North America's other election

I know the last thing we need right now is another North American election to worry about. Just as the coverage of the US election reaches saturation point in Europe, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has announced that Canada will go to the polls on October 14, in an attempt by Harper to increase the ruling conservative party's position to a majority government. And we should be worried.

The US election obviously matters to Europeans - the last eight years have shown us how much of a stake the rest of us have in who America chooses as its next leader on November 4. What we might forget, in the next two months of North American election campaigning, is how much the Canadian election matters too.

The lack of interest abroad in Canada's national politics is striking - probably partly a perennial stereotype of Canada as peaceful (read: boring) country, partly because the last eight years have required a heightened focus on the big bag of crazy that the institutional politics of Canada's southern neighbour has become. No one has benefited from this more than Harper: outside of Canada, there's barely been a mention of the fact that even calling this election is a violation of his earlier electoral promise to set fixed election dates, to stop politicians calling elections whenever they're in a favourable position in the polls (can you guess why Harper called the election now?).

In Britain we seem to be inured to how bizarre and undemocratic it is for leaders to be able to pick an election date. Harper's outright flip-flopping on the issue makes the whole problem transparent - and, sure enough, the likely outcome of the October election will be a majority Conservative government in Canada.

The broken pledge on fixed elections is just the latest dubious act from Harper, a man who has dismissed the Kyoto Protocol as a "socialist" enterprise with no purpose other than to punish rich nations, acquiesced to George Bush's war on terror, culled funding for women's advocacy programmes and accepted same-sex marriages only after members of his own party voted against him on a motion to "restore the traditional definition of marriage". For a prime minister with a powerless minority government, he's managed to do an almost impressive amount of damage since coming to power two years ago, damage that - particularly on environmental issues - has an impact far beyond Canada.

~ read on... ~