late,[[note]]It probably didn't help that while Justin Trudeau has become a somewhat divisive figure, he's still nowhere '''near''' as overwhelmingly disliked as then-Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff was in 2011.[[/note]] and between their support in Quebec largely returning to the Bloc (BQ leader Blanchet won his federal seat of Beloeil-Chambly from an NDP incumbent, for example) and voters elsewhere voting Liberal to keep the Tories out, they ended up winning just 24 seats, their weakest performance since the 2004 election. They did at least hold the consolation of being the {{kingmaker|Scenario}}s in the new parliament, with Trudeau being dependent on their support to remain as Prime Minister.

* The People's Party of Canada (PPC) were the new kids on the block. Formed in September 2018 by Scheer's Conservative leadership runner-up Maxime Bernier, it has a broadly similar range of political positions to the Tories, but with a more populist bent and a much firmer libertarian and anti-immigration stance. Their policies failed to find much favour among voters, however, and their campaign ended in disaster, with Bernier losing his own seat (Beauce) by over 6,000 votes to the Conservative challenger, and no other PPC candidate coming even vaguely close to winning a seat -- to add insult to injury, the most they likely achieved was throwing a few seats to the Liberals, NDP, and Bloc due to vote-splitting from the Tories -- with their total of 292,808 votes, a meagre 1.64% share,[[note]]For perspective, this is about what the defunct Social Credit Party got in the 1980 election, which saw them shut out of parliament for the last time -- and unlike the People's Party, they generally only bothered nominating candidates in Quebec, Alberta, and British Columbia, rather than nationwide.[[/note]] leading to many questions about the party's long-term viability.

Provincial politics tends to have the Conservatives, Liberals, and NDP as the primary parties as well, though there are exceptions: both Saskatchewan's Saskatchewan Party and B.C.'s Liberal Party are in practice [[EnemyMine mergers of provincial Liberals and Conservatives]] in opposition to both provinces' powerful NDP, Alberta conservatives saw a decade of [[AHouseDivided division]] between the more conservative Wild Rose Party and the old Progressive Conservatives before they reunited in 2017, and Quebec politics is [[MindScrew just plain weird]] because it includes a secessionist-federalist spectrum in addition to the typical left-right and authoritarian-libertarian spectrums.[[note]]It features the slightly left-leaning, separatist Parti Québécois (PQ), the slightly right-leaning, federalist Quebec Liberal Party (PLQ), the centre-right, autonomist Coalition Avenir Québec ([[FunWithAcronyms CAQ]]), and the openly socialist and separatist Québec Solidaire. In practice, however, the provincial parties in Quebec all have moderate and extreme factions, united more by their position on the sovereignty question than anything else. The CAQ claims to eschew the entire federalism-separatism debate, and has lately been poaching voter support and [=MNAs=] from the Liberals, the PQ, and the defunct ADQ. One thing to note: Quebec is somewhat to the left of Canada in general, notably on social issues, and as such, the Quebec Liberal Party is very similar to the federal Conservative Party. Indeed, former Quebec premier Jean Charest rose to prominence as a Progressive Conservative Cabinet minister in the 1980s government of Brian Mulroney — and even became the leader of the party after the 1993 wipeout — before becoming leader of the Quebec Liberals.[[/note]] The NDP does frequently win in provincial elections, especially in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia where, for historical reasons, they're the only major left-wing party in a two-party system and thus viable contenders for government by default.

Alberta is also an interesting case — having been a province since 1905, they have experienced only four changes of government: one during the Depression, one after popular premier Ernest Manning (father of Reform Party founder Preston Manning) resigned and was succeeded by the much less able Harry Strom, and the latest being because of falling oil prices that resulted in an increasingly unpopular NDP majority government's replacement with a Conservative one (led, incidentally, by [[HesBack Jason Kenney]], a former federal minister in the Harper government). From 1971 to 2015, a string of PC leaders [[LandslideElection won a majority in every election]], to the point where Alberta was routinely considered a one-party state, and it was [[SeriousBusiness only half a joke]].[[note]]Until the NDP lost government in 2019, Alberta had never gone back to a party after voting it out of power and the Conservative Party had the longest string of elections, the only comparable run being the 1935–71 Social Creditors, whom the [=PCs=] had themselves eliminated. This trend is also technically guaranteed in the future now since the [=PCs=] and Wildrose have merged into the "new" United Conservative Party.[[/note]]

The environment has also become a [[{{Pun}} hot]] topic of late. The Green Party has put environmental regulations at the center of their platforms, the NDP and Liberals also support reforms, and the Conservatives are more cautious, but still interested in, at minimum, seeming like they care. The Harper Conservatives’ environmental platform in government was effectively "We’ll Just See What the U.S. Does", and the U.S. didn’t seem to be doing much of anything, so Canada didn't either. In fact, under Harper's government, no provinces save Québec reached their targets under the Kyoto Protocol and a few even increased their greenhouse gas emissions since the PM simply refused to follow the Protocol's targets. It remains to be seen what the more explicitly pro-environment Liberal government will do on that file. In the meantime, the provinces are generally content to sit and bitch at each other about who gets what money. This has been described as “exactly like UsefulNotes/TheEuropeanUnion, just with more land”.

Two of the more recent scandals are the “sponsorship scandal,” where large sums of money earmarked for national-unity advertising programs in Quebec were used improperly (read: given away to friends of the then-ruling Liberal Party), and the “Airbus affair,” wherein then-Prime Minister Brian Mulroney stands accused of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from a German arms dealer as kickbacks on the purchase of Airbus jets for Air Canada, which the government owned at the time. More recently, in 2013, several senators (some Liberals, but mostly Conservatives) were accused of claiming excessive amounts of expenses, particularly living expenses,[[note]]Senators must own property in the province they represent, but they can claim expenses if their primary residence is more than 100 kilometres from Ottawa. This led senators to [[LoopholeAbuse designate small cabins in the middle of nowhere as their "primary residence"]] in the province they represent, allowing them to claim expenses for the large houses/luxury condos in Ottawa where they actually live.[[/note]] and are being investigated by the RCMP. When the Senate ordered them to repay the money, some did so while others went to court. This led to [[HereWeGoAgain another round]] of discussion regarding Senate reform, which almost inevitably change very little.

Two more recent cases of what could be described as "sex scandals" have happened within the past few years. One involved the ''very'' public 2005 breakup of two prominent Conservative [=MPs=], Belinda Stronach and Peter [=MacKay=], who had been dating, when Stronach defected to the Liberals for a Cabinet post — which she lost the next year after the Liberals lost an election — leading to a stunned-looking [=MacKay=] standing on his farm talking about how “at least my dog is loyal”, and a narrow aversion of an election in the now evenly-divided House (since the government can’t fall on a tie, and Stronach’s defection got them up to parity). It also led to a massive variety of ribald jokes at Stronach’s expense from prominent Conservatives, the most notable of which is then-Alberta Premier Ralph Klein's assertion that “[[NoTrueScotsman She didn’t have a Conservative bone in her body]] … okay, [[DoubleEntendre maybe one]],” many of which naturally [[CrossesTheLineTwice proved controversial in their own right]]. The other involved the then-Minister of Foreign Affairs dating a woman with connections to a chapter of the Hell’s Angels and actually leaving important classified documents lying around her apartment followed by their mysterious disappearance.

UsefulNotes/{{Canada}} is a federal parliamentary democracy within a constitutional monarchy. The head of state is the sovereign, currently [[UsefulNotes/HMTheQueen Queen Elizabeth II]], and the head of government is the Prime Minister, currently Justin Trudeau. Any citizen at least 18 years old may vote in any election, with two exceptions: the Chief and Deputy Chief Electoral Officers.

** Following the election of Justin Trudeau's Liberals in the 2015 election, the new government pledged to reform the way in which [=MPs=] were elected, following a public consultation. When the public consultation and Commons committee work failed to yield a consensus (arguably by design), and public sentiment ran to electoral methods that Trudeau and his Cabinet did not favour, the Liberals [[ILied abruptly dropped]] the idea.[[note]]People noticed the coincidence that had the 2015 election been held under some form of proportional representation, the Liberals would have received roughly 15% or 50 seats ''less'' representation and been reduced to a minority government.[[/note]]

* The '''Governor-General of Canada''', currently Julie Payette, is the representative of the Sovereign, appointed in theory by the Sovereign and in practice by the Prime Minister, and has a mammoth assortment of powers, ranging from the ability to dissolve Parliament, appoint Senators, Supreme Court Justices, all high-ranking bureaucrats, and the Prime Minister and Cabinet, though they must keep the approval of the House of Commons. (S)he is also Commander-in-Chief of the [[UsefulNotes/CanucksWithChinooks Canadian military]]. However, these powers are bound by a large amount of unwritten convention, and are almost never used except on instruction from the Prime Minister — the last time they were, in 1926, the resulting “King-Byng Affair” resulted in a massive public outcry that ended in the re-election of Prime Minister W.L. Mackenzie King, whom Governor-General Lord Byng had rejected.[[note]]Mackenzie King was Prime Minister despite the fact that his Liberal Party didn't even have the most seats in the House of Commons. When he tried to ask Lord Byng to dissolve Parliament after it voted against his government and call an election, he refused and appointed Conservative leader Arthur Meighen as PM instead. Meighen fared no better, so an election was called, which Mackenzie King handily won.[[/note]] The Governor-General is, in theory, supposed to be chosen by the Sovereign from a list of candidates chosen by the Prime Minister. For quite some time now, the Prime Minister’s list of Governor-General appointees has been exactly [[YouAreInCommandNow one name long]].

* The '''Supreme Court of Canada''' comprises nine justices, appointed for unfixed terms, though required to retire at age 75. Three are from Quebec, the other six from the rest of Canada, because Quebec civil law is structured differently than [[UsefulNotes/TheCommonLaw the English-derived systems]] used elsewhere in the country. By convention, three of the other six justices are from Ontario, two from the West or the North, and one from the Atlantic or Maritime provinces.

The Prime Minister is the head of the Canadian government for all intents and purposes; you must be chosen as your party’s leader on top of being an elected representative, in a manner strikingly similar to the Speaker of the House in American politics. Due to the nature of the Westminster-style parliament, Canada’s executive branch is purely ceremonial, so the usual executive powers are devolved to the office of the Prime Minister and their Cabinet, who are also sitting [=MPs=] (or rarely senators). Canadians do not vote for the Prime Minister directly, however; instead, they vote for the Member of Parliament in their riding only. The party with the most seats in the House of Commons forms a majority government, when they control more than half the seats, or a minority government, when they control less than half the seats,[[note]]Usually, but not necessarily, they still have more seats than any single party. For instance, Liberal Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King retained power after one election [[EnemyMine with another party's support]] even though the Conservatives had more seats.[[/note]] and the Prime Minister is then appointed by the party itself.[[note]]Theoretically, whenever where there is a minority government, some of the other parties could get together and form a coalition government if they can get a simple majority of the House’s membership onside with them (meaning, practically, that those parties must have more than half of [=MPs=] between them). However, this has never happened formally since Confederation; the one time it seemed like this might happen, in 2008, it was kiboshed by the ruling Conservatives’ clever exploitation of EaglelandOsmosis and general distrust of the separatist Bloc Québécois. For all intents and purposes, the “Unionist Party” that ran in 1917 was a coalition between the governing Conservatives and members of the Liberal Opposition who supported the Government’s plan to impose conscription to muster manpower for Canada’s [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarI war]] effort.[[/note]]

Territories differ from provinces in that the power of a territory is conferred by the federal government with an Act of Parliament in the name of the Sovereign like all other legislation, while the power of a province is granted directly from the Sovereign by the province’s constitution. Thus each province is a sovereign constitutional monarchy — to wit, an independent kingdom — that, in terms of constitutional theory, has voluntarily surrendered a substantial chunk of its sovereignty to a different sovereign constitutional monarchy that rules over it in certain matters. That the monarch of each of these eleven (ten provincial, one federal) monarchies is exactly the same person is of no consequence. The territories, on the other hand, are administered directly by the federal government in the name of the Crown of Canada. In other words, it’s ''exactly'' like the difference between a U.S. state and a U.S. territory, except for the obvious difference that the United States, being a republic, has no Sovereign to confer legitimacy, and relies on ‘the people’ instead.

Municipal politics are pretty much the same all over: the people of each town, city or regional municipality elect a mayor and some number of councillors, ranging from a handful in small towns to 64 in UsefulNotes/{{Montreal}}, generally depending on population. While party politics tend to be absent from smaller towns, bigger cities like UsefulNotes/{{Vancouver}} and Montreal tend to have formal political parties, though they are generally unrelated to the provincial and federal parties; not that councillors and mayors have no ideological stances or federal/provincial affiliations. Municipal political parties also tend to be less stable than parties at the other levels of government; often, although not always, they are simply ad hoc coalitions of councillors aligned with some mayoral candidate or another, and periodically dissolve to reconstitute entirely new political parties around new candidates.

Nova Scotia technically has no cities at all, with all municipal governance taking place purely at the regional municipality level -- even the province's major communities, such as Halifax, Dartmouth, Sydney and Antigonish, are not actual towns or cities in their own right, but simply "urban service areas" governed entirely by the regional council. Elsewhere, some but not all of the major cities (e.g. UsefulNotes/{{Toronto}}, Ottawa) are also not part of a county structure, but function like "consolidated city-county" or "independent city" governments in the United States.

Canada also has a very short election cycle, which can, in theory, occur at any time. Due to a fixed election date law passed in 2009, federal elections usually occur on the third Monday in October in the fourth calendar year after the previous poll. However, if the government falls in a non-confidence vote, elections can occur outside of the usual time, which often happens in minority government situations sooner or later. A non-confidence vote occurs when a supply bill — that is, a bill dealing with the spending of money — is defeated, and reflects that the Parliament no longer believes that the Prime Minister is an effective leader. Essentially, it’s the legislative equivalent of [[YouHaveFailedMe "We’re firing you."]] This can force an election, and the Prime Minister can ask the Governor General to dissolve the government at any time — it is expected, but not legally required, that if it has not been at least six months since the last election, the GG may simply ask the leader of the next-largest party to try to form a government rather than saying HereWeGoAgain Once government is dissolved, the election cycle normally lasts five to six weeks, during which candidates campaign and stump for votes.

American-style social conservatism is conversely regarded as a fringe view, with the conservative politicians focusing on fiscal issues. Indeed, this was a bone of contention for some of Prime Minister Harper’s own, more [[MoralGuardians moralistic]], backbenchers, and remains an issue for the Conservative Party post-Harper. Canadian conservatives tend to be fiscally conservative, supporting low taxes and local control, while remaining much more socially liberal and secular compared to their American counterparts. Their closest relatives on the U.S. right are libertarians like UsefulNotes/RonPaul and Gary Johnson.

Following the 2019 election, the current standings are as follows:
* The Liberal Party, despite having flown high in the polls during the first two years of Justin Trudeau's leadership, began to stumble in 2018 for various reasons including the unpopularity of Kathleen Wynne's provincial Liberal government in Ontario, a series of gaffe-prone state visits, and most damagingly, the emergence of the SNC-Lavalin scandal and Trudeau's alleged attempt to cover it up by firing Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould and later expelling her from the party. The scandal caused the Liberals' poll numbers to tank at the start of 2019, and it looked odds-on that Trudeau would not be re-elected. However, they managed to recover and just barely held onto power at the election, albeit being reduced to a minority government, with 157 out of 338 seats. Ironically, Justin Trudeau's father, Pierre, met the same fate at his first re-election in 1972.
* The Conservatives, after two years of poor polling numbers following the 2015 election, quickly began to regroup after Andrew Scheer's election as party leader in 2017 and led in the polls at various points in 2018 and 2019. However, they could not maintain said polling leads for very long, and entered the election polling roughly equal numbers to the Liberals. In the end, their campaign was hurt by various factors -- in particular, a platform that was accused of [[PanderingToTheBase appealing a little too stridently to the party's western base]] while offering little to the more populous Ontario and Quebec, being caught off-guard by the Bloc's resurgence in Quebec, and Doug Ford's provincial Conservative government in Ontario suffering a steep decline in popularity during 2019 -- resulting in them actually winning the popular vote by 200,000 votes[[note]]Mostly off the back of winning a number of absurdly huge majorities in Alberta, Saskachewan and Manitoba; the Liberals by contrast won a lot of closer races in Ontario, Quebec, and to a lesser extent, British Columbia.[[/note]] and winning almost as many seats as former Prime Minister Stephen Harper did when he won his first mandate in 2006 (121 vs. 124), but falling 36 seats short of the Liberals and thus not being able to form a government due to no other party having the numbers needed for the Tories even to overtake the Liberals, much less hold a majority in the Commons.

* The NDP continued their slow decline that began at the 2015 election, losing further ground. In 2017 the party elected Jagmeet Singh as leader, making him the first person from a visible minority (as a practising Sikh) to lead a Canadian political party.[[note]]Singh wasn't the first Christian NDP leader: David Lewis, who led them from 1972 to 1975, was a Jewish atheist.[[/note]] While Singh's installation as leader was initially well-received, the NDP's polling numbers gradually slumped in 2018 and early 2019, as voters became increasingly sceptical of Singh's ability to lead the party (it didn't much help that he didn't initially hold a seat, only winning Burnaby South in a by-election just eight months before the national election). The election campaign, and especially the official leaders' debates, saw Singh finally come into his own, leading to hopes that he might be able to replicate former leader Jack Layton's polling surge in the 2011 election. However, it ended up proving too little, too late,[[note]]It probably didn't help that while Justin Trudeau has become a somewhat divisive figure, he's still nowhere '''near''' as overwhelmingly disliked as then-Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff was in 2011.[[/note]] and between their support in Quebec largely returning to the Bloc and voters elsewhere voting Liberal to keep the Tories out, they ended up winning just 24 seats, their weakest performance since the 2004 election. They did at least hold the consolation of being the {{kingmaker|Scenario}}s in the new parliament, with Trudeau being dependent on their support to remain as Prime Minister.
* The Green Party made further progress compared to the 2015 election, though perhaps not by as much as they had hoped. Having picked up Nanaimo-Ladysmith from the NDP in a by-election earlier in the year, and with their pro-environmental policies proving a hit with voters, many polls were putting them near-equal to the NDP, leading to hopes for a breakthrough. In the end, they nearly doubled their popular vote share, but ended up with just three [=MPs=] (the third seized Fredericton, which contains the eponymous capital of New Brunswick); still a very respectable performance considering the party's size and resources, but it ended any hopes of them being possible kingmakers in the new Parliament. Afterwards, long-time party leader Elizabeth May announced her retirement from the position, though remains as an MP.
* The People's Party of Canada (PPC) were the new kids on the block. Formed in September 2018 by Scheer's Conservative leadership runner-up Maxime Bernier, it has a broadly similar range of political positions to the Tories, but with a more populist bent and a much firmer libertarian and anti-immigration stance. Their policies failed to find much favour among voters, however, and their campaign ended in disaster, with Bernier losing his own seat (Beauce) by over 6,000 votes, and no other PPC candidate coming even vaguely close to winning a seat -- to add insult to injury, the most they likely achieved was throwing a few seats to the Liberals, NDP, and Bloc due to vote-splitting from the Tories -- with their total of fewer than 300,000 votes, a meagre 1.64% share,[[note]]For perspective, this is about what the defunct Social Credit Party got in the 1980 election, which saw them shut out of parliament for the last time -- and unlike the People's Party, they generally only bothered nominating candidates in Quebec, Alberta, and British Columbia, rather than nationwide.[[/note]] leading to many questions about the party's long-term viability.

Provincial politics tends to also have the Conservatives, Liberals, and NDP as the primary parties, though there are exceptions: both Saskatchewan's Saskatchewan Party and B.C.'s Liberal Party are in practice [[EnemyMine mergers of provincial Liberals and Conservatives]] in opposition to both provinces' powerful NDP, Alberta conservatives saw a decade of [[AHouseDivided division]] between the more conservative Wild Rose Party and the old Progressive Conservatives before they reunited in 2017, and Quebec politics is [[MindScrew just plain weird]] because it includes a secessionist-federalist spectrum in addition to the typical left-right and authoritarian-libertarian spectrums.[[note]]It features slightly left-leaning, separatist Parti Québécois (PQ), the slightly right-leaning, federalist Quebec Liberal Party (PLQ), the centre-right, autonomist Coalition Avenir Québec ([[FunWithAcronyms CAQ]]), and the openly socialist and separatist Québec Solidaire. In practice, however, the provincial parties in Quebec all have moderate and extreme factions, united more by their position on the sovereignty question than anything else. The CAQ claims to eschew the entire federalism-separatism debate, and has lately been poaching voter support and [=MNAs=] from the Liberals, the PQ, and the defunct ADQ. One thing to note: Quebec is somewhat to the left of Canada in general, notably on social issues, and as such, the Quebec Liberal Party is very similar to the federal Conservative Party; indeed, the former Premier of Quebec, Jean Charest, rose to prominence as a Progressive Conservative Cabinet minister in the 1980s government of Brian Mulroney — and even became the leader of the party after the 1993 wipeout — before becoming leader of the Quebec Liberals.[[/note]] The NDP does frequently win in provincial elections, especially in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia where, for historical reasons, they're the only major left-wing party in a two-party system and thus viable contenders for government by default.

Alberta is also an interesting case — having been a province since 1905, they have experienced only four changes of government: one during the Depression, one after popular premier Ernest Manning (father of Reform Party founder Preston Manning) resigned and was succeeded by the much less able Harry Strom, and the latest being because of falling oil prices that resulted in an increasingly unpopular NDP majority government's replacement with a Conservative one. From 1971 to 2015, a string of PC leaders [[LandslideElection won a majority in every election]], to the point where Alberta was routinely considered a one-party state, and it was [[SeriousBusiness only half a joke]].[[note]]Until the NDP lost government in 2019, Alberta had never gone back to a party after voting it out of power and the Conservative Party had the longest string of elections, the only comparable run being the 1935–71 Social Creditors, whom the [=PCs=] had themselves eliminated. This trend is also technically guaranteed in the future now since the [=PCs=] and Wildrose have merged into the "new" United Conservative Party.[[/note]]

The result of the above is that although parties can have the same name at federal and provincial levels, often that’s ''all'' they have in common. The NDP is an exception, in that all provincial [=NDPs=] are branches of the federal NDP, while most of the provincial Liberals (Liberals in the Atlantic provinces being an exception) and Conservatives are independent of their federal counterparts. Canadians are usually well aware of this, so nobody blinks when, say, a former NDP Premier of Ontario like Bob Rae can make a serious run at leadership of the federal Liberal Party (and indeed be interim leader), former federal Progressive Conservative leader Jean Charest can become the Liberal Premier of Québec, or the former NDP Premier of British Columbia Ujjal Dosanjh can also switch parties to become a federal Liberal cabinet minister.

Municipal politics tends to be officially nonpartisan, except in British Columbia and in Montreal, Quebec. However, individual councillors and mayors are often known to have particular partisan leanings — for example, Jack Layton, former leader of the federal NDP, was a member of the Toronto City Council before he won the leadership, and the current Mayor of Toronto, John Tory, once led the Ontario PC Party and worked for the federal [=PCs=] before they collapsed.

Sex scandals are rarer than in the States. Despite stereotypes that Canadian politicians are better behaved in this respect, it is just more probable that the Canadian media are less likely to report on it and/or the Canadian populace less inclined to care. Two notable exceptions are the Gerda Munsinger case, which embarrassed the federal government of John Diefenbaker and prompted the resignation of a federal Cabinet minister, and the Colin Thatcher case, which centered around a former minister in the Saskatchewan provincial government who was arrested and convicted of the [[StuffedIntoTheFridge murder of his wife]] [=JoAnn=] after she divorced him for his numerous extramarital affairs.

A real sex scandal occurred in 2016 when Liberal Fisheries Minister Hunter Tootoo resigned from his cabinet post and was removed from the Liberal caucus (thus sitting as an independent MP). While the initial reports were that it was due to issues with alcohol (for which Tootoo entered rehab), it later surfaced that a significant factor earning Prime Minister Trudeau's ire had been Tootoo sleeping with a staffer, who had been found by security trashing his parliamentary office. While the affair alone would generally have been dismissed as a minor offense, it was soon reported that the reason she was trashing the office in fury was her discovery that Tootoo had also been sleeping with ''her mother''. The government has never officially commented on the story and, in Canadian fashion, once he'd resigned and thrown out of caucus to become an unimportant independent backbencher, the media didn't bother pursuing the case as it was considered a private matter and no longer relevant.

In February 2010, Conservative cabinet minister (for the status of women!) Helena Guergis was accused of throwing a hissy fit at the Charlottetown airport, located in Canada’s smallest province, P.E.I. The minister allegedly threw shoes across the security screening area and banged on a security door. When media and the Liberals asked for the security tapes, CATSA (the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority) could not provide them (many suspect [[ExecutiveMeddling Conservative meddling]]). Prime Minister Harper stood by her for a while (in the face of public information), then rumours began to rise that Guergis had been letting her husband, a former cabinet minister, use her office to promote his business. Apparently some photos surfaced of the two in a [[DenOfIniquity shady strip club]] with [[HookersAndBlow cocaine and, reportedly, “busty hookers”]]. Guergis was then [[YouHaveFailedMe expelled from cabinet by Harper]], [[YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness expelled from the Conservative Party caucus]], and [[OhCrap became the subject of an RCMP investigation]] (all thanks to ''private'' information). Even after the RCMP cleared Guergis of wrongdoing, she [[TheAtoner continued to sit as an independent MP]], but lost her seat to the Conservative challenger in the subsequent election. This led to the joke that Harper came to stand always behind his cabinet members because it was [[CaughtWithYourPantsDown easier to push them under a bus from there]].

The more recent ‘robocall’ scandal had its roots in the 2011 federal election. It came to light that ''someone'' was sending automated ‘robocalls’ (and, in some cases, targeted live calls) to non-Conservative or ex-Conservative voters in a number of different ridings, falsely directing them to incorrect polling stations or otherwise harassing them into not voting at all. Elections Canada got wind of these incidents via complaints from the public, and since the scandal broke they have accumulated over ''[[UpToEleven 31,000 reports]]'' of similar calls from across Canada. In the most high-profile case, in the riding of Guelph in Ontario, [[MediaWatchdog Elections Canada]] has traced at least some of the calls to a subsidiary of an automated calling company in Edmonton, which in turn was contacted both by the Guelph Conservative campaign as well as a disposable mobile phone registered under the alias “Pierre Poutine” of “Separatist Street” in Joliette, Quebec. (The “Pierre Poutine” name was likely taken off of an independent food caterer in Guelph, while the “Separatist Street” location was probably a crude attempt at a TakeThat to the Quebec independence movement.) In another riding where voter suppression tactics have been alleged (Nipissing–Timiskaming), the Conservative won by just ''eighteen votes'', and this was far from the only close riding across the country, potentially making the difference between a majority and minority government. The opposition NDP and Liberals [[StatusQuoIsGod rather predictably reacted with outrage]], while the Conservatives [[IWasNeverHere naturally denied any responsibility]], though a low-ranking Conservative staffer from the Guelph campaign has since resigned his position at the office of a Toronto-area MP. Spinoff allegations have included voter registration fraud as well as illegal campaign financing. Federal opinion polls registered minimal impact as a result of the ‘robocall scandal’; a federal judge offered the Tories a not-quite-absolution in April 2013.

On the municipal level, in May 2013, reporters from the ''Toronto Star'' and gossip website ''Gawker'' reported that they had viewed and been offered a video showing Toronto Mayor Rob Ford [[DrugsAreBad smoking crack cocaine]] and making homophobic slurs. Though Ford had a well-documented history of mild to belligerent public intoxication, he [[SuspiciouslySpecificDenial denied and evaded questions]] for several months — until, in October 2013, [[SeriousBusiness the Toronto police]] reported that they had recovered a deleted copy of what appears to be that same video from a hard drive seized in an anti-drug raid. Ford then changed his story and admitted to “probably” having used crack cocaine in the midst of a “drunken stupor,” while blaming the media for not asking the right questions (which they had, and he had ignored) and claiming [[ImplausibleDeniability that he was not an addict]]. With Ford and several of his associates and assistants now under police investigation, Toronto City Council [[EnemyMine banded together]] to strip him of most of his powers (at least those which they could remove under provincial laws) along with his staff and budget, and shift them to the deputy mayor. Rob Ford responded by playing the victim of a “coup d'état” while proudly going on to contest the 2014 municipal election. Not long after losing most of his mayoral powers, [[HereWeGoAgain another crack video surfaced, this time with screenshots]], forcing Mayor Ford to enter rehab. [[TenMinuteRetirement He continued to run for Mayor upon leaving rehab]], but a hospital visit revealed an abdominal tumor. Mayor Ford withdrew from the mayoral race, opting to run for his old Ward 2 seat on City Council. He died on March 22, 2016. Rob’s brother Doug (the then Ward 2 councillor) submitted his papers to run for mayor with one hour to spare before the nomination deadline. In the end, John Tory became mayor … but Doug Ford got the last laugh by becoming Premier of Ontario in 2018, a position Tory had run for in 2007 as leader of the Ontario Conservative Party and lost.

->''“If you put on too much weight? C’est la faute du fédéral!''[[note]]“It’s the fault of the federal [government]!” The song parodies the tendency of Canadian provincial governments (especially that of Quebec) to blame everything they don't like on the federal government.[[/note]]

** Following the election of Justin Trudeau's Liberals in the 2015 election, the new government pledged to reform the way in which [=MPs=] were elected, following a public consultation. When the public consultation and Commons committee work failed to yield a consensus (arguably by design), and public sentiment ran to electoral methods that Trudeau and his Cabinet did not favour, the Liberals [[ILied abruptly dropped]] the idea.[[note]]People noticed the fact that if the 2015 election had been held under a new proportional representation alternative the Liberals would have received roughly 15% or 50 seats ''less'' representation and been reduced to a minority government.[[/note]]

** The Senate, following a bit from its UsefulNotes/{{American|PoliticalSystem}} counterpart, also allows for some regional representation, where the number of senators from each province is much more equalized. Indeed, it's almost reversed in some ways, with the more populous Western provinces having far fewer Senators ''per capita'' than the smaller Atlantic ones; as a result, Western premiers are the most likely to complain about Senatorial imbalance.
** In practice, the Senate is often useful to Prime Ministers as a means of rewarding cronies, getting troublesome allies out of the way, and keeping their own mark on Parliament long after they have lost election or left politics themselves. More recently, due to public concerns over patronage as well as occasional scandals over fraud and improper expense claims, there have been calls to reform or even abolish the Senate. The Liberals have generally supported the status quo, while a wide swath of the New Democratic Party wants to [[YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness abolish the Senate altogether]], and the Conservatives (historically strong in the West) have usually supported an elected Senate. However, after the 2015 election returned Justin Trudeau's Liberals, a small but significant reform was initiated, with senatorial appointments being turned over to an independent commission to select experts [[AsskickingEqualsAuthority based on merit]]. This has drawn criticism from some provinces, particularly (as expected) the western ones, for failing to do anything about the lopsided distribution of seats; to this, the government has replied that even if it wanted to do that, it couldn't, as that would require a constitutional amendment that could essentially never pass without the consent of at least one Atlantic province, whose influence would be correspondingly diluted ([[SarcasmMode good luck with that]]).

The Prime Minister is the head of the Canadian government for all intents and purposes; you must be chosen as your party’s leader on top of being an elected representative, in a manner strikingly similar to the Speaker of the House in American politics. Due to the nature of the Westminster-style parliament, Canada’s executive branch is purely ceremonial, so the usual executive powers are devolved to the office of the Prime Minister and their Cabinet, who are also sitting [=MPs=] (or rarely Senators). Canadians do not vote for the Prime Minister directly, however; instead, they vote for the Member of Parliament in their riding only. The party with the most seats in the House of Commons forms a majority government, when they control more than half the seats, or a minority government, when they control less than half the seats,[[note]]Usually, but not necessarily, they still have more seats than any single party. For instance, Liberal Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King retained power after one election [[EnemyMine with another party's support]] even though the Conservatives had more seats.[[/note]] and the Prime Minister is then appointed by the party itself.[[note]]Theoretically, in any situation where there is a minority government, some of the other parties could get together and form a coalition government provided they can get a simple majority of the House’s membership onside with them (meaning, practically, that those parties must have more than half of [=MPs=] between them). However, this has never happened formally since Confederation; the one time it seemed like this might happen, in 2008, it was kiboshed by the ruling Conservatives’ clever exploitation of EaglelandOsmosis and general distrust of the separatist Bloc Québécois. For all intents and purposes, the “Unionist Party” that ran in 1917 was a coalition between the governing Conservatives and members of the Liberal Opposition who supported the Government’s plan to impose conscription to muster manpower for Canada’s [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarI war]] effort.[[/note]]

In practice, Canadians know what candidate a party will nominate for Prime Minister during the election cycle: by [[LikeYouWouldReallyDoIt so-far-unbroken]] convention, it is the party leader. In the readily possible event that the Prime Minister loses his/her riding, a junior member of the party will typically resign his/her seat for the party leader to win in a by-election, as the Prime Minister is normally expected to have a seat to serve in the government.[[note]]although it is possible for a prime minister to serve without holding a seat in the House of Commons (see John Turner, 1984), a prime minister without a seat would face public concern about his democratic legitimacy.[[/note]] This happened as early as the 1870s, after John A. Macdonald’s Conservative government collapsed over the Canadian Pacific Railway scandal (see below) and he lost his own seat in Kingston, Ontario. From 1878 to 1882, he represented the riding of Victoria, British Columbia, since he couldn’t get elected in the part of the country he came from.

The Northwest Territories and Nunavut operate using a [[NoPartyGiven nonpartisan]] consensus government model, unique to these territories: the premier and speaker are then chosen from among the elected [=MLAs=], who are all officially independent of political parties. This is similar theoretically to the U.S. state of Nebraska’s non-executive legislature and most municipalities in Canada. This nonpartisan model is supposedly based on the traditions of the Inuit and other peoples indigenous to the territories. [=MLAs=] in Nunavut and the NWT may be affiliated with federal parties privately, however, and should they pursue federal politics, align with a federal party; at present, the three territories are represented by Liberal [=MPs=] in the House and a Liberal and two Conservatives in the Senate.

Provincial responsibilities include transportation, health, education, and administration of justice. This last includes (as mentioned above) the adjudication of disputes in private law — contract, tort, wills, trusts, estates, etc., which is to say, most of the actual work that law actually is. Also, in practice, whining about unfair treatment from the federal government is a major responsibility of premiers (as demonstrated by one of the page quotes).

One of the most interesting comparisons between the Canadian and U.S. political systems is in seeing how they have evolved since their founding. The American Founding Fathers conferred all powers not explicitly provided to the federal government to the states, leading to what was in theory a decentralized country. When UsefulNotes/TheAmericanCivilWar broke out, many British North American observers blamed the conflict on America’s decentralized political structure. The Fathers of Confederation thus made sure that the new Dominion of Canada would have a much more centralized system, and even gave the federal government the power to explicitly disallow provincial legislation. Many of the English-speaking Fathers even wanted a “legislative union” like Britain, which would simply fuse all the colonies into a larger one, in the process erasing all colonial borders. However, the French-speaking Fathers of Lower Canada (which would become Quebec) were adamantly opposed to this because they would become a mere minority,[[note]]The Anglophone Maritime Fathers also opposed it for the same reason, but it’s less well remembered than Quebec opposition because, well, HistoryRepeats in Quebec’s case.[[/note]] and so Confederation became a federal system, albeit a strongly centralized one.

Municipal politics are pretty much the same all over: the people of each town, city or regional municipality elect a mayor and some number of councillors, ranging from a handful in small towns to 64 in UsefulNotes/{{Montreal}}, generally depending on population. While party politics tend to be absent from smaller towns, bigger cities like UsefulNotes/{{Vancouver}} and Montreal tend to have formal political parties, though they are generally unrelated to the provincial and federal parties. Municipal political parties also tend to be less stable than parties at the other levels of government; often, although not always, they are simply ad hoc coalitions of councillors aligned with a particular mayoral candidate, and periodically dissolve to reconstitute entirely new political parties around new candidates.

Nova Scotia technically has no cities at all, with all municipal governance taking place purely at the regional municipality level -- even the province's major communities, such as Halifax, Dartmouth, Sydney and Antigonish, are not actual towns or cities in their own right, but simply "urban service areas" governed entirely by the regional council. Elsewhere, some but not all of the major cities (e.g. Toronto, Ottawa) are also not part of a county structure, but function like "consolidated city-county" or "independent city" governments in the United States.

Canada also has a very short election cycle, which can, in theory, occur at any time. Due to a fixed election date law, federal elections usually occur on the third Monday in October in the fourth calendar year after the previous poll. However, if the government falls in a non-confidence vote, elections can occur outside of the usual time, which often happens in minority government situations sooner or later. A non-confidence vote occurs when a supply bill — that is, a bill dealing with the spending of money — is defeated, and reflects that the Parliament no longer believes that the Prime Minister is an effective leader. Essentially, it’s the legislative equivalent of [[YouHaveFailedMe "We’re firing you."]] This can force an election, and the Prime Minister can ask the Governor General to dissolve the government at any time — it is expected, but not legally required, that if it has not been at least six months since the last election, the Governor-General may simply ask the leader of the next-largest party to try and form a government rather than saying HereWeGoAgain Once government is dissolved, the election cycle normally lasts five to six weeks, during which candidates campaign and stump for votes.

A variation of the normal election cycle ''almost'' occurred in December 2008 when the Liberals, NDP, and Bloc Québécois drew up a formal agreement to topple the ruling Conservative minority government in a non-confidence vote just six weeks after the election and ask the Governor-General to install them as a majority coalition government without triggering another election. While such an act is perfectly legitimate in a parliamentary democracy, it is quite unorthodox in Canada and the Conservatives countered by delaying the vote until January and launching a media blitz characterizing the act as a [[InsistentTerminology “coup d’état”]], banking on the assumption (proved correct) that [[ViewersAreMorons many Canadians didn't know how their government actually worked]]. The uncertainty of the Great Recession and the fact the coalition would have required the support of the separatist Bloc Québécois and made the unpopular Stéphane Dion the next Prime Minister even though his Liberal party had just suffered its [[CurbStompBattle worst vote-share (26%) since 1867]] also made the idea troubling even to many who understood its constitutionality, and the idea died in December when the Liberals replaced Dion and backed down.

In federal politics, the [[PowerTrio three major parties]] are the centre-right Conservative Party (the "Tories"), the centrist/centre-left Liberal Party (the "Grits"), and the left-wing/social democratic New Democratic Party (NDP or "Dippers"). Historically, the Liberals and Conservatives have been the two major parties and the only ones to govern, although both have suffered periods of [[TheRemnant electoral collapse]] (the Conservatives from the mid-1990s to mid-2000s; the Liberals from the mid-2000s until 2015). The NDP was for a long time [[TheChewToy a perpetual third/fourth party]], but has been an important force in Canadian politics, [[TheLancer propping up minority Liberal governments]] in 1972–74 and 2006 and frequently [[TheSmartGuy raising policy concerns]] that Liberal governments took forward. The Green Party, while still small compared to the big three, is increasing in visibility and mainstream support and won its first seat in the 2011 election. There are many other smaller parties (Marijuana Party, Communist Party, etc.), and a few [[RuleOfFunny frivolous yet funny ones]] (most prominently the Rhinoceros Party).

* The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, who can be considered the forerunners of the modern New Democratic Party. They were formed in the mid-1930s, and went on to hold a fairly decent amount of seats in the two decades ahead, before being forced to regroup and re-form as the NDP after the CCF were all but wiped out in the 1958 election. Saw an unexpected comeback in 2018, when NDP MP Erin Weir was ejected from the party, and re-labelled himself as a member of the CCF, though he didn't seek re-election the following year.
* The Bloc Québécois, a [[SingleIssueWonk Quebec separatist party]] with a very slight centre-left orientation overall, was the dominant party in Quebec and a significant force in Parliament from 1993 to 2011, but lost its party status and all but four seats in the 2011 election, leaving them as TheRemnant. They made a modest comeback in 2015, winning ten seats, which was still not enough to return them to official party status. In early 2018, disagreements over the Bloc's newest leader led to the tiny caucus splintering further to create the "Quebec parliamentary group", though the rebel [=MPs=] would return to the party later in the year. Come 2019, and the party recieved enough votes to be an official party once more, and the third-largest party overall given the huge amount of seats lost by the NDP.

A thing of note for American readers: as a rule, the Canadian political "centre" (as used to describe parties here) is to the ''left'' of [[UsefulNotes/AmericanPoliticalSystem the American center]], much as it is in Western Europe. Canadian conservatives might be "Rockefeller Republicans" when there was still such a thing in Congress, right-leaning "Blue Dog Democrats" or moderate Democrats like UsefulNotes/BarackObama, UsefulNotes/JoeBiden or UsefulNotes/HillaryRodhamClinton in the USA, while the Liberals’ politics are closer to those of the left wing of the Democrats (e.g. Nancy Pelosi or Elizabeth Warren). The NDP are to the left of anything mainstream in the USA; a few prominent names on the American version of the "extreme left", such as Bernie Sanders, would probably be considered moderate progressives within the NDP.

American-style social conservatism is conversely regarded as a fringe view, with the conservative politicians focusing on fiscal issues. Indeed, this was a bone of contention for some of Prime Minister Harper’s own, more [[MoralGuardians moralistic]], backbenchers, and remains an issue for the Conservative Party post-Harper. Canadian conservatives tend to be fiscally conservative, supporting low taxes and local control, while remaining much more socially liberal and secular compared to their American counterparts. Their closest relatives on the U.S. right are libertarians like UsefulNotes/RonPaul or Gary Johnson.

The Liberal Party has had a truly remarkable run in Canadian politics: in the last century, the Liberals have spent more time governing Canada than the Communists have governing Russia, and they were in charge for 80 of 110 years between 1896 and 2006; small wonder that the Liberals are sometimes referred to as Canada's "[[NothingCanStopUsNow natural governing party]]". It didn’t hurt that the Liberals have frequently adopted various minor parties’ most popular policy proposals and then claimed credit for them, such as the postwar welfare state originally proposed by the NDP or, conversely, the drastic spending cuts of the 1990s advocated by the Reform Party. These policies were implemented by Liberal governments, but the third parties played no small part in getting the ball rolling for them.[[note]]As Milton Friedman said: “The way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.”[[/note]]

In the 2011 federal election, the NDP, largely by [[LandslideElection gaining major support in Quebec]] — where they had never before been a contender — gained a third of the seats in the House of Commons and [[DidntSeeThatComing became the Official Opposition for the first time in their history]]. This development was also responsible for the demise of the Bloc Québécois, who fell from long-time dominance in Quebec to TheRemnant of only ''four'' seats, [[HumiliationConga not enough to qualify them as an official party]]. The Liberals, for the first time in ''their'' history, [[MyGreatestFailure fell to third-party status]]. The Conservatives, for [[PutOnABus the first time since 1988]], were elected to a majority government. Finally, [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking the Green Party won its first-ever seat]] in Parliament, with its leader Elizabeth May being elected in a B.C. riding. This polarized Canadian politics to an unprecedented degree, as the NDP is further to the proverbial left than the Liberals are on most issues, and the current Reform-derived Conservatives are further right than the Progressive Conservative Party that preceded them.

However 2015 had another shift in store. After the longest election campaign since the 19th century — 78 days, which may seem quaint to [[UsefulNotes/AmericanPoliticalSystem other countries]] — the balance of power shifted ''again'', though unlike the previous election, many noted this to be more of a [[StatusQuoIsGod return to a previous equilibrium]]. In a stunning electoral win and borderline CurbStompBattle, the Liberal Party of Canada more than ''quintupled'' their seat count to 184 seats from 34, an electoral upset unprecedented in Canadian history, making Justin Trudeau the new Prime Minister, having won several seats in every province as well as sweeping the Atlantic provinces and all three territories. The Conservatives were reduced to 99 seats with several influential ministers losing their seats. Finally, the NDP dropped back to 44 seats, a substantial disappointment after having been the Official Opposition, losing to the Liberals several of what they considered very safe seats. Little changed for the Bloc Québécois, which rebounded slightly to ten seats in the Commons, while Green Party leader Elizabeth May retained her seat in British Columbia.

* The Liberal Party, despite having flown high in the polls during the first two years of Justin Trudeau's leadership, began to stumble in 2018 for various reasons including the unpopularity of Kathleen Wynne's provincial Liberal government in Ontario, a series of gaffe-prone state visits, and most damagingly, the emergence of the SNC-Lavalin scandal and Trudeau's alleged attempt to cover it up by firing attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould and later expelling her from the party. The scandal caused the Liberals' poll numbers to tank at the start of 2019, and it looked odds-on that Trudeau would not be re-elected. However, they eventually managed to recover and just barely held onto power at the election, albeit being reduced to a minority government; ironically the same fate that Justin Trudeau's father, Pierre, met at his first re-election in 1972.
* The Conservatives, after two years of poor polling numbers following the 2015 election, quickly began to regroup after Andrew Scheer's election as party leader in 2017 and led in the polls at various points in 2018 and 2019. However, they could not maintain said polling leads for very long, and entered the election polling roughly equal numbers to the Liberals. In the end, their campaign was hurt by various factors -- in particular, a platform that was accused of appealing a little too stridently to the party's western base while offering little to the more populous Ontario and Quebec, being caught off-guard by the Bloc's resurgence in Quebec, and Doug Ford's provincial Conservative government in Ontario suffering a steep decline in popularity during 2019 -- resulting in them actually winning the popular vote[[note]]Mostly off the back of winning a number of absurdly huge majorities in Alberta, Saskachewan and Manitoba; the Liberals by contrast won a lot of closer races in Ontario, Quebec, and to a lesser extent, British Columbia.[[/note]] and winning almost as many seats as former Prime Minister Stephen Harper did when he won his first mandate in 2006, but falling 37 seats short of the Liberals and thus not being able to form a government due to no other party having the numbers needed for the Tories even to overtake the Liberals, much less hold a majority in parliament.
* The Bloc Québécois, having looked dead and buried for most of 2018 after former leader Martine Oullet's leadership proved so deeply unpopular that all but three of their [=MPs=] temporarily split off to form a new party, enjoyed an incredible resurgence in popularity following Quebec assembly member Yves-François Blanchet's installation as party leader at the start of 2019. Blanchet dialled the party's position back from openly advocating the secession of Quebec to only suggesting it as an absolute last resort, and this plus the Conservative platform and Scheer's campaign being poorly received in the province saw them post their best performance since 2008, coming a very close second behind the Liberals in the seat count for the province, becoming the third-largest party again, and regaining official party status after losing it in 2011.

* The Green Party made further progress compared to the 2015 election, though perhaps not by as much as they had hoped. Having picked up Nanaimo-Ladysmith from the NDP in a by-election earlier in the year, and with their pro-environmental policies proving a hit with voters, many polls were putting them near-equal to the NDP, leading to hopes for a breakthrough. In the end, they nearly doubled their popular vote share, but ended up with just three [=MPs=]; still a very respectable performance considering the party's size and resources, but it ended any hopes of them being possible kingmakers in the new Parliament. Afterwards, long-time party leader Elizabeth May announced her retirement from the position, though remains as an MP.
* The People's Party of Canada (PPC) were the new kids on the block. Formed in September 2018 by Scheer's Conservative leadership runner-up Maxime Bernier, it has a broadly similar range of political positions to the Tories, but with a more populist bent and a much firmer libertarian and anti-immigration stance. Their policies failed to find much favour among voters, however, and their campaign ended in disaster, with Bernier losing his own seat (Beauce) by over 6,000 votes, and no other PPC candidate coming even vaguely close to winning a seat -- to add insult to injury, the most they likely achieved was throwing a few seats to the Liberals, NDP, and Bloc due to vote-splitting from the Tories -- with their total of fewer than 300,000 votes, a meagre 1.6% share,[[note]](For perspective, this is about what the defunct Social Credit Party got in the 1980 election, which saw them shut out of parliament for the last time -- and unlike the People's Party, they generally only bothered nominating candidates in Quebec, Alberta, and British Columbia, rather than nation-wide)[[/note]] leading to many questions about the party's long-term viability.
* Lastly, former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould was the sole independent MP elected to Parliament, comfortably defeating the Liberal challenger in her riding, Vancouver Granville. So far, she has indicated that she will likely remain independent for the foreseeable future, rather than either trying to rejoin the Liberals or joining one of the other parties.

The result of the above is that although parties can have the same name at federal and provincial levels, often that’s ''all'' they have in common. The NDP is an exception, in that all provincial [=NDPs=] are branches of the federal NDP, while most of the provincial Liberals (Liberals in the Atlantic provinces being an exception) and Conservatives are independent of their federal counterparts. Canadians, in general, are well aware of this; so nobody blinks when, say, a former NDP Premier of Ontario like Bob Rae can make a serious run at leadership of the federal Liberal Party, former federal Progressive Conservative leader Jean Charest can become the Liberal Premier of Québec, or the former NDP Premier of British Columbia Ujjal Dosanjh can also switch parties to become a federal Liberal cabinet minister.

One significant difference when it comes to individual politicians compared to the United States is that there is no equivalent in Canadian constitutional law to the “natural-born citizen” requirement for President and Vice-President, and in general Parliament (and some of the provincial legislatures) will have a higher number of naturalized immigrants than jurisdictions in the United States. As of February 2010, there were more Muslims sitting in Parliament (all of them foreign-born, including one who was a veteran combat pilot in the Pakistani Air Force) than had ever been in Congress, as well as 15 Sikhs, most of them immigrants as well. Four prime ministers (including the first, John A. Macdonald, and most recently John Turner, PM for less than three months in 1984[[note]]He succeeded Pierre Trudeau when the latter resigned the Liberal leadership, and in that fall’s election, the Progressive Conservatives [[CurbStompBattle cleaned his clock]].[[/note]]) were born outside Canada, albeit all in the United Kingdom. The previous two Governors-General (Adrienne Clarkson and Michaëlle Jean) were also immigrants (from China — well, UsefulNotes/HongKong[[note]]Clarkson, born Adrienne Poy, was married to the English-born academic Stephen Clarkson from 1963 to 1965 and retained his name after their divorce.[[/note]] — and Haiti, respectively). As well, following the 2015 election, five ministers are immigrants to Canada, including the first Sikh to command a regiment in the Canadian Forces ([[http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/11/06/harjit-sajjan-defence-min_0_n_8486412.html who is a major]] badass).[[note]]Fun fact: There are currently more Sikhs in the Canadian cabinet than in the Indian cabinet.[[/note]]

Of note is the fact that a practising Muslim, Naheed Nenshi, was elected Mayor of Calgary in October 2010, a first in Canadian cities and only the second in North America (after Mohammed Hameeduddin of Teaneck, UsefulNotes/NewJersey). This is of particular significance as Calgary is located in southern Alberta, which is generally considered to be one of the most conservative parts of Canada.

The environment has also become a [[{{Pun}} hot]] topic in recent years. The Green Party has put environmental regulations at the center of their platforms, the NDP and Liberals also support reforms, and the Conservatives are more cautious, but still interested in, at minimum, seeming like they care. The Harper Conservatives’ environmental platform in government was effectively "We’ll Just See What the U.S. Does", and the U.S. didn’t seem to be doing much of anything, so Canada didn't either. In fact, under Harper's government, no provinces save Québec reached their targets under the Kyoto Protocol and a few even increased their greenhouse gas emissions since the PM simply refused to follow the Protocol's targets. It remains to be seen what the more explicitly pro-environment Liberal government will do on that file. In the meantime, the provinces are generally content to sit and bitch at each other about who gets what money. This has been described as “exactly like UsefulNotes/TheEuropeanUnion, just with more land”.

Two of the more recent scandals are the “sponsorship scandal,” where large sums of money earmarked for national-unity advertising programs in Quebec were used improperly (read: given away to friends of the then-ruling Liberal Party), and the “Airbus affair,” wherein then-Prime Minister Brian Mulroney stands accused of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from a German arms dealer as kickbacks on the purchase of Airbus jets for Air Canada, which the government owned at the time. More recently, in 2013, several Senators (some Liberals, but mostly Conservatives) were accused of claiming excessive amounts of expenses, particularly living expenses,[[note]]Senators must own property in the province they represent, but they can claim expenses if their primary residence is more than 100 km from Ottawa. This led Senators to [[LoopholeAbuse designate small cabins in the middle of nowhere as their "primary residence"]] in the province they represent, allowing them to claim expenses for the large houses/luxury condos in Ottawa where they actually live.[[/note]] and are being investigated by the RCMP. When the Senate ordered them to repay the money, some did so while others went to court. This led to [[HereWeGoAgain another round]] of discussion regarding Senate reform, which almost inevitably change very little.

A real sex scandal occurred in 2016 when Liberal Fisheries minister Hunter Tootoo was resigned from his cabinet post and removed from the Liberal caucus (thus sitting as an independent MP). While the initial reports were that it was due to issues with alcohol (for which Tootoo entered rehab), it later surfaced that a significant factor earning Prime Minister Trudeau's ire had been Tootoo sleeping with a staffer, who had been found by security trashing his parliamentary office. While the affair alone would generally have been dismissed as a minor offense, it was soon reported that the reason she was trashing the office in fury was her discovery that Tootoo had also been sleeping with ''her mother''. The government has never officially commented on the story and, in Canadian fashion, once he'd resigned and thrown out of caucus to become an unimportant independent backbencher, the media didn't bother pursuing the case as it was considered a private matter and no longer relevant.

The more recent ‘robocall’ scandal had its roots in the 2011 federal election. It came to light that ''someone'' was sending automated ‘robocalls’ (and, in some cases, targeted live calls) to non-Conservative or ex-Conservative voters in a number of different ridings, falsely directing them to incorrect polling stations or otherwise harassing them into not voting at all. Elections Canada got wind of these incidents via complaints from the public, and since the scandal broke they have accumulated over ''[[UpToEleven 31,000 reports]]'' of similar calls from across Canada. In the most high-profile case, in the riding of Guelph in Ontario, [[MediaWatchdog Elections Canada]] has traced at least some of the calls to a subsidiary of an automated calling company in Edmonton, which in turn was contacted both by the Guelph Conservative campaign as well as a disposable mobile phone registered under the alias “Pierre Poutine” of “Separatist Street” in Joliette, Quebec. (The “Pierre Poutine” name was likely taken off of an independent food caterer in Guelph, while the “Separatist Street” location was probably a crude attempt at a TakeThat to the Quebec independence movement.) In another riding where voter suppression tactics have been alleged (Nipissing–Timiskaming), the Conservative won by just ''eighteen votes'', and this was far from the only close riding across the country, potentially making the difference between a majority and minority government. The opposition NDP and Liberals [[StatusQuoIsGod rather predictably reacted with outrage]], while the Conservatives [[IWasNeverHere naturally denied any responsibility]], though a low-ranking Conservative staffer from the Guelph campaign has since resigned his position at the office of a Toronto-area MP. Spinoff allegations have included voter registration fraud as well as illegal campaign financing. Federal opinion polls have registered minimal (if any) impact as a result of the ‘robocall scandal’; a federal judge offered the Tories a not-quite-absolution in April 2013.

* The People's Party of Canada (PPC) were the new kids on the block. Formed in September 2018 by Scheer's Conservative leadership runner-up Maxime Bernier, it has a broadly similar range of political positions to the Tories, but with a more populist bent and a much firmer libertarian and anti-immigration stance. Their policies failed to find much favour among voters, however, and their campaign ended in disaster, with Bernier losing his own seat (Beauce) by over 6,000 votes, and no other PPC candidate coming even vaguely close to winning a seat -- to add insult to injury, the most they likely achieved was throwing a few seats to the Liberals, NDP, and Bloc due to vote-splitting from the Tories -- with their total of fewer than 300,000 votes, a meagre 1.6% share, leading to many questions about the party's long-term viability.

* The Green Party made further progress compared to the 2015 election, though perhaps not by as much as they had hoped. Having picked up Nanaimo-Ladysmith from the NDP in a by-election earlier in the year, and with their pro-environmental policies proving a hit with voters, many polls were putting them near-equal to the NDP, leading to hopes for a breakthrough. In the end, they nearly doubled their popular vote share, but ended up with just three [=MPs=]; still a very respectable performance considering the party's size and resources, but it ended any hopes of them being possible kingmakers in the new Parliament.

* The Bloc Québécois, a [[SingleIssueWonk Quebec separatist party]] with a very slight centre-left orientation overall, was the dominant party in Quebec and a significant force in Parliament from 1993 to 2011, but lost its party status and all but four seats in the 2011 election, leaving them as TheRemnant. They made a modest comeback in 2015, winning ten seats, which was still not enough to return them to official party status. In early 2018, disagreements over the Bloc's newest leader led to the tiny caucus splintering further to create the "Quebec parliamentary group", though the rebel [=MPs=] would return to the party later in the year.

* The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, who can be considered the forerunners of the modern New Democratic Party. They were formed in the mid-1930s, and went on to hold a fairly decent amount of seats in the two decades ahead, before being forced to regroup and re-form as the NDP after the CCF were all but wiped out in the 1958 election. Saw an unexpected comeback in 2018, when NDP MP Erin Weir was ejected from the party, and re-labelled himself as a member of the CCF.

->''“If you put on too much weight? C’est la faute du fédéral!''[[note]]“It’s the fault of the federal [government]!” The song parodies the tendency of Canadian provincial governments (especially that of Quebec) to blame every little thing on the federal government.[[/note]]

* The '''Canadian Senate''' has 105 members, all appointed and serving until a mandatory retirement age of 75 (established under a 1965 law prior to which Senators served for life). In one case, the appointed Senator was chosen in a special election by the province he represents.[[note]]He represents Alberta and joined the Red Chamber on the prime-ministerial watch of Stephen Harper, belying the call for an elected upper chamber his old party regularly sounded.[[/note]] The Senate has generally rubber-stamped legislation from the House of Commons for decades and is not allowed to introduce financial legislation. Technically, the Senate is the place for “sober second thought”, where the mobbish tendencies of democracy can be curbed and where legislation can be considered away from public pressure. The Senate can suggest changes to the bills or delay a bill until it expires on the table, but it has almost never defeated one outright.

** In practice, the Senate is often useful to Prime Ministers as a means of rewarding cronies, getting troublesome allies out of the way, and keeping their own mark on Parliament long after they have lost election or left politics themselves. More recently, due to public concerns over patronage as well as occasional scandals over fraud and improper expense claims, there have been calls to reform or even abolish the Senate. The Liberals have generally supported the status quo, while a wide swath of the New Democratic Party wants to [[YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness abolish the Senate altogether]], and the Conservatives (historically strong in the West) have usually supported an elected Senate. However, after the 2015 election returned Justin Trudeau's Liberals, a small but significant reform was initiated, with Senatorial appointments being turned over to an independent commission to select experts [[AsskickingEqualsAuthority based on merit]]. This has drawn criticism from some provinces, particularly (as expected) the Western ones, for failing to do anything about the lopsided distribution of seats; to this, the government has replied that even if it wanted to do that, it couldn't, as that would require a constitutional amendment that could essentially never pass without the consent of at least one Atlantic province, whose influence would be correspondingly diluted ([[SarcasmMode good luck with that]]).
* The '''Governor-General of Canada''', currently Julie Payette, is the representative of the Sovereign, appointed in theory by the Sovereign and in practice by the Prime Minister, and has a mammoth assortment of powers, ranging from the ability to dissolve Parliament, appoint Senators, Supreme Court Justices, all high-ranking bureaucrats, and the Prime Minister and Cabinet, though they must keep the approval of the House of Commons. (S)he is also Commander-in-Chief of the [[UsefulNotes/CanucksWithChinooks Canadian military]]. However, these powers are bound by a large amount of unwritten convention, and are almost never used except on instruction from the Prime Minister — the last time they were, in 1926, the resulting “King-Byng Affair” resulted in a massive public outcry that ended in the re-election of Prime Minister W.L. Mackenzie King, whom Governor-General Lord Byng had rejected.[[note]]Mackenzie King was Prime Minister despite the fact that he didn't even have the most seats in the House of Commons. When he tried to ask Lord Byng to dissolve Parliament after it voted against his government and call an election, he refused and appointed Conservative leader Arthur Meighen as PM instead. Meighen fared no better, so an election was called, which Mackenzie King handily won.[[/note]] The Governor-General is, in theory, supposed to be chosen by the Sovereign from a list of candidates chosen by the Prime Minister. For quite some time now, the Prime Minister’s list of Governor-General appointees has been exactly [[YouAreInCommandNow one name long]].

*** This is taken directly from the Westminster System used by the British Parliament and Monarchy which serves as the basis for ''all'' Commonwealth Countries. Basically, they’re ''meant'' to keep each other in line.

The Prime Minister is the head of the Canadian government for all intents and purposes; you must be chosen as your party’s leader on top of being an elected representative, in a manner strikingly similar to the Speaker of the House in American politics. Due to the nature of the Westminster-style parliament, Canada’s executive branch is purely ceremonial, so the usual executive powers are devolved to the office of the Prime Minister and their Cabinet, who are also sitting [=MPs=] (or rarely Senators). Canadians do not vote for the Prime Minister directly, however; instead, they vote for the Member of Parliament in their riding only. The party with the most seats in the House of Commons forms a majority government, when they control more than half the seats, or a minority government, when they control less than half the seats,[[note]]Usually, but not necessarily, they still have more seats than any single party. For instance, Liberal Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King retained power after one election [[EnemyMine with another party's support]] even though the Conservatives had more seats.[[/note]] and the Prime Minister is then appointed by the party itself.[[note]]Theoretically, in any situation where there is a minority government, some of the other parties could get together and form a coalition government provided they can get a simple majority of the House’s membership onside with them (meaning, practically, that those parties must have a majority of [=MPs=] between them). However, this has never happened formally since Confederation; the one time it seemed like this might happen, in 2008, it was kiboshed by the ruling Conservatives’ clever exploitation of EaglelandOsmosis and general distrust of the separatist Bloc Québécois. For all intents and purposes, the “Unionist Party” that ran in 1917 was a coalition between the governing Conservatives and members of the Liberal Opposition who supported the Government’s plan to impose conscription to muster manpower for Canada’s [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarI war]] effort.[[/note]]

In practice, Canadians know what candidate a party will nominate for Prime Minister during the election cycle: by [[LikeYouWouldReallyDoIt so-far-unbroken]] convention, it is the party leader. In the readily possible event that the Prime Minister loses his/her riding, a junior member of the party will typically resign his/her seat for the party leader to win in a by-election, as the Prime Minister is normally expected to have a seat to serve in the government.[[note]]although it is possible for a prime minister to serve without holding a seat in the House of Commons (see John Turner, 1984), a prime minister without a seat would face public concern about his democratic legitimacy.[[/note]] This happened as early as the 1870s, after John A. Macdonald’s Conservative government collapsed over the Canadian Pacific Railway scandal (see below) and he lost his own seat in Kingston, Ontario. From 1878 to 1882, he represented the riding of Victoria in British Columbia, since he couldn’t get elected in the part of the country he came from.

Because of the multiparty system, where the party with the most votes may not have a majority, minority governments have occurred several times at both provincial and federal levels. Three of the last five federal elections have resulted in minority governments.

Canada also has a very short election cycle, which can, in theory, occur at any time. Due to a fixed election date law, federal elections usually occur on the third Monday in October in the fourth calendar year after the previous poll. However, if the government falls in a non-confidence vote, elections can occur outside of the usual time, which often happens in minority government situations sooner or later. A non-confidence vote occurs when a supply bill — that is, a bill dealing with the spending of money — is defeated, and reflects that the Parliament no longer believes that the Prime Minister is an effective leader. Essentially, it’s the legislative equivalent of [[YouHaveFailedMe "We’re firing you."]] This can force an election, and the Prime Minister can ask the Governor General to dissolve the government at any time — it is expected, but not legally required, that if it has not been at least six months since the last election, the Governor-General may simply ask the leader of the next-largest party to try and form a government rather than saying HereWeGoAgain. Once government is dissolved, the election cycle normally lasts five to six weeks, during which candidates campaign and stump for votes.

A variation of the normal election cycle ''almost'' occurred in December 2008 when the Liberals, NDP, and Bloc Québécois drew up a formal agreement to topple the ruling Conservative minority government in a non-confidence vote just six weeks after the election and ask the Governor-General to install them as a majority coalition government without triggering another election. While such an act is perfectly legitimate in a parliamentary democracy, it is quite unorthodox in Canada and the Conservatives countered by delaying the vote until January and launching a media blitz characterizing the act as a [[InsistentTerminology “coup d’état”]], banking on the (correct) assumption that many Canadians didn't know how their government actually worked. The uncertainty of the Great Recession and the fact the coalition would have required the support of the separatist Bloc Québécois and made the unpopular Stéphane Dion the next Prime Minister even though his Liberal party had just suffered its [[CurbStompBattle worst vote-share (26%) since 1867]] also made the idea troubling even to many who understood its constitutionality, and the idea died in December when the Liberals ousted Dion and backed down.

* The Reform Party (later the Canadian Alliance), a conservative party with support in the western provinces, did well from 1993 to 2000 before merging with the Progressive Conservatives (from which they had initially broken off in 1987) to form the current Conservative Party.

* The Social Credit Party, who started out as a right-wing party focused on the western provinces in the 1930s, before becoming more focused on Quebec nationalism in the 1960s. Probably the most extreme right-wing of the "mainstream" parties who have achieved any parliamentary representation in Canada, to the extent that the party held openly anti-Semitic policies until the mid-1950s, while their most famous leader, Réal Caouette, made the headlines for proclaiming Hitler and Mussolini to be his political idols, and trying to downplay the holocaust by claiming that the Nazis only killed Jews who were also a burden on society. After Caouette's death, the party was taken over by Neo-Nazis in the 1980s, resulting in it rapidly collapsing.
* The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, who can be considered the forerunners of the modern New Democratic Party. They were formed in the mid-1930s, and went on to hold a fairly decent amount of seats in the two decades ahead, before being forced to re-group and reform as the NDP after the CCF were all but wiped out in the 1958 election. Saw an unexpected comeback in 2018, when NDP MP Erin Weir was ejected from the party, and re-labelled himself as a member of the CCF.

* The Liberal Party, despite having flown high in the polls during the first two years of Justin Trudeau's leadership, began to stumble in 2018 for various reasons including the unpopularity of Kathleen Wynne's provincial Liberal government in Ontario, a series of gaffe-prone state visits, and most damagingly, the emergence of the SNC--Lavalin scandal and Trudeau's alleged attempt to cover it up by firing attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybold and later expelling her from the party. The scandal caused the Liberals' poll numbers to utterly tank at the start of 2019, and it looked odds-on that Trudeau would not be re-elected. However, they eventually managed to recover and just barely held onto power at the election, albeit being reduced to a minority government; ironically the same fate that Justin Trudeau's father, Pierre suffered at his first re-election in 1972.
* The Conservatives, after two years of poor polling numbers following the 2015 election, quickly began to regroup after Andrew Scheer's election as party leader in 2017, and led in the polls at various points in 2018 and 2019. However, they were unable to hang onto said polling leads for very long, and entered the election polling roughly equal numbers to the Liberals. In the end, their campaign was hurt by various factors -- in particular, a manifesto that was accused of appealing a little too stridently to the party's western base while offering little to the more populous regions of Ontario and Quebec, being caught off-guard by the Bloc's resurgence in Quebec, and Doug Ford's provincial Conservative government in Ontario suffering a steep decline in popularity during 2019 -- resulting in them actually winning the popular vote[[note]](Mostly off the back of winning a number of absurdly huge majorities in Alberta, Saskachewan and Manitoba; the Liberals by contrast won a lot of closer races in Ontario, Quebec, and to a lesser extent, British Columbia)[[/note]] and winning almost as many seats as former Prime Minister Stephen Harper did when first elected to office in 2006, but falling 37 seats short of the Liberals and thus not being able to form a government due to no other party having the numbers needed for the Tories to even overtake the Liberals, much less hold a majority in parliament.
* The Bloc Québécois, having looked dead and buried for most of 2018 after former leader Martine Oullet's leadership proved so deeply unpopular that all but three of their [=MPs=] temporarily split off to form a new party, enjoyed an incredible resurgence in popularity following Quebec assembly member Yves-François Blanchet's installation as party leader at the start of 2019. Blanchet dialled the party's position back from openly advocating the secession of Quebec to only suggesting it as an absolute last resort, and this combined with the Conservative manifesto and Scheer's campaigning being poorly-received in the province saw them post their best performance since 2008, coming a very close second behind the Liberals in the seat count for the province, becoming the third-largest party once again, and regaining official party status after losing it in 2011.
* The NDP continued their slow decline that began at the 2015 election, losing further ground. In 2017 the party elected Jagmeet Singh as leader, making him the first person from a visible minority (as a practising Sikh) to lead a Canadian political party. While Singh's installation as leader was initially well-received, the NDP's polling numbers gradually slumped in 2018 and early 2019, as voters became increasingly sceptical of Singh's ability to lead the party (it didn't much help that he didn't initially hold a seat, only winning one in a by-election less than a year before the election). The election campaign, and especially the official leaders' debates, saw Singh finally come into his own, leading to hopes that he might be able to replicate former leader Jack Layton's polling surge in the 2011 election. However, it ended up proving too little, too late,[[note]](It probably didn't help that while Justin Trudeau has become a somewhat divisive figure, he's still nowhere '''near''' as overwhelmingly disliked as then-Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff was in 2011)[[/note]] and between their support in Quebec largely returning to the Bloc and voters elsewhere voting Liberal to keep the Tories out, they ended up winning just 24 seats, their weakest performance since the 2004 election. They did at least hold the consolation of being the kingmakers in the new parliament, with Trudeau being dependent on their support to remain as Prime Minister.
* The Green Party made further progress compared to the 2015 election, though perhaps not by as much as they had hoped. Having taken a seat in a by-election earlier in the year, and with their pro-environmental policies proving a hit with voters, many polls were putting them near-equal to the NDP, leading to hopes for a breakthrough. In the end, they nearly doubled their popular vote share, but ended up with just three [=MPs=]; still a very respectable performance considering the party's size and resources, but it ended any hopes of them being possible kingmakers in the new parliament.
* The People's Party of Canada were the new kids on the block. Formed in September 2018 by Conservative leadership runner-up Maxime Bernier, it has a broadly similar range of political positions to the Tories, but with a more populist bent and a much firmer libertarian and anti-immigration stance. Their policies failed to find much favour among voters however, and their campaign ended in disaster, with Bernier losing his own seat by over 6,000 votes, and none of the other candidates coming even vaguely close to winning a seat -- to add insult to injury, the most they likely achieved was throwing a few seats to the Liberals, NDP, and Bloc due to vote-splitting from the Tories -- with their total of just 1.6% of the national vote leading to many questions about the party's long-term viability.
* And lastly, former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould was the sole independent MP elected to parliament, comfortably defeating the Liberal challenger in her riding. So far, she has indicated that she will likely remain independent for the foreseeable future, rather than either trying to rejoin the Liberals or joining one of the other parties.

Provincial politics tends to also have the Conservatives, Liberals, and NDP as the primary parties, though there are exceptions: both Saskatchewan's Saskatchewan Party and B.C.'s Liberal Party are in practice [[EnemyMine mergers of provincial Liberals and Conservatives]] in opposition to both provinces' powerful NDP, Alberta conservatives saw a decade of [[AHouseDivided division]] between the more conservative Wild Rose Party and the old Progressive Conservatives before they reunited in 2017, and Quebec politics is [[MindScrew just plain weird]] because it includes a secessionist-federalist spectrum in addition to the typical left-right and authoritarian-libertarian spectrums.[[note]]It features the separatist and slightly left-leaning Parti Québécois (PQ), the federalist and slightly right-leaning Quebec Liberal Party (PLQ), the autonomist and centre-right Coalition Avenir Québec ([[FunWithAcronyms CAQ]]), and the openly socialist and separatist Québec Solidaire. In actual effect, however, the provincial parties in Quebec all have moderate and extreme factions, united more by their position on the sovereignty question than anything else. The CAQ claims to eschew the entire federalism-separatism debate, and has lately been poaching voter support and [=MNAs=] from the Liberals, the PQ, and the defunct ADQ. One thing to note: Quebec is somewhat to the left of Canada in general, notably on social issues, and as such, the Quebec Liberal Party is very similar to the federal Conservative Party; indeed, the former Premier of Quebec, Jean Charest, rose to prominence as a Progressive Conservative Cabinet minister in the 1980s government of Brian Mulroney — and even became the leader of the party after the 1993 wipeout — before becoming leader of the Quebec Liberals.[[/note]] The NDP does frequently win in provincial elections, especially in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia where, for historical reasons, they're the only major left-wing party in a two-party system and thus viable contenders for government by default.

Alberta is also an interesting case — having been a province since 1905, they have experienced only four changes of government: one during the Depression, one after popular premier Ernest Manning (father of Reform Party founder Preston Manning) resigned and was succeeded by the much less skillful Harry Strom, and the latest being because of falling oil prices that resulted in an increasingly unpopular NDP majority government's replacement with a Conservative one. From 1971 to 2015, a string of PC leaders [[LandslideElection won a majority in every election]], to the point where Alberta was routinely considered a one-party state, and it was [[SeriousBusiness only half a joke]].[[note]]Until the NDP lost government in 2019, Alberta had never gone back to a party after voting it out of power and the Conservative Party had the longest string of elections, the only comparable run being the 1935–71 Social Creditors, whom the [=PCs=] had themselves eliminated. This trend is also technically guaranteed in the future now since the [=PCs=] and Wildrose have merged into the "new" United Conservative Party.[[/note]]

Besides the usual sorts of issues that surface in most countries’ elections (the economy, taxes, foreign trade, defence, foreign affairs, et al.), healthcare and national unity are major issues in Canadian elections. Canada has a national healthcare system that is considered excellent but underfunded by the populace (and starting to show it in the form of long waiting times for certain procedures); figuring out how to pay for it is always a major point in any party’s platform.

The half-ton gorilla in contemporary Canadian politics has been "national unity". A VocalMinority of Quebecers want Quebec to leave Canada and become an independent country, while many non-separatist Quebecers believe in Quebec having rights to greater autonomy. There have been two referenda on independence, in 1980 and 1995, the first of which was defeated with 60% of the vote, and the second of which was defeated with [[DecidedByOneVote 50.6%]] of the vote.[[note]]As it happened, then-Quebec Premier Jacques Parizeau shot off his mouth in a SoreLoser concession speech at this loss, complaining about how “money and the ethnic vote” thwarted him, which has apparently made getting “winning conditions” for a third independence referendum so far impossible.[[/note]] The Parti Québécois keeps threatening to call another one, though it hasn’t had another majority since 1995 with which to try.[[note]]In September 2012, the PQ won a governing minority, with 54 of the Assembly’s 125 seats; however, they lost 24 of those seats in the election of March 2014, including that of Premier Pauline Marois.[[/note]] The other federal parties take various positions on how to respond to this, which frequently involve special concessions for Quebec.

The environment has also become a [[{{Pun}} hot]] topic in recent years. The Green Party has put environmental regulations at the center of their platforms, the NDP and Liberals also support reforms, and the Conservatives are more cautious, but still interested in, at minimum, seeming like they care. The Harper Conservatives’ environmental platform in government was effectively "We’ll Just See What the U.S. Does", and the U.S. didn’t seem to be doing much of anything, so Canada didn't either. In fact, under Harper's government, no provinces save Québec reached their targets under the Kyoto Protocol and a few even skyrocketed their greenhouse gas emissions since the PM simply refused to follow the Protocol's targets. It remains to be seen what the more explicitly pro-environment Liberal government will do on that file. In the meantime, the provinces are generally content to sit and bitch at each other about who gets what money. This has been described as “exactly like UsefulNotes/TheEuropeanUnion, just with more land”.

On the municipal level, in May 2013, reporters from the ''Toronto Star'' and gossip website ''Gawker'' reported that they had viewed and been offered a video showing Toronto Mayor Rob Ford [[DrugsAreBad smoking crack cocaine]] and making homophobic slurs. Though Ford had a well-documented history of mild to belligerent public intoxication, he [[SuspiciouslySpecificDenial denied and evaded questions]] for several months — until, in October 2013, [[SeriousBusiness the Toronto police]] reported that they had recovered a deleted copy of what appears to be that same video from a hard drive seized in an anti-drug raid. Ford then changed his story and admitted to “probably” having used crack cocaine in the midst of a “drunken stupor,” while blaming the media for not asking the right questions (which they had, and he had ignored) and claiming to [[ImplausibleDeniability not be an addict]]. With Ford and several of his associates and assistants now under police investigation, Toronto City Council [[EnemyMine banded together]] to strip him of most of his powers (at least those which they could remove under provincial laws) along with his staff and budget, and shift them to the deputy mayor. Rob Ford has since responded by playing the victim of a “coup d'état” while proudly going on to contest the 2014 municipal election. Not long after losing most of his mayoral powers, [[HereWeGoAgain another crack video surfaced, this time with screenshots]], forcing Mayor Ford to enter rehab. [[TenMinuteRetirement He continued to run for Mayor upon leaving rehab]], but a hospital visit revealed an abdominal tumor. Mayor Ford withdrew from the mayoral race, opting to run for his old Ward 2 seat. He died on March 22, 2016. Rob’s brother Doug (the then Ward 2 councillor) submitted his papers to run for mayor with one hour to spare before the nomination deadline. In the end, John Tory became mayor … but Doug Ford got the last laugh by becoming Premier of Ontario in 2018, a position Tory had run for in 2007 as leader of the Ontario Conservative Party and lost.

* The Conservatives, after two years of poor polling numbers following the 2015 election, quickly began to regroup after Andrew Scheer's election as party leader in 2017, and led in the polls at various points in 2018 and 2019. However, they were unable to hang onto said polling leads for very long, and entered the election polling roughly equal numbers to the Liberals. In the end, their campaign was hurt by various factors -- in particular, a manifesto that was accused of appealing a little too stridently to the party's western base, being caught off-guard by the Bloc's resurgence in Quebec, and Doug Ford's provincial Conservative government in Ontario suffering a steep decline in popularity during 2019 -- resulting in them actually winning the popular vote[[note]](Mostly off the back of winning a number of absurdly huge majorities in Alberta, Saskachewan and Manitoba; the Liberals by contrast won a lot of closer races in Ontario, Quebec, and to a lesser extent, British Columbia)[[/note]] and winning almost as many seats as former Prime Minister Stephen Harper did when first elected to office in 2006, but falling 37 seats short of the Liberals and thus not being able to form a government.

* The NDP continued their slow decline that began at the 2015 election, losing further ground. In 2017 the party elected Jagmeet Singh as leader, making him the first person from a visible minority to lead a Canadian political party. While Singh's installation as leader was initially well-received, the party's polling numbers gradually slumbed in 2018 and early 2019, as voters became increasingly sceptical of Singh's ability to lead the party (it didn't much help that he didn't initially hold a seat, only winning one in a by-election less than a year before the election). The election campaign, and especially the official leaders' debates, saw Singh finally come into his own, leading to hopes that he might be able to replicate former leader Jack Layton's polling surge in the 2011 election. However, it ended up proving too little, too late,[[note]](It probably didn't help that while Justin Trudeau has become a somewhat divisive figure, he's still nowhere '''near''' as overwhelmingly disliked as then-Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff was in 2011)[[/note]] and between their support in Quebec largely returning to the Bloc and voters elsewhere voting Liberal to keep the Tories out, they ended up winning just 24 seats, their weakest performance since the 2004 election. They did at least hold the consolation of being the kingmakers in the new parliament, with Trudeau being dependent on their support to remain as Prime Minister.

* The People's Party of Canada were the new kids on the block. Formed in September 2018 by Conservative leadership runner-up Maxime Bernier, it has a broadly similar range of political positions to the Tories, but with a more populist bent and a much firmer libertarian and anti-immigration stance. Their policies failed to find much favour among voters however, and their campaign proved an utter disaster, with candidates dropping out and openly denouncing the party as extremists, and the end result being Bernier losing his own seat by over 6,000 votes, and none of the other candidates coming even vaguely close to winning a seat -- to add insult to injury, the most they likely achieved was throwing a few seats to the Liberals, NDP, and Bloc due to vote-splitting from the Tories -- with their total of just 1.6% of the national vote leading to many questions about the party's long-term viabilities.

* The NDP continued their slow decline that began at the 2015 election, losing further ground. In 2017 the party elected Jagmeet Singh as leader, making him the first person from a visible minority to lead a Canadian political party. While Singh's installation as leader was initially well-received, the party's polling numbers gradually slumbed in 2018 and early 2019, as voters became increasingly sceptical of Singh's ability to lead the party (it didn't much help that he didn't initially hold a seat, only winning one in a by-election less than a year before the election). The election campaign, and especially the official leaders' debates, saw Singh finally come into his own, leading to hopes that he might be able to replicate former leader Jack Layton's polling surge in the 2011 election. However, it ended up proving too little, too late,[[note]](It probably didn't help that while Justin Trudeau has become a somewhat divisive figure, he's still nowhere '''near''' as overwhelmingly disliked as then-Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff was in 2011)[[/note]] and between their support in Quebec largely returning to the Bloc and voters elsewhere voting Liberal to keep the Tories out, they ended up winning just 24 seats, their weakest performance since the 2004 election.

As of this point:
* The Liberal Party still reigns supreme as a majority government. At Justin Trudeau's swearing-in, he made headlines by appointing a gender-equal cabinet consisting of 15 men and 15 women. When asked why, he said simply, [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLk2aSBrR6U “Because it’s 2015.”]] However, the early optimism and adulation that persisted for much of 2015 and 2016 has gradually faded as Trudeau and his government have repudiated a series of promises they made during the 2015 campaign, including a prominent commitment to end the "first past the post" electoral system in favour of reform. An embarrassingly gaffe-prone state visit to India in 2018 and the unpopularity of Ontario's Liberal government further eroded public approval of Trudeau and his government, though they remain generally in first place in the polls. The Liberals have received a bit of a boost recently from their handling of the trade dispute with the US (in addition to the Ontario Liberals no longer weighing them down now that they're out of power).
* The Conservatives got a fairly comfortable Opposition state, winning 99 seats. Following his loss in 2015, outgoing prime minister Stephen Harper graciously accepted defeat and resigned as party leader, eventually also resigning his seat in Calgary and returning to the private sector. After a period under interim Opposition Leader Rona Ambrose, the Conservatives selected Saskatchewan MP and former Commons Speaker Andrew Scheer as their new permanent leader in 2017 (from among a field of [[LoadsAndLoadsOfCharacters 13 candidates]]). As the Liberals gradually lost trust among Canadians, the Conservatives slowly prospered. The spring of 2018 even saw them challenging the Liberals for the polling lead (with some outliers putting them as much as ''16 points'' ahead of the Liberals), but the summer saw them fall back to being about equal, before a major wrench was thrown into the works in August when Scheer's main leadership rival Maxime Bernier suddenly quit the party and announced he would [[StartMyOwn start his own]] in protest of the Tories not taking a hard enough line on immigration.
* The NDP, once favored to rise high into the political scene and stay there, was relatively devastated at least as much as the Conservatives due to the Liberal wave in 2015. At the party's convention in April 2016, [[YouHaveFailedMe the party membership voted to oust]] leader Thomas Mulcair and elect a new one before the next election. In late 2017, they elected Jagmeet Singh, a former MPP from Ontario, and now the first person from a visible minority (he's of Punjabi descent) to lead a federal political party in Canada. In the polls, the NDP has recovered somewhat from a period of substantial weakness following the 2015 election and Mulcair's removal, and now stands about where they were when the 2015 election concluded.
* The Bloc Québécois did a bit better in 2015 than in 2011, but with a twist. While they managed to secure ten seats (up from four), party leader Gilles Duceppe notably [[EpicFail lost his own seat to the NDP candidate (again)]] and resigned from politics (again). Then his successor Martine Ouellet proved so [[SketchySuccessor controversial among the membership]] that in early 2018 seven of the party's ten [=MPs=] (including the longest-serving MP in the House, Louis Plamondon) broke off to form their own parliamentary group and briefly a new party, Québec Debout, leading to predictions that, barring a miracle, the next election would be the end of the road for the Bloc. Ouellet was eventually ousted, leading to all the rebel [=MPs=] eventually returning to the Bloc by mid-September, though it remains to be seen how permanent the damage caused by the affair will be.
* Pretty much nothing has happened to the Green Party in the 2015 election, with Elizabeth May continuing to hold the Greens' single seat in the House of Commons. A second Green MP, Bruce Hyer, who crossed the floor from the NDP during the previous parliament, lost his seat when he ran again in 2015. The Greens have, however, been bolstered by the recent successes of their provincial parties in recent years, especially in BC where their 3 [=MLAs=] hold the BalanceOfPower.
* The People's Party of Canada are the new kids on the block. Formed in September 2018 by Conservative leadership runner-up Maxime Bernier, it has a broadly similar range of political positions to the Tories, but with a more populist bent and a much firmer libertarian and anti-immigration stance. Though the PPC's estimated membership is almost double that of the Bloc Québécois, their polling numbers (1.5% to 4%) barely even challenge those of the Bloc, and unlike the Bloc, Bernier intends to run candidates in all 338 ridings. The party's first test came in three February 2019 by-elections where they finished fourth in Burnaby South (urban BC) with 10.6% of the vote and a distant sixth with around 2% in both Outremont (urban Quebec) and the Conservative stronghold of York-Simcoe (rural Ontario).

The half-ton gorilla in contemporary Canadian politics has been "national unity". A VocalMinority of Quebecers want Quebec to leave Canada and become an independent country, while many non-separatist Quebecers believe in Quebec having rights to greater autonomy. There have been two referenda on independence, in 1980 and 1995, the first of which was defeated with 60% of the vote, and the second of which was defeated with [[NearVillainVictory 50.6%]] of the vote.[[note]]As it happened, then-Quebec Premier Jacques Parizeau shot off his mouth in a SoreLoser concession speech at this loss, complaining aboutt how “money and the ethnic vote” thwarted him, which has apparently made getting “winning conditions” for a third independence referendum so far impossible.[[/note]] The Parti Québécois keeps threatening to call another one, though it hasn’t had another majority since 1995 with which to try.[[note]]In September 2012, the PQ won a governing minority, with 54 of the Assembly’s 125 seats; however, they lost 24 of those seats in the election of March 2014, including that of Premier Pauline Marois.[[/note]] The other federal parties take various positions on how to respond to this, which frequently involve special concessions for Quebec.

->''“If you put on too much weight? C’est la faute du fédéral!''[[note]]“It’s the fault of the federal [government]!” The song parodies the tendency of Canadian provincial governments (especially that of Quebec) to blame every little thing on the federal government.[[/note]]\\
''If you have a large prostate? C’est la faute du fédéral!”''

A side effect of this system is a close similarity to the political systems of [[UsefulNotes/BritishPoliticalSystem Britain]], [[UsefulNotes/IrishPoliticalSystem Ireland]], [[UsefulNotes/AustralianPolitics Australia]] and [[{{UsefulNotes/India}} India]].

Since English and French are both official languages, any federal government service may be received in either language. In practice, it’s typically more complicated than that. Suffice it to say you can only get French-language service easily in Quebec, most of New Brunswick, Winnipeg, eastern and northern Ontario, and a few other locations, while you can get English-language service anywhere that is not rural Quebec.

** The size of this body varies, and in practice, it increases size every decade after each census. From the 2004 federal election until 2015, there were 308 ridings, whereupon thirty new districts were added beginning from the 2015 election. These ridings were added largely in Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia to balance a shifting population. Many of the old ridings were simultaneously redrawn by a non-partisan federal commission at the same time and for the same reason.
** Following the election of Justin Trudeau's Liberals in the 2015 election, the Government pledged to reform the way in which [=MPs=] were elected, following a public consultation. When the public consultation and Commons committee work failed to yield a consensus (arguably by design), and public sentiment ran to electoral methods that Trudeau and his Cabinet did not favour, the Liberals [[ILied abruptly dropped]] the idea.[[note]]The fact that if the 2015 election had been held under a new proportional representation alternative the Liberals would've received roughly 15% or 50 seats ''less'' representation and been reduced to a minority government, did not escape notice.[[/note]]
* The '''Canadian Senate''' has 105 members, all appointed and serving until a mandatory retirement age of 75 (established under a 1965 law prior to which Senators served for life). In one case, the appointed Senator was chosen in a special election by the province he represents.[[note]]That province is Alberta, and he joined the Red Chamber on the prime-ministerial watch of Stephen Harper, belying the call for an elected upper chamber his old party regularly sounded.[[/note]] The Senate has generally rubber-stamped legislation from the House of Commons for decades and is not allowed to introduce financial legislation. Technically, the Senate is the place for “sober second thought”, where the mobbish tendencies of democracy can be curbed and where legislation can be considered away from public pressure. The Senate can suggest changes to the bills or delay a bill until it expires on the table, but it has almost never defeated one outright.

** In practice, the Senate is often useful to Prime Ministers as a means of rewarding cronies, getting troublesome allies out of the way, and keeping their own mark on Parliament long after they have lost election or left politics themselves. More recently, due to public concerns over patronage as well as occasional scandals over fraud and improper expense claims, there have been calls to reform or even abolish the Senate. The Liberals have generally supported the status quo, while a wide swath of the New Democratic Party wants to [[YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness abolish the Senate altogether]], and the Conservatives (historically strong in the West) have usually supported an elected Senate. However, after the 2015 election returned Justin Trudeau's Liberals, a small but significant reform was initiated, with Senatorial appointments being turned over to an independent commission to select experts [[AsskickingEqualsAuthority based on merit]]. This has drawn criticism from some provinces, particularly (as expected) the Western ones, for failing to do anything about the lopsided distribution of seats; to this, the Government has replied that even if it wanted to do that, it couldn't, as that would require a constitutional amendment that could essentially never pass without the consent of at least one of the Atlantic provinces, whose influence would be correspondingly diluted ([[SarcasmMode good luck with that]]).
* The '''Governor-General of Canada''', currently Julie Payette, is the representative of the Sovereign, appointed in theory by the Sovereign and in practice by the Prime Minister, and has a mammoth assortment of powers, ranging from the ability to dissolve Parliament, appoint Senators, Supreme Court Justices, all high-ranking bureaucrats, and the Prime Minister and Cabinet, though they must keep the approval of the House of Commons. (S)he is also Commander-in-Chief of the [[UsefulNotes/CanucksWithChinooks Canadian military]]. However, these powers are bound by a large amount of unwritten convention, and are almost never used except on instruction from the Prime Minister — the last time they were, in 1926, the resulting “King-Byng Affair” resulted in a massive public outcry that ended in the re-election of Prime Minister W.L. Mackenzie King, whom Governor-General Lord Byng had rejected[[note]]Mackenzie King was Prime Minister despite the fact that he didn't even have the most seats in the House of Commons. When he tried to ask Lord Byng to dissolve Parliament after it voted against his government and call an election, he refused and appointed Conservative Arthur Meighen as PM instead. Meighen fared no better, so an election was called, which Mackenzie King handily won[[/note]]. The Governor-General is, in theory, supposed to be chosen by the Sovereign from a list of candidates chosen by the Prime Minister. For quite some time now, the Prime Minister’s list of Governor-General appointees has been exactly [[YouAreInCommandNow one name long]].
** An event in which the G-G ''can'' become more critical is if the Prime Minister starts to show signs of [[JumpingOffTheSlipperySlope getting dictatorial]], at which point the Governor-General, as representative of the Sovereign, can deny Royal Assent to bills that violate fundamental liberties. [[GodzillaThreshold If need be]], as the Governor-General is also the Commander-in-Chief, they can order the army to depose the PM by force.

The Prime Minister is the head of the Canadian government for all intents and purposes; you must be chosen as your party’s leader on top of being an elected representative, in a manner strikingly similar to the Speaker of the House in American politics. Due to the nature of the Westminster-style parliament, Canada’s executive branch is purely ceremonial, so the usual executive powers are devolved to the office of the Prime Minister and their Cabinet, who are also sitting [=MPs=] (or rarely Senators). Canadians do not vote for the Prime Minister directly, however; instead, they vote for the Member of Parliament in their riding only. The party with the most seats in the House of Commons forms a majority government, when they control more than half the seats, or a minority government, when they control less than half the seats[[note]]Usually, but not necessarily, they still have more seats than any single party. For instance, Liberal Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King retained power after one election [[EnemyMine with another party's support]] even though the Conservatives had more seats.[[/note]], and the Prime Minister is then appointed by the party itself.[[note]]Theoretically, in any situation where there is a minority government, some of the other parties could get together and form a coalition government provided they can get a simple majority of the House’s membership onside with them (meaning, practically, that those parties must have a majority of [=MPs=] between them). However, this has never happened formally since Confederation; the one time it seemed like this might happen, in 2008, it was kiboshed by the ruling Conservatives’ clever exploitation of EaglelandOsmosis and general distrust of the separatist Bloc Québécois. For all intents and purposes, the “Unionist Party” that ran in 1917 was a coalition between the governing Conservatives and members of the Liberal Opposition who supported the Government’s plan to impose conscription to muster manpower for Canada’s [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarI war]] effort.[[/note]]

Each province elects a Legislative Assembly, whose members are normally named Members of the Legislative Assembly ([=MLAs=]), though Ontario calls them Members of Provincial Parliament ([=MPPs=]), Quebec calls them Members of the National Assembly ([=MNAs=]), and Newfoundland calls them Members of the House of Assembly ([=MHAs=]). All provinces and the Yukon use a similar electoral system as the federal House of Commons does, though generally the ridings are different[[note]]Ontario is an exception, as most provincial ridings there are identical to the federal ridings[[/note]]. The leader of the party with the most members generally becomes the Premier of a given province or territory, though there are occasional exceptions when two smaller parties form a coalition to create a majority — this happened in Ontario in 1985, when the Ontario New Democratic Party made a formal agreement with the Liberal minority government.

The Northwest Territories and Nunavut operate using a [[NoPartyGiven non-partisan]] consensus government model, unique to these territories: the premier and speaker are then chosen from among the elected [=MLAs=], who are all officially independent of political parties. This is similar theoretically to the U.S. state of Nebraska’s non-executive legislature and most municipalities in Canada. This nonpartisan model is supposedly based on the traditions of the Inuit and other peoples indigenous to the territories. [=MLAs=] in Nunavut and the NWT may be affiliated with federal parties privately, however, and should they pursue federal politics, align with a federal party; at present, the three territories are represented by Liberal [=MPs=] in the House and a Liberal and 2 Conservatives in the Senate.

Each province’s representative of the Sovereign is appointed on recommendation from the Governor-General; in a province, this officeholder is called the Lieutenant-Governor[[note]]Though they now represent the Queen directly, back when Canada was created, they represented the Governor-General and were an instrument through which the federal government could veto provincial legislation; this is now only done if a provincial law is infringing on the federal government's responsibilities[[/note]], and in a territory, the name is Commissioner[[note]]Commissioners are appointed by and represent the federal government and not the Queen directly. They used to be powerful administrators who ruled territories directly, before the federal government curbed their powers and instituted democratically elected governments for the territories. Now, like the lieutenant governors, their role is mainly ceremonial.[[/note]].

Provincial responsibilities include transportation, health, education, and administration of justice. This last includes (as mentioned above) the adjudication of disputes in private law — contract, tort, wills, trusts, estates, etc., which is to say, most of the actual work that law actually is. Also, in practice, whining about unfair treatment from the federal government is a major responsibility of Premiers (as demonstrated by one of the page quotes).

Municipal politics are pretty much the same all over: the people of each town, city or regional municipality elect a mayor and some number of councillors, ranging from a handful in small towns to 64 in UsefulNotes/{{Montreal}}, generally depending on population. While party politics tend to be absent from smaller towns, bigger cities like UsefulNotes/{{Vancouver}} and UsefulNotes/{{Montreal}} tend to have formal political parties, though they are generally unrelated to the provincial and federal parties. Municipal political parties also tend to be less stable than parties at the other levels of government; often, although not always, they are simply ad hoc coalitions of councillors aligned with a particular mayoral candidate, and periodically dissolve to reconstitute entirely new political parties around new candidates.

The province of Nova Scotia technically has no cities at all, with all municipal governance taking place purely at the regional municipality level -- even the province's major communities, such as Halifax, Dartmouth, Sydney and Antigonish, are not actual towns or cities in their own right, but simply "urban service areas" governed entirely by the regional council. Elsewhere, some but not all of the major cities (e.g. Toronto, Ottawa) are also not part of a county structure, but function like "consolidated city-county" or "independent city" governments in the United States.

A variation of the normal election cycle ''almost'' occurred in December 2008 when the Liberals, NDP, and Bloc Québécois drew up a formal agreement to topple the ruling Conservative minority government in a non-confidence vote just six weeks after the election and ask the Governor-General to install them as a majority coalition government without triggering another election. While such an act is perfectly legitimate in a parliamentary democracy, it is quite unorthodox in Canada and the Conservatives countered by delaying the vote until January and launching a media blitz characterizing the act as a [[InsistentTerminology “coup d’état,”]] banking on the (correct) assumption that many Canadians don't know how their government actually works. The uncertainty of the Great Recession and the fact the coalition would've required the support of the separatist Bloc Québécois and made the unpopular Stéphane Dion the next Prime Minister even though his Liberal party had just suffered its [[CurbStompBattle worst vote-share (26%) since 1867]] also made the idea troubling even to many who understood its constitutionality, and the idea died in December when the Liberals ousted Dion and backed down.

A new variation happened in the 2015 election: while Parliament could still have been dissolved at any time, the election date was fixed on October 19 as described above[[note]]Although the government can theoretically ignore this law and have the election on any day they wanted[[/note]](the third Monday in October 2015), meaning the campaign could have lasted anywhere from the standard 36–40 days to many months. Indeed, the latter scenario came to pass when the election was called and Parliament was dissolved on August 2, resulting in a modern-day record[[note]]The 1872 election lasted up to 89 days in some parts of the country, but as little as ''five days'' in others, because votes could be held at different times in different regions ([[http://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/analysis-ruling-parties-have-done-better-in-shorter-election-campaigns-1.2497260 source]]). While this was intended to reflect the new nation’s geographic spread and what was then a lack of infrastructure to traverse it, it also led to some blatant LoopholeAbuse by the ruling Conservatives, which then led to an ObviousRulePatch.[[/note]] campaign length of 78 days.

In federal politics, the [[PowerTrio three major parties]] are the centre-right Conservative Party (the "Tories"), the centrist/centre-left Liberal Party (the "Grits"), and the left-wing/social democratic New Democratic Party (NDP or "Dippers"). Historically, the Liberals and Conservatives have been the two major parties and the only ones to govern, although both have suffered periods of [[TheRemnant electoral collapse]] (the Conservatives from the mid-1990s to mid-2000s; the Liberals from the mid-2000s until 2015). The NDP was until recently [[TheChewToy a perpetual third/fourth party]], but has been an important force in Canadian politics, [[TheLancer propping up minority Liberal governments]] in 1972–74 and 2006 and frequently [[TheSmartGuy raising policy concerns]] that Liberal governments took forward. The Green Party, while still small compared to the big three, is increasing in visibility and mainstream support and won its first seat in the 2011 election. There are many other smaller parties (Marijuana Party, Communist Party, etc.), and a few [[RuleOfFunny frivolous yet funny ones]] (most prominently the Rhinoceros Party).

* The Progressive Party, a centrist party who got established in the early 1920s when the Conservatives were going through a period of electoral weakness, and even became the second-largest party for a while. They quickly fell back into obscurity when it turned out the party's members views were a bit too diverse for them to put forward a coherent platform, though remnants of the party would later merge with the original Conservative Party (who had been wrecked as an electoral force due to their poor handling of TheGreatDepression) to form the Progressive Conservatives.
* The Social Credit party, who started out as a right-wing party focused on the western provinces in the 1930s, before becoming more focused on Quebec nationalism in the 1960s. Probably the most extreme right-wing of the "mainstream" parties who have achieved any parliamentary representation in Canada, to the extent that the party held openly anti-Semitic policies until the mid-1950s, while their most famous leader, Réal Caouette, made the headlines for proclaiming Hitler and Mussolini to be his political idols, and trying to downplay the holocaust by claiming that the Nazis only killed Jews who were also a burden on society. After Caouette's death, the party was taken over by Neo-Nazis in the 1980s, resulting in it rapidly collapsing.

A thing of note for American readers: as a rule, the Canadian political "centre" (as used to describe parties here) is to the ''left'' of [[UsefulNotes/AmericanPoliticalSystem the American center]], much as it is in Western Europe. Canadian conservatives might be "Rockefeller Republicans" when there was still such a thing in Congress, right-leaning "Blue Dog Democrats" or moderate Democrats like UsefulNotes/BarackObama, UsefulNotes/JoeBiden or UsefulNotes/HillaryClinton in the USA, while the Liberals’ politics are closer to those of the left wing of the Democrats (e.g. Nancy Pelosi or Elizabeth Warren). The NDP are to the left of anything mainstream in the USA; a few prominent names on the American version of the "extreme left", such as Bernie Sanders, would probably be considered moderate progressives within the NDP.

American-style social conservatism is conversely regarded as a fringe view, with the conservative politicians focusing on fiscal issues. Indeed, this was a bone of contention for some of Prime Minister Harper’s own, more [[MoralGuardians moralistic]], backbenchers, and remains a issue for the Conservative Party post-Harper. Canadian conservatives tend to be fiscally conservative, supporting low taxes and local control, while remaining much more socially liberal and secular compared to their American counterparts. Their closest relatives on the U.S. right are libertarians like UsefulNotes/RonPaul or Gary Johnson.

* The Liberal Party still reigns supreme as a majority government. At Justin Trudeau's swearing-in, he made headlines by appointing a gender-equal cabinet consisting of 15 men and 15 women. When asked why, he said simply, [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLk2aSBrR6U “Because it’s 2015”]]. However, the early optimism and adulation that persisted for much of 2015 and 2016 has gradually faded as Trudeau and his government have repudiated a series of promises they made during the 2015 campaign, including a prominent commitment to end the "first past the post" electoral system in favour of reform. An embarrassingly gaffe-prone state visit to India in 2018 and the unpopularity of Ontario's Liberal government further eroded public approval of Trudeau and his government, though they remain generally in first place in the polls. The Liberals have received a bit of a boost recently from their handling of the trade dispute with the US (in addition to the Ontario Liberals no longer weighing them down now that they're out of power).
* The Conservatives have settled into a fairly comfortable Opposition state, winning 99 seats. Following his loss in 2015, outgoing prime minister Stephen Harper graciously accepted defeat and resigned as party leader, eventually also resigning his seat in Calgary and returning to the private sector. After a period under interim leader and Opposition Leader Rona Ambrose, the Conservatives selected Saskatchewan MP and former Commons Speaker Andrew Scheer as their new permanent leader in 2017 (from among a field of [[LoadsAndLoadsOfCharacters 13 candidates]]). As the Liberals have gradually lost trust among Canadians, the Conservatives have slowly prospered. The spring of 2018 even saw them challenging the Liberals for the polling lead (with some outliers putting them as much as ''16 points'' ahead of the Liberals), but the summer saw them fall back to being about equal, before a major wrench was thrown into the works in August when Scheer's main leadership rival Maxime Bernier suddenly quit the party and announced he would [[StartMyOwn start his own]] in protest of the Tories not taking a hard enough line on immigration.
* The NDP, once favored to rise high into the political scene and stay there, was relatively devastated at least as much as the Conservatives due to the Liberal wave in 2015. At the party's convention in April 2016, [[YouHaveFailedMe the party membership voted to oust]] leader Thomas Mulcair and elect a new one before the next election. In late 2017, they elected Jagmeet Singh, a former MPP from Ontario, and now the first person from a visible minority to lead a federal political party in Canada. In the polls, the NDP has recovered somewhat from a period of substantial weakness following the 2015 election and Mulcair's removal, and now stands about where they were when the 2015 election concluded.

* The People's Party of Canada are the new kids on the block. Formed in September 2018 by Conservative leadership runner-up Maxime Bernier, it has a broadly similar range of political positions to the Tories, but with a more populist bent and a much firmer libertarian and anti-immigration stance. Though the [=PPCs=] estimated membership is almost double that of the Bloc Quebecois, their polling numbers (1.5% to 4%) barely even challenge those of the Bloc, and unlike the Bloc, Bernier intends to run candidates in all 338 ridings. The party's first test came in three February 2019 by-elections where they finished fourth in Burnaby-South (urban BC) with 10.6% of the vote and a distant sixth with around 2% in both Outremont (urban Quebec) and the Conservative stronghold of York-Simcoe (rural Ontario).

Provincial politics tends to also have the Conservatives, Liberals, and NDP as the primary parties, though there are exceptions: both Saskatchewan's Sask Party and B.C.'s Liberal Party are in practice [[EnemyMine mergers of provincial Liberals and Conservatives]] in opposition to both provinces' powerful NDP, Alberta conservatives saw a decade of [[AHouseDivided division]] between the more conservative Wild Rose Party and the old Progressive Conservatives before they reunited in 2017, and Quebec politics is [[MindScrew just plain weird]] because it includes a secessionist-federalist spectrum in addition to the typical left-right and authoritarian-libertarian spectrums.[[note]]It features the separatist and slightly left-leaning Parti Québécois (PQ), the federalist and slightly right-leaning Quebec Liberal Party (PLQ), the autonomist and centre-right Coalition Avenir Québec ([[FunWithAcronyms CAQ]]), and the openly socialist and separatist Québec Solidaire. In actual effect, however, the provincial parties in Quebec all have moderate and extreme factions, united more by their position on the sovereignty question than anything else. The CAQ claims to eschew the entire federalism-separatism debate, and has lately been poaching voter support and [=MNAs=] from the Liberals, the PQ, and the defunct ADQ. One thing to note: Quebec is somewhat to the left of Canada in general, notably on social issues, and as such, the Quebec Liberal Party is very similar to the federal Conservative Party; indeed, the former Premier of Quebec, Jean Charest, rose to prominence as a Progressive Conservative Cabinet minister in the 1980s government of Brian Mulroney — and even became the leader of the party after the 1993 wipeout — before becoming leader of the Quebec Liberals.[[/note]] The NDP does frequently win in provincial elections, especially in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia where--for historical reasons--they're the only major left-wing party in a two-party system, and thus viable contenders for government by default.

Alberta is also an interesting case — having been a province since 1905, they have experienced only three changes of government: one during the Depression, one after popular premier Ernest Manning (father of Reform Party founder Preston Manning) resigned and was succeeded by the much less skillful Harry Strom, and the latest being because of the introduction of an unpopular budget that resulted in the shocking election of a NDP majority government. From 1971 to 2015, a string of PC leaders [[LandslideElection won a majority in every election]], to the point where Alberta was routinely considered a one-party state, and it was [[SeriousBusiness only half a joke]].[[note]]Alberta had never gone back to a party after voting it out of power and the Conservative Party had the longest string of elections, the only comparable run being the 1935–71 Social Creditors, whom the [=PCs=] had themselves eliminated. This trend is also technically guaranteed in the future now since the [=PCs=] and Wildrose have merged into the "new" United Conservative Party.[[/note]]

The result of the above is that although parties can have the same name at federal and provincial levels, often that’s ''all'' they have in common. The NDP is an exception, in that all provincial [=NDPs=] are branches of the federal NDP, while most of the provincial Liberals (Liberals in the Atlantic provinces being an exception) and Conservatives are independent of their federal counterparts. Canadians, in general, are well aware of this; so nobody blinks when, say, a former NDP Premier of Ontario like Bob Rae can make a serious run at leadership of the federal Liberal Party; the former head of the federal Progressive Conservatives, Jean Charest, can become the Liberal Premier of Québec, or the former NDP Premier of British Columbia, Ujjal Dosanjh, can also switch parties to become a federal Liberal cabinet minister.

Municipal politics tends to be officially nonpartisan, except in British Columbia and in Montreal, Quebec. However, individual councillors and mayors are often known to have particular partisan leanings — for example, Jack Layton, former leader of the federal NDP, was a member of the Toronto City Council before he won the leadership, and the current Mayor of Toronto, John Tory, once led the Ontario PC party and worked in the federal PC party before it collapsed.

One significant difference when it comes to individual politicians compared to the United States is that there is no equivalent in Canadian constitutional law to the “natural-born citizen” requirement for President and Vice-President, and in general Parliament (and some of the provincial legislatures) will have a higher number of naturalized immigrants than jurisdictions in the United States. As of February 2010, there were more Muslims sitting in Parliament (all of them foreign-born, including one who was a veteran combat pilot in the Pakistani Air Force) than had ever been in Congress, as well as 15 Sikhs, most of them immigrants as well. Four prime ministers (including the first, John A. Macdonald, and most recently John Turner, PM for less than three months in 1984[[note]]He succeeded Pierre Trudeau when the latter resigned the Liberal leadership, and in that fall’s election, the Progressive Conservatives [[CurbStompBattle cleaned his clock]].[[/note]]) were born outside Canada, albeit all in the United Kingdom. The previous two Governors-General (Adrienne Clarkson and Michaëlle Jean) were also immigrants (from China — well, UsefulNotes/HongKong[[note]]Clarkson, born Adrienne Poy, was married to the English-born academic Stephen Clarkson from 1963 to 1965 and retained his name after their divorce.[[/note]] — and Haiti, respectively). As well, following the 2015 election, five ministers are immigrants to Canada, including the first Sikh to command a regiment in the Canadian Forces ([[http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/11/06/harjit-sajjan-defence-min_0_n_8486412.html who is a major]] badass)[[note]]Fun fact: There are currently more Sikhs in the Canadian cabinet than in the Indian cabinet[[/note]].

The half-ton gorilla in recent Canadian politics has been "national unity". A minority of Quebecers want Quebec to leave Canada and become an independent country, while many non-separatist Quebecers believe in Quebec having rights to greater autonomy. There have been two referenda on independence, in 1980 and 1995, the first of which was defeated with 60% of the vote, and the second of which was defeated with [[NearVillainVictory 50.6%]] of the vote.[[note]]As it happened, then-Quebec Premier Jacques Parizeau shot off his mouth in a SoreLoser concession speech at this loss, complaining aboutt how “money and the ethnic vote” thwarted him, which has apparently made getting “winning conditions” for a third independence referendum so far impossible.[[/note]] The Parti Québécois keeps threatening to call another one, though it hasn’t had another majority since 1995 with which to try.[[note]]In September 2012, the PQ won a governing minority, with 54 of the Assembly’s 125 seats; however, they lost 24 of those seats in the election of March 2014, including that of Premier Pauline Marois.[[/note]] The other federal parties take various positions on how to respond to this, which frequently involve special concessions for Quebec.

The environment has also become a [[IncrediblyLamePun hot]] topic in recent years. The Green Party has put environmental regulations at the center of their platforms, the NDP and Liberals also support reforms, and the Conservatives are more cautious, but still interested in, at minimum, seeming like they care. The Conservatives’ environment platform in government was effectively "We’ll Just See What the U.S. Does", and the U.S. didn’t seem to be doing much of anything, so Canada didn't either. In fact, under Harper's government, no provinces save Québec reached their targets under the Kyoto Protocol and a few even skyrocketed their greenhouse gas emissions since the Prime Minister simply refused to follow the Protocol's targets. It remains to be seen what the more explicitly pro-environment Liberal government will do on that file. In the meantime, the provinces are generally content to sit and bitch at each other about who gets what money. This has been described as “exactly like the European Union, just with more land”.

Two of the more recent scandals are the “sponsorship scandal,” where large sums of money earmarked for national-unity advertising programs in Quebec were used improperly (read: given away to friends of the then-ruling Liberal Party), and the “Airbus affair,” wherein then-Prime Minister Brian Mulroney stands accused of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from a German arms dealer as kickbacks on the purchase of Airbus jets for Air Canada, which the government owned at the time. More recently, in 2013, several Senators (some Liberals, but mostly Conservatives) were accused of claiming excessive amounts of expenses, particularly living expenses [[note]]Senators have to own property in the province they represent, but they can claim expenses if their primary residence is more than 100 km from Ottawa. This led Senators to [[LoopholeAbuse designate small cabins in the middle of nowhere as their "primary residence"]] in the province they represent, allowing them to claim expenses for the large houses/luxury condos in Ottawa that they actually live in[[/note]], and are being investigated by the RCMP. When the Senate ordered them to repay the money, some did so while others went to court. This led to [[HereWeGoAgain another round]] of discussion regarding Senate reform, which almost inevitably change very little.

In February 2010, Conservative cabinet minister (for the status of women!) Helena Guergis was accused of throwing a hissy fit at the Charlottetown airport, located in Canada’s smallest province, P.E.I. The minister allegedly threw shoes across the security screening area and banged on a security door. When media and the Liberals asked for the security tapes, CATSA (the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority) could not provide them (many suspect [[ExecutiveMeddling Conservative meddling]]).

Prime Minister Harper stood by her for a while (in the face of public information), then rumours began to rise that Guergis had been letting her husband, a former cabinet minister, use her office to promote his business. Apparently some photos surfaced of the two in a [[DenOfIniquity shady strip club]] with [[HookersAndBlow cocaine and, reportedly, “busty hookers”]]. Guergis was then [[YouHaveFailedMe expelled from cabinet by Harper]], not to mention [[YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness expelled from the Conservative Party caucus]], and [[OhCrap an RCMP investigation was launched]] (all thanks to ''private'' information). Even after the RCMP cleared Guergis of wrongdoing, she [[TheAtoner continued to sit as an independent MP]], though she lost her seat to the Conservative challenger in the subsequent election. This led to the joke that Harper now always stands behind his cabinet members because it’s [[CaughtWithYourPantsDown easier to push them under a bus from that position]].

The more recent ‘robocall’ scandal had its roots in the 2011 federal election. It came to light that ''someone'' was sending automated ‘robocalls’ (and, in some cases, targeted live calls) to non-Conservative or ex-Conservative voters in a number of different ridings, falsely directing them to incorrect polling stations or otherwise harassing them into not voting at all. Elections Canada got wind of these incidents via complaints from the public, and since the scandal broke they have accumulated over ''[[UpToEleven 31,000 reports]]'' of similar calls from across Canada. In the most high-profile case, in the riding of Guelph in Ontario, [[MediaWatchdog Elections Canada]] has traced at least some of the calls to a subsidiary of an automated calling company in Edmonton, which in turn was contacted both by the Guelph Conservative campaign as well as a disposable mobile phone registered under the alias “Pierre Poutine” of “Separatist Street” in Joliette, Quebec. (The “Pierre Poutine” name was likely taken off of an independent food caterer in Guelph, while the “Separatist Street” location was probably a crude attempt at a TakeThat to the Quebec independence movement.) In another riding where voter suppression tactics have been alleged (Nipissing–Timiskaming), the Conservative won by just ''eighteen votes'', and this was far from the only close riding across the country, potentially making the difference between a majority and minority government.

The opposition NDP and Liberals [[StatusQuoIsGod rather predictably reacted with outrage]], while the Conservatives [[IWasNeverHere naturally denied any responsibility]], though a low-ranking Conservative staffer from the Guelph campaign has since resigned his position at the office of a Toronto-area MP. Spinoff allegations have included voter registration fraud as well as illegal campaign financing. Federal opinion polls have registered minimal (if any) impact as a result of the ‘robocall scandal’; a federal judge offered the Tories a not-quite-absolution in April 2013.

On the municipal level, in May 2013, reporters from the ''Toronto Star'' and gossip website ''Gawker'' reported that they had viewed and been offered a video showing Toronto Mayor Rob Ford [[DrugsAreBad smoking crack cocaine]] and making homophobic slurs. Though Ford had a well-documented history of mild to belligerent public intoxication, he [[SuspiciouslySpecificDenial denied and evaded questions]] for several months — until, in October 2013, [[SeriousBusiness the Toronto police]] reported that they had recovered a deleted copy of what appears to be that same video from a hard drive seized in an anti-drug raid. Ford then changed his story and admitted to “probably” having used crack cocaine in the midst of a “drunken stupor,” while blaming the media for not asking the right questions (which they had, and he had ignored) and claiming to [[ImplausibleDeniability not be an addict]]. With Ford and several of his associates and assistants now under police investigation, Toronto City Council [[EnemyMine banded together]] to strip him of most of his powers (at least those which they could remove under provincial laws) along with his staff and budget, and shift them to the deputy mayor. Rob Ford has since responded by playing the victim of a “coup d'état” while proudly going on to contest the 2014 municipal election. Not long after losing most of his mayoral powers, [[HereWeGoAgain another crack video surfaced, this time with screenshots]], forcing Mayor Ford to enter rehab. [[TenMinuteRetirement He continued to run for Mayor upon leaving rehab]], but a hospital visit revealed an abdominal tumor. Mayor Ford withdrew from the mayoral race, opting to run for his old Ward 2 seat. He passed away March 22, 2016. Rob’s brother Doug (the then Ward 2 councillor) submitted his papers to run for mayor with one hour to spare before the nomination deadline. In the end, John Tory became mayor … but Doug Ford got the last laugh by becoming Premier of Ontario in 2018, a position Tory had de facto run for in 2007 as leader of the Ontario Conservative Party and lost.

* The People's Party of Canada are the new kids on the block. Formed in September 2018 by Conservative leadership runner-up Maxime Bernier, it has a broadly similar range of political positions to the Tories, but with a more populist bent and a much firmer libertarian and anti-immigration stance. Thus far their polling numbers have barely even challenged those of the Bloc and Greens; however, the PPC currently has an estimated membership almost double that of the Bloc, and has entered candidates in a series of by-elections in February 2019, meaning that the party and Bernier are evidently in it for the long haul.

* The Bloc Québécois, a [[SingleIssueWonk Quebec separatist party]] with a very slight centre-left orientation overall, was the dominant party in Quebec and a significant force in Parliament from 1993 to 2011, but lost its party status and all but four seats in the 2011 election, leaving them as TheRemnant. They made a modest comeback in 2015, winning ten seats, which was still not enough to return them to official party status. In early 2018, disagreements over the Bloc's newest leader led to the tiny caucus splintering further to create the "Quebec parliamentary group".

* The People's Party of Canada are the new kids on the block. Formed in September 2018 by Conservative leadership runner-up Maxime Bernier, it has a broadly similar range of political positions to the Tories, but with a more populist bent and a much firmer libertarian and anti-immigration stance. It's much too soon to have any firm idea of how this party will affect the political landscape, particularly whether it will split the right-wing vote and give the Liberals an easier ride in the 2019 election, or more efficiently carve up the Liberal vote and ensure they end up losing.

** Following the election of Justin Trudeau's Liberals in the 2015 election, the Government pledged to reform the way in which [=MPs=] were elected, following a public consultation. When the public consultation and Commons committee work failed to yield a consensus (arguably by design), and public sentiment ran to electoral methods that Trudeau and his Cabinet did not favour, the Liberals [[ILied abruptly dropped]] the idea.