Reply #12: just an interjection [View All]

Canadian politics is not about the US. Not everything in the world is about the US.

The party structure in Canada is not like the US -- there are five parties with significant representation in the House of Commons right now, just for starters.

You are taking one news report and exploiting one little bit of information about Canada to draw conclusions that you apply in the US. It simply doesn't work.

One news report does not a Canadian winter make. The perennial Tory-Alliance party is a fun diversion on our political scene, but it is of very little consequence; it is a death dance, on both sides. What weakened both parties involved was not the splitting of "their" vote, it was simply their very own irrelevance to a large majority of Canadians. They are not going to unite and waltz on to victory by virtue of their unity.

I find it curious and pretty annoying that just about every time some news of Canadian politics is reported at DU, it virtually immediately gets turned into an attempt to grind some axe about US politics.

The thing is that there might actually be some interesting lessons to be learned by USAmericans from observing and learning about Canadian politics, and comparing and contrasting with US politics.

But that's not what this is. This is just exploitation of a pretty meaningless "foreign" factoid to score points in some debate that the factoid has virtually nothing to do with. Really, no one appreciates having their own experience drafted into the service of someone else's arguments that they might not even agree with, and essentially misconstrued and misrepresented for that purpose. Me, I'd rather just be ignored by the south of the border throngs than used in that way.

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