Another Canadian federal (national) election campaign is about to officially begin.

You know when it will end? October 14th. That's about 6 weeks from now.

My friends in the USA...think about it.

You see, we don't have to have an interminable fight with primaries all over the country for many months to start the damn thing off when we have an election. Our parties already have their party leaders in place, since a long time back usually, because party primaries are not even part of our election process. They are an inner-party process in each political party that occurs completely separately from federal elections. They normally involve only the one party that is choosing a new leader at that time, so there is no battle in the media to play off the different parties against each other. The new leader of a political party is chosen at a party convention, and he will be one of a number of already seated members of our parliament, normally speaking. This could happen at any time when the party membership (at the higher level) collectively decide in various meetings that it's time for a change of leadership. They might do it with an eye to preparing for some future election...or they might more often do it following a federal election which has given them a bad result, causing them to feel that the public hasn't much confidence in the party leader...so it's time to replace him with someone else.

At any rate, what we have here is a federal election campaign that lasts only six weeks and which does not necessitate our political parties tearing themselves to pieces internally with bitter infighting between different candidates who are vying for the top position while the main election campaign is underway.

Worth thinking about?

But you would have to change your present governmental setup radically and change your constitution also in order to alter your present system...a system which puts your entire government and society in a state of political crisis for at least a year, I've noticed, just so you can elect a new president. That means you effectively lose one out of every four years of stable government because of your election campaigns. Not very efficient use of time, is it?

We lose 6 weeks to our elections.

Man, it's time for a change allright...!