Stephen Marche at TNR has an interesting piece about the looming political crisis in Canada. The multi-party system in our northern neighbor is leading to serious instability:
The country keeps refusing to pick an out-and-out winner. We have had minority governments since 2004, revealing our lack of shared purpose. The Conservatives have been unable to build the strategic alliances between regions that they have traditionally used to form governments, the Liberals are coming off their worst electoral showing ever, and the Greens have split the left without ever holding a seat in the Commons. In place of strong national parties capable of creating consensus, the country is realigning along single issues and regional interests, centrifugally spinning apart.
The path to dissolution has already been built. Quebec holds a referendum on independence every 15 years or so. The last one was 1995, so we have about two years left. If the rest of Canada is still incoherent, there will be less of an argument to keep the country together, and Quebec may well go. No one has any idea what a patchwork of national units divided by linguistic identity across the northern part of the Continent would look like. The East Coast would be split from the main body of English Canada--how would that work?
Marche notes that the US should be paying a lot more attention to it than it currently is (case in point- on Monday at lunch, my colleagues and I were trying to remember if Brian Mulroney was still the PM). Canada is America's largest trading partner, with $1.5b in goods and 300,000 people crossing the border every day. It's also our largest energy trading partner, and we share ownership over the Great Lakes, which provide drinking water for 35m in the region. At the very least probably worth knowing who the PM is.
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