Today I’ll be talking about the structure of the Canadian government, and the process of the election. I’ll also include my opinion on the current election and share some interesting articles with y’all.
Canada is a parliamentary democracy and a constitutional monarchy. Parliamentary democracy means that the majority of people that gets to make governing decisions, and get to vote for their MPs that represents them in the House of Commons. Constitution monarchy means that the queen still has a role of federal and provincial decision making but limited by the constitutions.
Every few years Canadians go to the polls to elected the members of parliaments to choose Canada’s future. Canada is separated into different ridings and there are candidates from each party that compete for the most votes. The candidate that has the most votes will become the member of parliament. The party that has the most candidates elected as members of parliament will form the government, and the leader of that party will become the prime minister.
Usually the election happens every four years in October, but the current Prime Minister can request one at anytime as long as it’s within fives years of the previous one. Today, on September 20th, the 44th federal election has been held. Tonight, the election was live on CBC news, and the liberals are winning by 25 more elected candidates than the conservatives, which is probably gonna lead to their victory in this election. But this is not a victory for the liberals at all, at least in my opinion. Trudeau wanted to have more power over Canada, and transform the liberal party into a majority government. A majority government is a party that has over 170 seats, but the liberals only had 157 MPs elected in the 2019 election, therefore, an election was needed. This year the liberals got 158 seats, which is one more seat than the previous election. Prime Minister Trudeau spent 610 million dollars on this election, which is 100 million more than the previous one. With a difference of one more seat, do you really think it’s worthy to spend 610 million dollars?
From CBC News
Basically, the election didn’t change the fact that the liberal party is still a minority government, but it did put Canada deeper into debt. The liberal party is not doing well at balancing the budget, especially in this pandemic. A lot of money is needed for maintaining the society, such as the 10$ a day childcare, and helping small and medium sized businesses. All this kind of massive spending led Canada to have 1 trillion dollars in debt. It would be extremely hard for Canada to recover economically from this massive deficit.
These articles are from National Post and Global News.
The Liberal Party of Canada is a progressive party that is slightly left winged. They wanted over 170 seats, that way they could have more voices when it comes to making big decisions, but clearly, the results didn’t go the way that Prime Minister Trudeau wanted. In the future, federal decisions will still be effective by other political ideologies and beliefs.
Many decisions are made across Canada each day. Three different types of government take care of the cases based on the problem. First we have the federal government which takes care of the whole country. Specifically, citizenship and passports, criminal laws, currency, federal taxes, fisheries and oceans, indigenous rights and more. Then we have the provincial/territorial governments, which are responsible for their provinces or territories. Specifically, colleges and universities, drivers’ licensing and highways, education, health care, natural resources, and more. Lastly, we have the municipal government which manage their cities or towns, specifically, animal control, fire protection, local parks, waste management and more. In Canada, we vote for people that represent us at each level. The elected candidates are responsible for making decisions and voting on bills. We have different titles for the representatives at each level. The federal representatives are called the members of parliament(MPs), who debate and pass laws in the House of Commons. The titles for the provincials’ or territorials’ representatives are called the Members of Legislative Assembly(MLA), Members of Provincial parliament(MPP), Members of the National Assembly(MNA), or Members of the House of Assembly(MHA), based on where you live. The municipal representatives are called councilors, or aldermen. We also have different leaders for each level. The leader of the federal government is called the prime minister. The leader of the provincial or territorial government is called the premier. Lastly, the leader of the municipal government is called a mayor, or a reeve. Our daily lives are effected by these politicians, and they are the people that we voted for.
Terry Beech, the liberal candidate in my riding (North-Burnaby, Seymour) was re-elected as the member of parliament. The results were totally different than what we had in the student election. The NDP candidate had 38% of the votes, and the liberals only got 25%. This is probably because a lot more students agreed with the idea of taxing the rich so we could afford health care rather than just saying “Move Forward For Everyone”. Terry Beech is the most experienced candidate out of everyone else in the riding, therefore, 38% of the people chose him. I voted for the PPC in the student election, because my cat said so. He and I both like the name of the candidate, but unfortunately he only got 6% of the votes in my school.
