Weather Station Rerun: Canadian Politics for Foreigners

This is a piece I wrote the last time Canadians had to go to the polls. We seem to be voting a lot these days, so much so that I can actually recycle articles from two years ago. The only difference this time around is the absence of former Liberal Leader Stephane Dion, who is I think working at a call centre now. Anyway, here’s the 2008 article again:

I’ve found that the Canadian political system confuses some people, and let me tell you why: It’s a mess. Here are the sad facts:

• We’re a constitutional monarchy. Our head of state is Queen Elizabeth II of England (above), who stops by every few years to wave. Her face is on our cash, and her portrait is in all the hockey rinks. What the Queen does is have a Governor-General, who is her representative here, but she doesn’t pick that person; the Prime Minister does. The current GG is a TV journalist from Quebec. Her job involves a lot of coming around and waving.
• We have an upper house and a lower house. The lower house is where the things get done. The upper house, our Senate, is an appointed body that rubberstamps final assent on new law. You read that correctly: our Senate is made up of people appointed by the governing party. They tend to be chosen for a variety of reasons, political acumen being pretty low on the list. Our Senate has a lot of hockey players in it.
• Our head of government is our Prime Minister, who at the moment is Stephen Harper. We don’t vote directly for our PM. We vote locally for our MP, Member of Parliament. Whichever political party gets the most MPs elected gets to form the government, and whoever leads that party is the PM. The PM is also an MP, with a riding of his or her own to also represent, although we all know that doesn’t actually happen.
• We have a five-party Parliament. There used to be two parties, the Conservatives (“Tories”) and the Liberals (“Grits”), and they would campaign, and one would get more than the other and would win. Then a third party, the New Democratic Party, or NDP, strolled in, creating the possibility of a minority government. Then another party showed up, the Bloc Quebecois. They only run in Quebec, but there are a lot of them. They are numerically unable to form the government, but were once the official Opposition, and remain spoilers. Now there’s another party, the Green Party, with one MP in the House of Commons. This situation makes minority governments far more common. We just had one. It basically means the governing party has to make a lot of side deals with rivals to stay afloat.
• Here’s how that works: The government, say, introduces a budget. Every MP votes on it. With a majority, well, it passes and it’s law. In a minority, the government needs at least one other party to get on board. If the government holds a vote and loses, it’s taken as a vote of non-confidence, the government fails and we have to elect a new one.
• Our elections can happen at any time. The Tories introduced a fixed-date election law when they got elected two years ago, then ignored it a couple of weeks back and called another election. I have voted in something like eight federal elections in 20 years, and about the same number of provincial elections.
• Oh yeah — our provinces and territories work the same way, only with different parties, and the leader is called the Premier. I live in Ontario, which currently has a Liberal majority government, but the provincial Liberals don’t get along with the federal Liberals. It’s all very stupid.
• Back to the national scene: The Liberals’ leader is a nerd named Stephane Dion. He has failed to really impress the people and is to blame for his party’s sinking status. Dion is almost like the John Major of Canada, except he’s more like the Mr. Bean of Canada.
• The current Conservative Party, led by Harper, is not the same one we used to have. The old one got wiped out because of a particularly shitty PM named Mulroney in the early 90s; they went from majority government to two seats. So a new party came along, called Reform; they rose through the ranks, changed their name to the Alliance, then absorbed the last shredded remnants of the Conservatives to become the new Conservatives. But a lot of old Conservatives don’t like the new Conservatives, because the old Conservatives were blue-blooded eastern barons, and the new Conservatives are J.R. Ewings from the Alberta oil sands. It’s fun to watch from the outside.
• The NDP is led by Jack Layton, a scrappy little guy from Toronto. People like him, but they don’t like the NDP much, so he’s kind of stuck. A few provinces have had NDP governments and it hasn’t gone well.
• The Bloc has a guy named Gilles Duceppe, but they rarely leave Quebec so we don’t know much about them. Duceppe wore a hairnet to a photo op at a cheese factory once, and it has haunted him ever since.
• And the Greens serve a person called Elizabeth May, who is so over the top unusual she will clearly never get elected. She is the only leader who is not a sitting MP, and is not likely to become one, so in the flukey weird King Ralph chance that the Greens form a government, she would have to watch from the balcony.
• If a party leader resigns, a convention is held and party members vote on the new leader. If that party is in power, that person becomes our unelected Prime Minister. We usually don’t like that when it happens, because once it was Kim Campbell, and another time it was John Turner.
• Our leaders debate on TV, but it isn’t like American debates. Everyone gets the same question and they take turns answering. It’s really dull. Then there is hugging and cake, because we’re Canadian.

I wrote this more than two years ago. Little has changed. We have a different Governor-General now, and the Greens lost that one seat they had in the last election. But really, all you have to do is go back and change “Stephane Dion” to “Michael Ignatieff” and it all still works.

Quick Movie Reviews

I’ve been having trouble sleeping over the past couple of weeks, and I’m working a crazy schedule due to the federal election, so I have found myself awake in the small hours, looking for movies to enjoy. Between the television, Netflix, my public library and Blockbuster, I have a fair selection. Here are some of the things I’ve seen lately:

Flash of Genius: This is the story of the weird guy who invented intermittent windshield wipers. It sounds dull, but is in fact a very fine film, with Greg Kinnear (quickly becoming one of my favourite actors), Lauren Graham and even Alan Alda. I expected this movie to help me fall asleep. Instead, I watched it with a big grin throughout.

The Hammer: Adam Carolla produced and stars in this sort-of-like-Rocky 6 movie about a washed-up 40-year-old amateur boxer who gets a shot at the U.S. Olympic team. Better than you’d think, despite its stupidly low budget and reliance on Carolla’s schtick.

Valhalla Rising: Mads Mikkelsen plays a mysterious one-eyed warrior who has been held captive by Vikings for years. When he escapes, he goes on a savage journey of revenge. It’s a beautiful film, shot on foggy, rocky shores, but drags a bit and is sometimes hard to follow.

Devil: Loved it. This locked-room scary mystery is one of the best horror movies I’ve seen in a long time. Set in a stuck elevator, it’s the story of five strangers, one of whom is Satan. In other words, kind of like dinner with my former in-laws.

Cemetery Junction: I had a hoot and a holler throughout this British comedy. Amazing performances, a touching tale and a spot-on rendition of ’70s England, this made me want to listen to David Bowie all night. At one point, a character is listening to classical music to better himself; his mates tell him to stop listening to music made by poofters, and put on some Elton John instead.

Tron Legacy: I loved the first hour, but lost interest once Jeff Bridges (the Rooster Cogburn version) showed up. The effects, though, are fantastic, and the overall construct expands on the advances of the first movie. Much has been made of how Bridges was digitally de-aged, but I was not convinced; the effect made him look like a CGI version of Alec Baldwin, for some reason. And there was far too much sitting around and talking while glowing, and not enough action. If you’re going to make a movie about living inside a video game, there should be more gaming. Still, it bodes well for the next film.

I’m about to start two weeks of night shifts, so I fully expect to get home at 3 a.m. wired on coffee and adrenaline. I will definitely need more movies. Luckily, the dollar store is selling old Jackie Chan DVDs.

The New Weather Station Studios

So we bought a house today. The listing agent called it a “mini mansion,” and it is — it’s a much larger house than we expected to find in our price range, with seven bedrooms and a full, partially finished basement that will soon become a rec room once I put in a subfloor. And right beside the rec room there’s a 12×12 space that will soon be the new home of the Weather Station Studios. I plan to cork and carpet the walls, install new overhead booms and build a sound-dampening isolation box for the big fat Mac tower I use to record with. Throw in one of the old sofas and my office chairs, and baby, we’re cooking with gas.

One side of the room will have space for my guitars and drums, while the other will hold my desk, mixers and microphones. A low shelf running around the room, a foot below the ceiling, will hold my books, DVDs, CDs, VHS tapes and Star Trek action figures.

The beauty of this is there’s so much extra space upstairs I will no longer have to share my workspace with the kids. This means, of course, that when I sit down to write for you fine people, or record a new show, I won’t find my computer screen frozen on the Moshi Monster website or an aborted game of Minecraft. They’ll have their own computer room upstairs, which is where the Windows machines will soon live.

I will be down in my cave. Plotting world domination.