Meanwhile, in Ottawa

This week: I refuse to let a bout of food poisoning prevent me from bringing you the Canada 2025 election special.

Bank holidays are always a bit weird as a freelancer. I worked on Good Friday – I had a meeting with the geography professor translating my book into Korean, which was lovely; I had a lot of looming deadlines, which were not; and I had no personal commitments that day, so hey, might as well keep things moving. I debated working again on Easter Monday, but decided that, no, deadlines or not, I needed a break, and began plotting a long lie in followed by a longer aimless walk.

And at 3am on Sunday night, I awoke with a start, then proceeded to throw up in multiple rooms. So no, I didn’t work. But neither did I relax or enjoy myself.

Such conditions have yet to fully abate – it is slightly sobering to confront the fact that, in the event of my untimely death, the first person to notice would likely be Jasper, when his increasingly irritable texts about where exactly this newsletter was went unanswered. At any rate, this week’s newsletter is a little briefer than normal I’m afraid.

Those of you who are getting a sense of deja vu, vaguely remembering a similar intro to a newsletter last summer when I decided to take a week off, then all I can say is – I know! Believe me, I know. Bloody hell.

I Try To Understand Canadian Politics

In the first half of last year, you may recall, I got a bit too into the 1993 Canadian election: the one in which a combination of new parties, unfriendly electoral geography and First Past the Post meant that the ruling Tory party lost all but two seats. The reason I got a bit too into that, obviously, was that it was a comforting fantasy I could project onto the future of British politics (and having since been faced by the reality of actually existing British politics, my god do I miss that). But these things linger, and having done a deep dive on one election, I’ve instinctively been keeping half an eye on this one.

And my god, this has been a good year to get suddenly really into Canadian politics. For one thing, Donald Trump’s repeated references to the USA’s northern neighbour – it’s been several months now since anyone could confidently describe them as “jokes” – have unexpectedly made Canada a sort of symbol of western liberal democracy, in ways that are not that similar to Ukraine but have more parallels than is entirely comfortable.

The other is what’s happened to the polls. Going into this year, it seemed all but inevitable that the Liberals – the centrist/centre-left party which has been in office since 2015 – would lose, like most other incumbent parties facing re-election of late, terribly. Now, thanks in large part to Trump’s interventions, they’re the favourites. The Conservatives, meanwhile, look likely to have their hopes dashed.

Here’s an incredible chart, showing the odds of the two big parties winning. See if you can spot the start of Donald Trump’s second term.

Image: CBC Poll Tracker.

At any rate, since I’m watching an election an ocean away anyway, I figured I’d turn it into content.

The electoral system

Basics first. Canada is a bicameral parliamentary democracy modelled on the Westminster system. A governor general represents the crown; the upper house is the Senate, whose members are appointed by the governor general on the advice of the Prime Minister as vacancies arise. (Newfoundland gets six senators; Ontario and Quebec 24 each; the other provinces are split into Atlantic and Western divisions, each of which get 24, too; while the territories get one apiece, bringing the total to 105. So, now we know.)

That, though, is mainly a revising body with relatively limited actual power – it really is a Westminster-style system, isn’t it – and all the real power lies with the House of Commons. That’s what Canada goes to the polls to elect next Monday: 343 MPs, chosen by first-past-the-post contests in single member electoral districts colloquially known as “ridings”. Each of the 10 provinces and three territories is allocated a particular number of MPs, meaning that the ridings come in a surprisingly wide range of population sizes. Those in Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia average just over 125,000 voters each; the four in Prince Edward Island fewer than 34,000. The tiny population of the vast Arctic territory of Nunavut, meanwhile, means that just 18,000 voters elect a single MP to represent a riding four times the size of Spain.

All this is one symptom of Canada being an extremely geographically unbalanced country, which stretches over 2,000 miles north of the 49th parallel but where roughly 90% of the 41 million population live within 100 miles of the US border. That makes for an electoral map which requires a lot of box outs: