The Canadian political system iceberg explained

Hello friends my name is JJ so one of the most flattering experiences I have as a YouTuber is when people come up to me on the street and tell me that my videos have been useful to them in some way and probably the most common comment that I get as far as this sort of thing goes is people telling me that I've helped them understand Canadian politics better in my experience there is a lot of interest among both Canadian and Foreigner alike in learning more about the politics of this country but sadly the information that people are interested in is often not easy to come by or is communicated quite poorly and it was with that in mind that I decided to make this the Canadian political system Iceberg basically I tried to use all of my accumulated knowledge as someone who has spent many years working as a Canadian political journalist and commentator to come up with a relatively comprehensive list of all of the Concepts institutions procedures anecdotes and jargon that someone who is fully literate in Canadian politics is expected to know as is customary in these sorts of videos we will start with relatively simple mainstream Concepts and gradually get into more obscure and complicated stuff the deeper we go one thing before I begin however I will note that this video is mostly focused on stuff relating to how the Canadian political system functions as opposed to stuff relating to specific politicians belief systems or debates on particular issues if you are more interested in that sort of thing I recommend checking out this video I made about a Canadian political Compass or this video I made on the 35 tribes of Canadian politics all right without further Ado the Canadian political system Iceberg level one so Canada is one of many countries where the guy in charge of the national government is called the Prime Minister the Canadian prime minister is the most powerful politician in Canada and directs the priorities of the Canadian government he is also the person who formulates Canada's foreign policy and represents the country abroad Canada is divided into 10 provinces and three territories there is no longer any real meaningful difference between a province and a territory but we'll talk more about that later the provinces and territories each have their own elected governments and have the exclusive power to control certain issues of local concern the concept of sharing political power between provincial governments and a national government is known as federalism accordingly Canadians refer to the national government as their federal government Ottawa is the capital city of Canada located on the Ontario side of the border between the provinces of Ontario and Quebec Canada is one of those countries where the capital city is not the biggest city City but rather a special city that was set aside to be the capital and doesn't really have a lot else going for it Beyond a bunch of government buildings sorry Ottawa Canada uses a parliamentary system as its system of government based on the style of government that they use in England the national legislature of Canada located in this iconic building in Ottawa is officially just called parliament in Canada's parliamentary system the prime minister is is chosen on the basis of which political party can get the most seats elected to the parliament in a national election all of the provinces use a smaller scale version of the same system to pick their own Prime Ministers or Premier Canada has courts and if one makes a ruling you don't like you can appeal to a higher court and try again the highest court in the entire country is the Supreme Court of Canada it only hears the most important cases and since it has the final say on all legal questions its rulings can often dramatically alter Canadian law the Prime Minister appoints the judges of the Supreme Court who serve until age 75 Canadian politics mostly revolves around three big political parties the conservatives the Liberals and the new Democratic party or NDP the conservatives and the Liberals are the biggest ones and they are the only parties that have ever won a Canadian election the NDP which is the further left party almost always finishes in third place nationally but has been more successful in provincial politics Canadian political parties are very hierarchical and each one has a single leader who more or less single-handedly decides what the party stands for in Canadian parliamentary elections the party leaders stand as candidates for prime minister Quebec is the only province of Canada where most of the population consists of people of French heritage who speak French rather than English a lot of French Canadians feel that they are just too different from the rest of Canada and for many decades there has been an active political movement pushing for Quebec to separate and become its own country this is considered a major existential threat to Canada and curbing Quebec separatism has been treated as a leading priority of the Canadian government over the years color plays a very big role in Canadian political culture with all of the major political parties associated with one of the major colors of the rainbow metaphors and jokes involving colors are a very common part of Canadian political conversation level two so for most of its modern existence Canada has functioned as a self-governing British colony and even after securing complete independence from Great Britain in 1982 the Canadian political system still recognizes the British king or queen as the country's highest Pol political Authority and head of state this is an entirely symbolic thing King Charles has no actual power over Canada even though the Canadian political system still uses a lot of old-fashioned Colonial language that makes it sound like he does every Canadian law begins with the phrase his majesty enacts as follows for instance the king's representative in Canada is the governor general who does various ceremonial head of state type things on the king behalf he or she is a nonpartisan person who gets appointed by the Prime Minister as recognition for their life of public service but I would say that most Governor generals aren't particularly well known to the Canadian public unless you're a real politics junkie so what is commonly called the constitution of Canada is really two documents the Constitution Act 1867 also known as the British North America Act which explains how the Canadian political system works and the Constitution Act 1982 which lays out the civil rights that all Canadians enjoy as well as the process for amending the Constitution as you can tell from the names the 1867 part was written in the year 1867 which is when Canada became a self-governing colony of Great Britain while the 1982 part was written in 1982 which is the year that Canada achieved complete Independence even though they are two separate documents they are collectively referred to as the Constitution a constitutional monarchy is a political system where the nominal head of the state is a royal person who doesn't have any actual political power but may still go through the motions of formally granting Royal approval to decisions of the elected government in Canada the governor general as representative of the king grants what is known as Royal Ascent to every law passed by the Parliament and every decree issued by the Prime Minister she is also the person who formally recognizes the winner of a Canadian election and inaugurates that person as prime minister it has been nearly 100 years since the governor general has ever said no to a prime minister but people continue to be fascinated by the possibility that that could maybe happen again someday if the situation was Dire enough the BL Quebec W is a Quebec separatist political party that is usually the third largest party in the Canadian Parliament officially it is a protest part party that only runs in Quebec and gives quebecers who don't believe in the idea of being part of Canada something to vote for in Canadian parliamentary elections these days however it mostly just functions as a fairly normal left of center political party and doesn't really talk about separatism all that much because the block is so narrowly Quebec focused it doesn't tend to make a lot of national news and I would say that many Canadians forget it even exists except for during election time it's kind of debatable whether or not it should should be considered Canada's thirdd Place party like I said it often finishes third place in the Parliamentary seat count but the NDP usually Places third place in the popular vote following a Canadian election we say that one of two outcomes has occurred there was either a majority government elected which means that one party won control of the majority of seats in the parliament or there was a minority government elected in which the winning party only won a plurality of seats or in other words the largest party is still outnumbered by the combined total of the other parties a majority government prime minister can basically get his way 100% of the time since his control of the parliament is so solid but a prime minister in a minority government situation can only get his legislation passed with the support of at least one other party the other parties can also gang up and pass a vote of no confidence in the minority government which forces an early election the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is perhaps the most famous part of the Canadian Constitution and comprises the bulk of the 1982 Constitution act as the name suggests it lays out all of the specific human rights and freedoms that Canadians enjoy like freedom of speech and the right to a fair trial and it states that these privileges cannot be violated by the government well most of the time the Canadian Parliament is made up of two Chambers and both have to vote to approve all bills before they become laws the House of Commons is the first chamber and its members or MPS are elected by Canadian voters the House of Commons is the only chamber that actually does much and when Canadians say Parliament they are usually referring to just the House of Commons the second chamber is the Senate and its members called senators are not elected they are appointed by the Prime Minister whenever seats become vacant and when do seats become vacant you ask well whenever a senator turns 75 the existence of the Senate is very controversial in Canada because it's seen as so undemocratic there are very few countries in the world that still have an unelected house of parliament at all partially for this reason the Canadian Senate functions mostly as just a rubber stamp on things passed by the House of Commons a lot of senators believe in fact that it is morally wrong for them to vote in any other way in addition to the big three and the block Quebec W there are two other political parties that are kind of sort of considered part of mainstream Canadian politics even though they're quite unsuccessful the environmentalist green party has been a red for decades but only started receiving substantial media attention AR red the mid 2000s when climate change started to become more of a bigger deal the party has never pulled particularly well and it took ages for them to even elect one Member of Parliament to a large degree the party is held together by the Charisma and media Savvy of party leader Elizabeth May who has been running the party for nearly 20 years there is also the people's party which was founded by ex-conservative Maxim Bernier in 2018 and seems to be an attempt to bring a sort of European style harderr anti-immigrant politics to Canada but it also doesn't pull well and has never elected a single member of parliament so Canada is a country that is built on land that was taken from the indigenous peoples of this continent in many but not all cases their land was officially taken through treaties of surrender that the Indian leaders signed with representatives of France or England or Canada in exchange for special governance rights over a limited portion of their original territories these treaties are of course Very unpopular things with many Native Canadians today who view them as oppressive things that they were forced to sign under duress but they still enjoy the status of Canadian law even now after he takes office the Prime Minister appoints several members of parliament from his party to serve as ministers in his cabinet and help him run the country what makes Canada unique is just how enormous this cabinet tends to be prime minister Trudeau is currently said to have the largest cabinet of any national leader on Earth with 40 ministers a big reason why Canada's cabinet is so large is just that the Canadian Prime Minister can create cabinet jobs by decree whereas in a lot of other countries a cabinet minister is a more entrenched and permanent office you can tell how recently created a lot of cabinet positions are just BAS Bas on their very modern sounding titles for example right now there is a minister of rural Economic Development and a minister of diversity inclusion and persons with disabilities level three Canada is constitutionally required to have a parliamentary election at least once every 5 years but it is the prime minister who decides the date that election will happen this power is often used to strategically time elections at moments where a prime minister's poll numbers look best which is controversial the only alternative is in minority government situations where elections can be forced by a non-confidence vote speaking of Elections first pass the post is a somewhat pejorative term to describe the electoral system that Canada uses to pick its politicians the system is based on a pretty simple premise whoever gets the most votes wins if one guy gets 10 votes and another guy gets 11 votes then the guy with 11 wins however if five guys get 10 votes and one guy gets 11 votes then the 11 vote guy also wins the winner is just whoever gets more than his next closest opponent first pass the post used to be the world's most common system of Elections but it has fallen out of favor in most countries with Canada being one of the few remaining outli the Canadian Constitution explicitly recognizes God and even Christianity in a number of ways for one the opening line in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms says that Canada is founded under the supremacy of God other parts of the Constitution likewise guarantee the right to a specifically Catholic Education in some provinces which are run by special Catholic School boards elected by Catholic voters this is a relic of a time when Catholics were seen as Canada's main oppressed minority the King of Great Britain is of course also believed to be chosen by God and the phrase by the grace of God king of Canada is included in His official Canadian title and a Latin version of this phrase is printed on all Canadian coins Queen Elizabeth had defender of the faith as part of her official Canadian title but this was dropped when Charles became king so in the old days the Canadian provinces more or less used the same three-party system as the federal government but in recent years provincial politics have been drifting further and further away from this the politics of British Columbia Alberta Saskatchewan Yukon and especially Quebec all feature these unique political parties that don't exist outside of their provinces and in many cases specifically try to avoid answering the question of which of the national parties they are the most similar to in fact even when provincial parties share a name with a national party they will often make a big Foss boot how they're actually a completely different party and you shouldn't judge them based on what the National Party does Westminster system is the term used to describe the Parliamentary style of government used by many former British colonies including Canada Australia New Zealand Jamaica India Pakistan and More in all of these countries the General procedures of how their Parliament functions is said to be broadly similar since they're all copied from England the Constitution says that Canada has two official languages French and English and that Canadians have a constitutional right to use these languages when interacting with any government service this includes a right for French and English speakers to have their children educated in their language this concept of language rights is a somewhat unique L Canadian idea and the system for protecting them is quite elaborate if we look at this popular print out of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms you can see that language rights comprise the largest section so in theory the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects the civil rights of all Canadians and laws that violate these rights are supposed to be ruled unconstitutional by the courts but in practice laws that violate the charter still get passed all the time and this is because section one of the charter says that protected rights and freedoms can be subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and Democratic Society what the Canadian Supreme Court has interpreted this to mean is that it is lawful for the government to violate civil rights so long as there is a compelling justification for doing so so a lot of court cases in Canada involving allegations of Charter rights being violated often wind up being less about whether the violation occurred than whether the violation could be demonstrably justified which is obviously a somewhat subjective value judgment and is one of the reasons why court rulings on Charter rights can be such a source of great controversy level four so remember when I said that the government has to prove a demonstrable justification when it violates the protections of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms well sometimes s even that's not true section 33 of the charter says the provincial and federal governments can pass laws that violate civil rights so long as those laws come up for a renewal vote within 5 years of being passed and don't violate a small number of Super protected rights aside from Quebec which routinely passes laws that explicitly violate the right to free expression in order to impose strict French only language policies using the so-called notwithstanding Clause has historically been Taboo in Canada and is almost never done the taboo does seem to be weakening these days though as conservative politicians grow frustrated with the Supreme Court's interpretation of what kind of laws do and don't violate Charter rights there has been increased talk of using section 33 to preempt what is seen as an overly left-wing Judiciary in theory Canada's provincial governments have exclusive authority to make public policy a broad range of local matters in including Health Care public infrastructure Child Care and housing in practice however the provinces are increasingly dependent on federal funding to manage these issues and Ottawa is increasingly eager to tie transfers of federal cash to the implementation of consistent Nationwide policies the amount of Revenue Ottawa has access to compared to the provinces has made the so-called federal spending power a hugely important aspect of how Canadian federalism works and and has played a large role in making public policy increasingly consistent across Canada regardless of what party is in power in what province this sometimes makes provincial politics in Canada seem a little dull just because a lot of the policy debates these days seem to happen between the provincial governments and the federal government rather than between the provincial parties and the voters so there are actually more component parts of the Canadian Constitution than just the two big docu ments that everybody knows most of these involve the individual provinces in some way the main reason why this is is because every time England authorized a new Province to join Canada they would have to write a whole new constitutional document about it since the original Constitution Act is written in this weird manner where it doesn't talk about the provinces in a general way but rather names and describes each province separately so there are nine distinct constitutional acts for each of the nine provinces and territories that joined Canada after 1867 these mostly outline their borders and how their local parliaments work and what policy Realms they have jurisdiction over and these sorts of things there are a couple of other changes that have been made to the Canadian political system over the decades that take the form of entire separate documents instead of just Constitutional Amendments but these tend to be about mostly technical matters involving clarifying Canada's territorial claims and a few things relating to Canada's relationship with the British Monarchy originally the big difference between a territory and a province was that a territory was administered by Ottawa and lacked Democratic self-government over the last three decades this has changed and Canada's three sparsely populated Northern Territories now have elected governments with all of the same Powers as the provinces this process actually completed just recently with prime minister Trudeau granting the nonot Territory full control over land and natural resource management earlier this year the last power being withheld from the last remaining territory the only other difference of some significance is that two of the three territories do not use political parties in their parliaments every elected member is an independent and their Parliament just elects their Premier and the individual cabinet ministers directly this decreases partisanship but does seem to increase interpersonal drama a bit the various Departments of the federal government are run by cabinet ministers who are elected members of parliament appointed by the Prime Minister however a lot of cabinet ministers don't really know much about the department they have been placed in charge of and their appointments often don't last for very long what this means is that it is the nominal second in command the deputy ministers who wind up running much of the government in practice Deputy ministers are career civil servants professional bureaucrats who may serve across the administrations of multiple different cabinet ministers or even prime ministers on paper the Prime Minister appoints the deputy ministers but it is more accurate to say that he just signs off on a hiring process that is conducted by the bureaucracy itself and is in fact explicitly not supposed to be influenced by politics okay this is an important one when Canada became fully independent from Great Britain in 1982 a new process was invented to change Canada's constitution in the future which was previously a process that Britain had exclusively controlled and the new process that was developed is extremely complicated and varies a great deal depending on what part of the Constitution you're trying to change for amendments that touch a certain set of issues including the monarchy the minimum number of seats in Parliament specific provinces can have Canada's official French English bilingualism regime and the Supreme Court the amendment has to be approved by the federal Parliament and the parliaments of all of the provinces for changes involving other Stu the Amendments only have to be approved by seven of the provinces representing 50% of Canada's total population the territories Play No role in passing Constitutional Amendments which I guess is another distinct thing about them so the Canadian Supreme Court has the power to issue rulings based on entirely theoretical scenarios if the government asks them to this is seen as an important way that the government can get closure on what sort of laws are or ar aren't constitutional before passing them and thus avoid getting sued later in 2014 for example the government asked the Supreme Court if it would be constitutional to hypothetically hold elections for the Senate someday and the Supreme Court said no for some reason the drafters of the Canadian Constitution did not seem to anticipate the possibility that Queen Victoria might not live forever as a result all references to the role of the British monarch in the Canadian system just say the queen shall do this or that so when we understand the role that Charles III plays in the Canadian system we consider him the current occupant of the office of the queen level five so in addition to the fact that it is unelected the Canadian Senate is controversial because of the very arbitrary number of Senators that each province gets while parliament's elected House of Commons grants seats on the basis of population which is to say the larger provinces have more members of parliament than the smaller ones the Senate assigns Senators Based On A system that is sort of vaguely tied to the length of time that a province has been part of Canada but even then not really so the original four provinces have the most Senators 24 24 10 and 10 and every other province that joined later get six except for Prince Edward Island which has four and the three territories which have one each the Constitution has been amended a bunch of different times to rationalize this allocation by sorting the provinces into different groups and saying even if the provinces are represented in wildly different ways irrelevant to population it's still okay because at least all of the groups are equal the current group breakdown looks like this but these groups don't really make any consistent Geographic cultural or historical sense and you can see that there are still some parts of the country that don't fit into any groups at all like I said a controversial system in 1998 the government of prime minister Jean cran asked the Supreme Court to issue a reference ruling about whether a province had a right to unilaterally separate from Canada you know just a province it could be any of them the Supreme Court said no there is no right to unilateral secession in the Canadian system however they did demand that the government create a procedure through which separation of a province could be theoretically negotiated so the creten government passed the Clarity Act of 2000 it is a pretty uncharitable document that says that provinces can hold referendums on separation but the parliament of Canada has the sole right to determine whether a province's separation referendum is valid or not it famously says that Ottawa will not recognize the validity of any referendum that asks an unclear question or receives an unclear mandate from voters and these are of course Grans which are subjective enough to allow Parliament to reject basically any referendum so party leaders the men and women who run as candidates for prime minister of Canada are elected by members of their political parties any Canadian can become a member of a political party but it requires registering with the party paying an annual fee and repaying that fee to renew your membership every year even though these fees are generally very cheap or even free in the case of the Liberals the vast vast majority of Canadians have no interest in doing this and as a result the candidates for prime minister of Canada are chosen by an incredibly small number of people based on some recent numbers I found in the press in total just over a million Canadians are members of one of the big three parties in a country of 40 million people that is just 2.5% of the population deciding Prime ministerial candidates the king Bing Affair is a pretty famous episode from 1926 involving the powers of the governor general the situation is difficult to quickly summarize because there was a lot of weird stuff going on in Canadian politics at that time but basically prime minister McKenzie King had been reelected head of a weak minority government and after a few months he tried to call another election to strengthen his position the governor general Lord Bing who in those colonial times was an aristocrat appointed by England refused to sign off on this and instead used his Royal powers to fire McKenzie King and appoint the head of the opposition conservative party as prime minister in his place the much larger faction of parliament allied with McKenzie King then immediately voted non-confidence in that new smaller minority government which triggered an emergency election which King W this episode is usually held up as an example of the chaos that can unfold if a governor general tries to assert himself too aggressively though In fairness to Lord Bing no one really knew what they were doing in Canadian politics back then the meech Lake and charlatan Accords were two large bundles of Constitutional Amendments that were proposed in 1987 and 1992 respectively they were big and complicated but in a broad sense aspired to alter the way that powers were shared between the federal and provincial governments the plan was the brainchild of prime minister Brian Malon whose larger motivation was to appease the province of Quebec in particular at a time when nationalist sentiment there seemed to be growing the Amendments of the meech Lake Accord were less ambitious and thus used the easier of the two amending formulas but it still narrowly failed to get the necessary seven provincial parliaments to vote in favor the charlone Accord was much more ambitious and thus needed to get unanimous provincial consent in order to achieve this Mone organized a massive Countrywide referendum on October 26 1992 in which voters across the country were asked whether they wanted their provincial parliaments to pass the Amendments or not and some provinces did and some provinces didn't so it wasn't unanimous and it didn't go through so the legacy of all of this is very complicated even at the time it was common to argue that most Canadians didn't really understand the Constitution well enough to fully get what was going on and the whole idea of holding a referendum was in part motivated to make the process seem less top down and elitist but on that front the project failed quite badly and the two groups of Canadians who once formed the backbone of mone's political Coalition conservatives and quebecers turned sharply against him over the whole episode either for believing his amendments gave Quebec too much power or not enough power the separatist block Quebec W party was founded during this period as was the right-wing Reform Party which became the dominant party in western Canada during the 1990s so candidate nominations are pretty widely recognized to be one of the most dodgy and corruptible features of the Canadian political system we previously discussed how candidates for prime minister are elected by fee paying party members and this is also the same same system used to select individual candidates for the national and provincial parliaments and since the vast majority of Canadians are not party members this is a very easy process to game since it often just comes down to wrangling up enough random people who are willing to pay a small one-time fee to vote for you in practice this tends to give an advantage to politicians who have some large pre-existing pool of connections that they can exploit often religious congregations or large local ethnic communities the fact that these elections are likewise administered by the parties themselves often gives them an even more suspicious character since vote totals are often not released and when the vote is close there can be a lot of acrimony between candidates only recently did the parties stop allowing people to join the party immediately before casting a ballot and paying for their party membership using cash level six the federal government maintains a little known and often changing list of which cabinet ministers become Prime Minister in the event the Prime Minister dies or there is some sort of big event wiping out Top members of the Canadian government there is an odd clause in the Constitution that says the Prime Minister can appeal directly to the king to appoint a up to eight basically bonus Senators if he simply thinks it fit for that to happen the only real rationalization for this power is a tcid acknowledgement that the Senate is mostly expected to be a rubber stamp and if the Senate is giving a prime minister a hard time he deserves a sort of cheat code to help him swing a closely divided Senate vote in his favor so when the Canadian Constitution was being written in the late 1960s the dominant geopolitical event of the time was the American Civil War and this greatly informed how politicians on this continent thought about the idea of local government namely that it was a somewhat threatening thing that needed to be controlled by a strong federal government accordingly the Canadian government was given the power to veto laws passed by the provincial governments through a power known as disallowance each provincial government has a governor general type character known as the lieutenant governor who is appointed by the Prime Minister and is technically supposed to be an agent of the federal government and this person can refuse to sign provincial laws that Ottawa does not approve of this power was never widely used and hasn't been used in nearly a century the whole dominant understanding of federal provincial relations and the role of the lieutenant Governors has changed so much over the last 150 years that the entire concept of disallowance now seems really strange and exotic and undemocratic and wrong Lieutenant Governors have become these extremely obscure figureheads probably some of the least known people in all of Canadian politics nevertheless their disallowance powers do remain in the Constitution and from time to time people on The Fringe will sometimes say that the federal government should use this power in order to clip the wings of a provincial government that is getting out of control train s is a pejorative term used to describe the overly compliant nature of members of the Canadian Parliament a lot of parliament's decision-making power is concentrated in the hands of the leaders of the political parties and individual members of parliament mostly just defer to their leader judgment and never express political opinions that differ from the party leaders this is most obvious when you look at how individual members of parliament vote a few years ago a Toronto Think Tank did a study looking at MP voting Trends and found that the average MP votes with his party leader 99.6% of the time even the most rebellious member in the entire House of Commons still voted with his party leader 97% of the time this reality eliminates a lot of drama from the Canadian Parliament since parliamentary votes are always so predictable no matter what the issue at hand is one of the more contentious ideas in the charlot toown Accord was a proposal to make it even harder to pass Constitutional Amendments by giving certain provinces a right to veto amendments outright this obviously didn't go through but in 1996 prime minister ketan passed an ordinary law enshrining a similar right of veto in a more raboot way the amendment veto act obliges the federal government to clear Constitutional Amendments with certain provincial governments before introducing them for approval in the National parli Quebec Ontario and British Columbia the three biggest provinces all have a unilateral right of veto while the so-called Prairie and Atlantic provinces can only veto collectively in doing out these new powers cren offered a way for the provinces to Halt the Constitutional amending process before it even Begins the privy council is a very conceptually strange very abstract institution of the Canadian government but in theory it is where all of the power of the executive branch flows from so you'll see the term privy Council used a fair bit in Canadian government jargon even if a literal privy Council barely exists the privy council is a sort of theoretical imaginary thing that pretty much every Canadian politician of any importance gets symbolically appointed to as a reward for their service to Canada all of the current cabinet ministers get appointed to the privy Council and in theory they perform the actual constitutional duties of the privy Council which is to advise the king's Governor General on how to run Canada except this is of course a polite fiction unto itself since the governor general is a figurehead who doesn't do anything and it is the prime minister who appoints the cabinet and actually runs the country the privy Council system is so convoluted in its symbol m in fact that the existence of a prime minister isn't even explicitly acknowledged in the Canadian Constitution at all and is only rarely acknowledged in other laws in Canadian law Decisions by the Prime Minister are usually referred to as being made by the governor in Council which is a convoluted way of saying the governor general acting on behalf of the king acting on the advice of his Council which is controlled by the cabinet which is controlled by the prime minister even though the majority of Canadians cannot speak French in recent decades a convention has solidified wherein political parties will not promote or Elevate politicians who are not fluently bilingual in both French and English this is most notably the case for political party leaders but also for senior cabinet ministers like the Deputy Prime Minister the attorney general and the Finance Minister this tradition is of course intended to make the political parties more marketable to voters in french-speaking Quebec and it mirrors a broader shift in Ottawa culture where many senior bureaucratic jobs are now legally required to be held by fluently bilingual people because Canada's bilingualism rate has remained pretty consistently below 20% of the population this means that a lot of important government jobs are effectively Out Of Reach for most Canadians earlier we talked about how the notwithstanding Clause can be used to pass laws that openly violate the constitution rights protected by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms this is a pretty dramatic power but there are some safeguards against it several parts of the charter are actually immune to the notwithstanding Clause meaning that these are the most protected rights within the Canadian system their selection can feel a little arbitrary though and in some ways just reflects what the drafters of the charter considered to be the most important things in 1982 rather than what we might consider most important today so the right to vote cannot be suspended nor can the right to enter leave or freely move around Canada and everything relating to language rights is super protected as is the part of the charter that obligates Canada to honor Indian treaties but pretty much everything else gender equality freedom of speech freedom of religion protection against cruel and unusual punishment is up for grabs in addition to the two main Amendment procedures the Canadian Constitution also allows for certain types of amendments to be made unilaterally if they only affect certain narrow topics changing things about the parliament technically requires a constitutional amendment but the parliament itself is allowed to make these amendments unilaterally this has been done a few times in the past as different governments have fiddled with the house of commons' representation by population formula more controversially however provinces can pass unilateral amendments that only affect their own political system historically this has only been done a couple of times on fairly small issues but in recent years the Nationalist government in Quebec has started using this power fairly liberally granting itself new powers that some say cross the line of what the unilateral amending process is supposed to cover in 2008 conservative Prime Minister Steven Harper was reelected to a second minority government he was a man who was quite hated by the Canadian left so a few months after his reelection the heads of the Liberal Party the NDP and the BL bequa got together and asked the governor general to fire Harper and install the liberal party leader of the time in his place this was a very dramatic and controversial proposal of A Sort that had never been attempted before in Canadian history governor general Mikel Jean did not agree and prime minister Harper responded by proroguing or suspending the sitting of the parliament for a few weeks so the parties couldn't non-confidence vote him and by the time the parliament did reconvene the opposition parties had lost interest in the scheme the whole episode was a rather nakedly cynical moment in recent Canadian political history and I feel like the general consensus is that nobody came out looking great level seven the Canadian Constitution is very ult for an ordinary person to casually read much of it is written in quite dense and dated Victorian legal ease it is not well organized with Clauses about the same topics scattered all over different sections or even entire documents it often gets into very elaborate detail about relatively minor things while leaving Big topics vague it inflates the relevance of the monarchy and Governor General in a confusing way you have to learn how to translate into references to the Prime Minister the list goes on almost every country on Earth has a more clearly written Constitution than Canada the friendly dictatorship was a popular 2001 book written about the Canadian political system by Jeffrey Simpson a longtime Canadian political columnist the thesis of the book was basically that the Canadian political system is unique among Western democracies in just how much power it concentrates in the office of prime minister which Simpson characterizes as a job with far more un ceral power than the American president the French President the British prime minister or the German Chancellor a lot of this is due to just how few meaningful checks there are on the Prime Minister given how subordinate the House of Commons is how pointless the Senate is and how many important government jobs including cabinet ministers and justices of the Supreme Court he gets to appoint completely on his own if Canada was located in some other part of the world says Simpson we would probably not regard it as a particularly well-designed democracy though the political systems of a lot of former British colonies share some aesthetic similarities and obviously share a common English Colonial Heritage in practice all of these countries have spent decades or even centuries developing their political systems independently from each other adding and subtracting all sorts of unique features as they've seen fit their elections work differently their parliaments work differently their Prime Ministers and heads of state work differently their regimes of constitutional rights are all completely different this makes it quite difficult to make the case that there exists a single Westminster system that all of the nations of the former British Empire use let alone that by understanding the political system of one of these countries you will somehow more or less understand the system used by all of the others the Canadian government actually commissioned a report a while ago trying to determine what the guiding principles of the supposed Westminster system even are and they could only come up with the most Broad and useless generalizations including that perhaps the most important feature of the Westminster principles has been and remains their ability to evolve or adapt to the historical Regional and political realities in which they are situated level8 way back on layer three we talked the so-called first P the post electoral system and how candidates in Canada get elected with the most votes not the majority of votes this has become more and more controversial since as Canada's number of political parties has increased MPS seem to be trending towards getting elected with smaller and smaller shares of the popular vote critics sometimes say that Canada should switch to a proportional representation system of the sort they use in Europe wherein seats in the parliament are allocated to parties based on the share of the national popular vote that they win the problem is that it would be unconstitutional in Canada to allocate seats in this way because the Constitution says that seats have to be allocated by province and every province has to have at minimum as many MPS as they have senators and as you may recall Senate seats are distributed a little willy-nilly so this basically guarantees that some of the smallest provinces will always enjoy some degree of over representation in Parliament independent of their population size the Trudeau government also recently passed a unilateral Constitutional Amendment that said no Province can ever have fewer seats than it had in 2019 this was mostly done to permanently lock in the number of seats that Quebec has whose population is in Decline so in short while it is theoretically possible that the election of individual MPS could be more fair the ultimate representation of seats in the parliament will never perfectly correlate with the party share of the popular vote this doesn't refer to the idea that Canadians are just ignorant of their own Constitution we literally don't know how long the Canadian Constitution is this is because the amending formula implies that some ideas are part of the Constitution and thus can't be affected by an ordinary law of parliament only a constitutional amendment the Supreme Court has ruled that this means that any pre-existing laws touching on these sacred topics are legally part of the Constitution but we don't necessarily know how many laws are out there that enjoy such protection and we won't ever really know for sure until the government tries to change one of those laws and the Supreme Court says no you can't do that that's actually part of the Constitution on some level the Canadian political system is held together mostly through a collective willingness to follow past practices and the fact that Canada is a stable country without a lot of social turmoil however since Canada's Constitution is often confusingly and vaguely written and is silent on a number of important matters not the least of which being the election of the Prime Minister there is always a looming possibility that someday some sort of deeply unprecedented thing will happen and there will be a massive political crisis because no one will know or agree what to do some possible crisis scenarios would include some sort of dispute over who gets to be prime minister in the case of a very close or ambiguous election outcome some sort of dispute between the governor general and the prime minister or possibly the king something involving disallowance and of course Quebec declaring independence in some way in the over 40 years since the 1982 constitutional amending formula was created there have been no substantial amendments made to the Constitution of Canada the experiences of the charlot town and meech Lake Accords that we discussed earlier were pretty traumatizing to the Canadian political class and helped form a conventional wisdom that there's really no point of trying to amend the Constitution in any substantial way it is just too difficult to get the necessary number of provinces on side with Quebec in particular having a very different perspective on how the Canadian government should work that is difficult to reconcile with the perspective of the other nine provinces it is common to say that this has allowed a certain sort of apathetic malays towards the Constitution to calcify in the minds of the Canadian public you know this idea that the constitution is kind of bad but it's also impossible to change so what are you going to do this refers to the idea that because Canada is a state built on land that was unjustly taken from the Native Canadians the entire Canadian political regime is fundamentally illegal and illegitimate and that the only legitimate legal Authority in Canada comes from the indigenous Nations who still believe themselves to be the true owners of this land this remains a mostly Fringe theory in practice but it has been growing in popularity as the indigenous rights movement in Canada gets more powerful and influential in some activist in academic spaces it is now common to see people refer to Canada with quotation marks or say socalled Canada or even refer to Turtle Island rather than Canada which is a term that some indigenous activists use for North America while not going quite that far the Trudeau government does often speak of supporting the general need to decolonize Canadian political institutions and Elevate the influence and power of the indigenous nations in the country's governance obviously the country of Canada is not going away anytime soon but one idea you do sometimes hear brought up is this notion of an indigenous veto which is to say as the original owners of this continent the the Aboriginal Nations should have a right to veto anything that happens on the lands that are now Canada as they sometimes say this right of veto would not come from any Indian treaty or even the Canadian Constitution but rather some higher concept of international law or even natural law that transcends the boundaries of Canada altogether all right so I hope you enjoyed that little Adventure do the Canadian political system some rabbit hole anything particularly Intrigue you or weird you out honestly this is such a broad topic there is really no limit to the entries I could put on this thing but at the very least I think that being familiar with most of these Concepts should be enough to let you confidently fake your way through just about any conversation about Canadian politics what aspect of Canada would you like to see me make a video on next let me know in the comments do not forget to like And subscribe and I will see you next week hello [Music] friend

Channel: J.J. McCullough

Views: 220,595

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Id: Q9LrjU5n63g

Length: 53min 36sec (3216 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 24 2024