At the risk of sounding un-Canadian—heaven forbid—I’ve come to believe there is one element of the U.S. political system Canada should adopt.
There are any number of things our neighbours south of the border should stop doing. Things Canada’s never done. They should stop electing the vast majority of positions they currently elect... which is just about everything.
On a federal level, the two countries are pretty similar, with one glaring difference. Both elect regional representatives, but only one elects the top job. Everyone in the U.S. can vote for president, unless they’re an unwelcome minority in a gerrymandered state. In Canada, only people in the riding where he or she runs can vote directly for prime minister. Yeah, I know, we also have an un-elected Senate. But I’m only addressing important positions. Voting directly for PM is not what Canada should adopt.
At lower levels of American government it gets silly. Statewide and especially locally, every position from dog catcher up is an elected job. Judges, sheriffs, treasurers, county commissioners, everything.
So what’s the U.S. got Canada doesn’t? And should? Term limits at the top.
There are two main reasons Canada should have term limits for prime ministers: Lack of succession planning, and hubris. And yes, the Venn diagram of the two overlap considerably.
Canadian prime ministers rarely know when to quit. They hang around so long they begin to stink. Like Ben Franklin’s adage about guests and three-day-old fish. From Diefenbaker on—exception to come—prime ministers have tended to overstay their welcome. When Dief’s own caucus turned against him and the party suffered a defeat, he still held on to power.
Lester Pearson was the notable exception. Serving only four years in the mid 1960s, he not only decided to retire, he recruited his successor, Pierre Trudeau, his justice minister. He was the last prime minister who had the foresight—though many would argue not the judgment—to do so, and a sufficient lack of hubris to hang on to power.
It’s been all downhill since. We had 12 years of Trudeau the First, with a brief asterisk for the nine months Joe Who held the office the first time Pierre decided enough was enough. And we endured the two-and-a-half months of John Turner’s interlude after Pierre’s walk in the woods because Pierre was even worse at succession planning than Pearson.
And then came Brian Mulroney, who hung on to power so long and in the end stunk so badly that when he finally read the tea leaves and passed the torch to Kim Campbell, she squeezed out four months in office before suffering the worst defeat a governing party ever experienced in Canadian history, not only losing her own seat but presiding, briefly, over the party returning to Parliament with only two elected members.
Despite playing against the odds—a Liberal government balancing the budget—Jean Chrétien’s 10 years were a few too many. He recognized the smell when he passed the reins of power to Paul Martin. While Paul spent his whole life preparing to be prime minister, few could remember anyone who seemed less prepared for the job.
To no one’s surprise, Stephen Harper got the job with a minority government in 2006. His crowning achievement was to redesign almost every stop sign in the country with his own name appended before he failed to discern the smell surrounding him and lost to our current PM in 2015.
And so we come to Trudeau the Second.
When the Liberals won the election in 2015, there was no doubt why. It was partly because of the country’s deep dislike of Mr. Harper, partly because he was easy to dislike, partly because of his policies and largely because of his hubris in not knowing when to exit—and his ego block causing him to not bring along anyone who might follow him.
But, hard as it is to believe now, it was largely because Justin Trudeau was a breath of fresh air.
Like his father, he packed the upper echelons of the party with his supporters. And like his father—and so many in the job before him—he has stayed too long. And he has steadfastly failed to groom a successor.
At this point, a year-and-a-half out from an election, many voices around the country are clamouring for him to step aside. Those are voices of people who can read the writing on the wall. The party is badly trailing the Conservatives, from sea to sea to sea, who are being led by a guy you probably wouldn’t be comfortable buying a used car from, pushing a common-sense revolution devoid of common sense.
In other words, a perfect candidate in our dismal, populist times.
I’d like to take this opportunity to say I’ve never voted for Justin Trudeau. Okay, cheap trick. Nearly 23,000 people living in the riding of Papineau did in 2021. Factoid: That was only 50.3% of the votes cast.
I have voted for the Liberal candidate in this riding, however. And barring a real surprise, I probably will again, since I believe Patrick Weiler has not only done a good job but at this point I’m certain he could do a better job as PM than Trudeau is doing, which may be what is known as damning with faint praise.
But he’s not on the radar. Neither is anyone else. The party is in paralysis. Maybe because they’ve been looking at the polls, watching their support in Atlantic Canada drift to the Conservatives, watching the Conservatives begin to edge them out even in Quebec, and erode their shaky support in Ontario.
The election next year is shaping up to be another Canadian blow out. That said, I can almost understand Trudeau’s fantasy that he’s the best guy to lead the party’s charge. None of the most frequently named successors—Mark Carney, Chrystia Freeland, François-Philippe Champagne, Anita Anand, Marc Garneau, Dominic LeBlanc—all either wear and share the antipathy people have for Trudeau or are, in the case of Carney, simply too intellectually elite to be trusted by Canadians. Think Michael Ignatieff.
The closer we get to the election, the more scandals and failures that seem to land on the Liberals' doorstep—hey there, ArriveCAN—the more problematic it becomes for Trudeau, whether he stays or goes, to perform the one task left for him: to at least leave the party in reasonably strong shape to rebuild.
I’ve no doubt the country will survive another Conservative government. For all his absurd common senselessness, Pierre Poilievre doesn’t constitute the existential threat to this country the Orange Monster south of us poses for the U.S.... and the world.
But really, couldn’t we avoid this rerun if we just had term limits for the PM?
