Little Hawk, you're even righter than you know about Canadian politicians and military service. In fact, not one single prime minister of Canada has ever even campaigned on his military or naval service record, let alone been elected because of it. The only prominent politicians since Confederation who were noted as much for their military credentials as for their civic contributions were George Pearkes, who earned the Victoria Cross at Passchendaele and served as Minister of National Defence in John Diefenbaker's cabinet, and Sam Hughes, who thought he should have got the Victoria Cross for his adventures in the South African War and got fired from his Cabinet post (Militia and Defence) by Prime Minister Robert Borden in 1916, at the height of the First World War, for screwing around with the command link between Parliament and the Canadian Expeditionary Force overseas.

A fair few Canadian politicians had good war records that helped their candidacy -- J.L. Ralston, George Drew and John Matheson, for example -- but none of them could have got elected on that alone. And General Andrew G.L. McNaughton, who was cherry-picked from the command of First Canadian Army in 1944 to be MacKenzie King's Defence minister, couldn't get himself elected to the House even though he was campaigning on implementation of conscription, the burning issue of the day for most Canadian voters. The most egregious example of the irrelevance of military service to success as a politician in Canada was Pierre Trudeau, who dodged the draft and bragged about it (in 1945, he was photographed posing in a Nazi helmet), and was Canada's second-longest-serving prime minister, after MacKenzie King.

Why is Canada so different from the U.S. on this issue? In my admittedly arrogant opinion, it is because each and every Member of the Canadian House of Commons, even the Prime Minister, is elected by the residents of a specific riding (constituency or electoral district), and success at the polls depends at least as much on how well the electors in each riding think a candidate will represent them as it does on the party's platform.

This parish-pump approach is both the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of Canadian parliamentary democracy. Because each politician's career depends on success with mundane local problems like fishing rights, milk prices and lumber exports, his or her horizons -- and ambitions -- are likewise restricted. As long as this system survives, Canada will never rule the world, for which the world should be properly grateful.

Charmion Chaplin-Thomas