Hey American followers!
I know you don’t tend to reblog any politics of countries other than your own… but the Canadian Federal Election is going to be this year in October!
In Canada we don’t replace 1/3 of the government every couple of years, we replace every single seat. EVERYONE has to run for a seat all at the same time, through the whole nation. Party that gets the most votes? Their leader usually becomes the Prime Minister.
We need your help (And you can help by reblogging this too!)
Not enough information on Canadian politics and issues is circulated on tumblr. Despite there being a lot of Canadians, somehow most of us can go a whole year without seeing a post about Canada, even when we make a point about following Canadians.
The US election will be ramping up in the early primaries when Canada’s entire election happens (We don’t campaign very long and we have a LOT of rules about campaigning too).
Trudeau has failed us. Entirely. He is doing nothing about climate change, he’s chummy with Trump, he violates land treaties, he pushes pipelines through unceeded territory, he’s having our native peoples arrested for protesting this, he has not investigated the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, he’s been a HUGE fan of The Glass Cliff while calling himself a feminist, he has repeatedly broken promises including electoral reform (our system is actually not great! Maybe not as rigged as yours, but it badly favours the Liberal and Conservative parties!), and been over-all pretty bad for us. It’s especially infuriating that we see all of this and also you guys reblogging photo-op pieces of him going on about how great he is for going to pride and being cute (That’s actually not an indicator here when only one party leader hasn’t gone in like, 20 years).
We need the NDP or the Greens this year. We need them to have a loud voice at the very least. We need your help to do this. We need you to blog this time, for once, about an election that isn’t american. Our politics affect you too. We affect you as much as you affect us, we are neighbours and unless y’all invade us again some time soon, it’s not likely to change. Help us get someone better into office. Please, reblog posts about the Canadian Election when they start appearing in September/October.
Americans Can And Should Reblog This Post Please.
This is super important. The kind of nasty, bigoted populism that’s come to rise in the USA has leeched up here too and they’re only getting bolder. I’ve never been a fan of the Conservative party but they’ve become particularly embedded with these kind of alt-right populist scumbags and they’re heavily relying both on the general lack of coverage of Canadian politics and masquerading as the old-style Conservatives to get elected. People will vote for them because most people (especially the older, more reliable voting base) only see the Liberals and Conservatives as viable parties so they will only vote for one of them, and people are pissed at Trudeau. It really, really doesn’t bode well if Scheer gets elected in the Fall. Not for immigrants, or other marginalized communities, or the climate. And I’m no fan of Trudeau but as far as things to with relations to Trump, I can only imagine that Scheer would be infinitely worse. Those two controlling all of North America would be scary. This is honestly a terrifying time to be having an election the way that politics is going and we have few good options and are struggling with our own populist movement and a rise in hate and politically-motivated disinformation. DON’T IGNORE THIS.
Also if any of you (Canadian or not) are looking to see more about Canadian politics on your dash, I highly recommend starting by following @allthecanadianpolitics (they’re left-wing but if you agree with this post I don’t think that’ll be an issue for you). There are blogs out there that do post about Canadian politics, they just tend to require a lot more searching to track down because tumblr is very saturated with American topics.
VOTING CONSERVATIVE WILL MAKE IT WORSE
CANADA IS NOT A TWO PARTY SYSTEM.
THERE ARE OPTIONS.
Here in NS a really common argument not to vote NDP is “the one time they got in they did a bad job.” I’m sorry, how many tries are you going to give the Conservatives and Liberals to do a worse job over and over again?
And as for all my fellow Indigenous Canadians: Trudeau rode in on the backs of a lot of our peoples votes, because a lot of us believed in his lies, and because we were desperate to get Harper out and he seemed the most likely option. But we can’t let this discourage us from voting again. Our ancestors went too long without the right for us to waste it.
And most of all:
📢 VOTING CONSERVATIVE WILL MAKE IT WORSE
CANADA IS NOT A TWO PARTY SYSTEM.
What does “Canada is not a two party system” mean?
It means there’s no such thing as spoiling/wrecking the vote (like Nader to Al Gore).
In the US, you vote for the presidential candidates, which every party can only nominate one member, and where the simple majority winner in the electoral college gets the job. This typically results in two large parties getting most of the vote by the spoiler vote effect: voting third party hurts your 2nd choice candidate.
In Canada and other parliamentary systems, you vote to elect party members to seats as Members of Parliament (MPs), and the party with the majority of seats becomes the ruling party which then elects its leader as Prime Minister. If one party doesn’t get majority, they have to form a coalition with another party to form a majority, and that means compromising to the demands of that party, be if NDP or even Green. So there is no worry about promoting the ones you like leading to the election of those you do not, unlike in the US.
And remember that in the last BC elections, the Green party got the final say because of how split the vote was. A vote for a party which doesn’t have a good shot to form a government is not wasted.
