Can we agree that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are probably the two strangest presidential candidates in American history?

Romeny’s father was born in Mexico on a Mormon polygamist commune of religious exiles. He would later become CEO of American Motors, then governor of Michigan, then a failed presidential candidate. Son Mitt was also a Mormon, an eccentric faith only 2% of the American population practices, and hardly anyone truly understands.  From 1966 to 1969 he moved to France and worked full-time as a missionary, trying to recruit faithless Europeans into his Church. Moving back to America, he earned a double-degree in Law and Business from Harvard, and became the big-shot corporate executive whose legacy we so critically pour over today. His success made him a multi-multi-millionaire, with an infamous 2011 tax return claiming $20 million of income in that year alone. With total assets estimated as high as $250 million, he would be the richest president in two centuries.

Barack Obama’s father, of course, was a Kenyan student who lived only briefly in the United States during a short period of studying abroad. His mother was white, making Obama Jr. part of America’s 3% biracial minority, and the even smaller faction of that group who are the offspring of black-white marriages. As a child, he was raised in Indonesia and Hawaii, and did not reside in the continental United States at all until his freshman year in university. After earning his own Harvard law degree, his life story prompted enough interest to see a memoir commissioned at age 35, a book the New York Times described as a story of “belonging to two different worlds, and thus belonging to neither.” Limiting the number to just two seems stingy.

Now obviously there is no objective “right” or “wrong” American background. We’re all deviants from the fantasy mean of patriotic perfection in our own unique way, yet that obvious truism doesn’t disguise the fact that there is such a thing as an American outlier as well. It’s extraordinarily rare to be a Mormon multi-millionaire and it’s extraordinarily rare to be a man with a racial and cultural background as fascinatingly complicated as Obama’s. It doesn’t necessarily make one a bigot for pointing this out. Bill Clinton never knew his father and Gerald Ford was adopted. These backgrounds were mildly unorthodox. Romney and Obama’s are flat-out weird.

The U.S. election should be fought over the future of the American economy, but neither candidate seems to be particularly stealer on this issue. Obama is stapled to high unemployment numbers, a credit downgrade, and ever-worsening national debt, while Romney, as Mr. 1%, is tied to the GOP legacy of tax cuts for the rich and layoffs for everyone else that many blame for creating all the unemployment and debt in the first place. In such a context, it’s easy for supporters of both parties to distract themselves with the much easier side debate over whose candidate is further away from the U.S. “mainstream” in various superficial, symbolic ways. So here come the stories about Obama eating dog meat and Romney having elevators for his cars.

It’s a hard argument to make in polite company, but it can be said that people who are too different from the mainstream might be ill-suited to govern in a democratic society, which — by definition — presumes the nation’s rulers will support and appreciate majoritarian interests. An outsider can overcome his natural ignorance towards the majority only if he possesses a well-horned sense of empathy — and unsurprisingly this is the exact personality trait both Romney and Obama partisans target most furiously in their opponent.

Romney is not only weird, we are told, but he’s so comfortable in his alien world of wealth and status that he neither knows nor cares about anyone not already exactly like himself. His out-of-context quip about “not caring about the very poor” was seized upon by Democrats for precisely this reason, and recent headlines about the Governor’s background as a callous prep school bully will no doubt be woven into this same narrative cloth. Obama, for his part, has long been targeted by the mainstream GOP as a snob, and by wilder elements as an miseducated foreigner. The President is still living down his “clinging to their guns and religion” quip of the 2008 campaign, and his much-deconstructed autobiography does reveal the mind of a man whose emotional attachment to America was somewhat aloof and abstract, as anyone with his background would understandably be.

Putting all partisanship and ideology aside from a moment, does anything about either man’s ultra-minority background genuinely bother you, either in terms of how you believe their unusual biographies have altered their worldview, or any perceived lack of empathy for the majority that may flow from it. A good way to engage with this question is to contemplate a world in which both were members of the opposite party — a Democrat Romney and Republican Obama. Once you attempt to view either guy from this perspective, what immediately becomes obvious is that Romney’s background (rich member of an ultra-strict religious order) is only seen as problematic insofar as it pushes him further to the right, and Obama’s (bitter, activist member of several racial minority groups) is only troublesome  insofar as it pushes him more to the left.

Divorce them from their preexisting ideological baggage and what you’re left with is just two odd politicians. And is oddness unto itself a dangerous thing?

Here’s a fun question: in the years since the current global economic recession struck in late 2008, how many western world leaders have been able to win re-election? Our own Stephen Harper would be one, as would Angela Merkel in Germany. But beyond that…

With the defeat of incumbent French President Nicholas Sarkozy to Socialist Party challenger Francois Hollande on Sunday, the papers have made much fuss over the fact that Sarko is the supposed the “11th consecutive” political casualty of a continent in crisis. I’ve been trying in vain to find an article that actually names names instead of just citing that number, but near as I can tell, the list is as follows:

1. Geir Harde of Iceland (resigned January, 2009)
2. Gordon Brown of the United Kingdom (voted out May, 2010)
3. Robert Fico of Slovakia (voted out June, 2010)
4. Brian Cowen of Ireland (voted out February, 2011)
5. Mari Kiviniemi of Finland (voted out April, 2011)
6. Jose Socrates of Portugal (voted out June, 2011)
7. Lars Rasmussen of Denmark (voted out September, 2011)
8. George Papandreou of Greece (resigned November, 2011)
9. Silvio Berlusconi of Italy (resigned November, 2011)
10. Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero of Spain (voted out November, 2011)
11. Nicholas Sarkozy of France (voted out May, 2012)

Then there are a couple of more “iffy” ones, like the recently non-confidence’d voted government of Dutch Minister-President Mark Rutte, who may or may not be able to cling to office in his nation’s upcoming parliamentary elections,or former Slovakian prime minister Iveta Radicova, who resigned preemptively in October of 2011 rather than face certain defeat at the polls.

Outside of Europe, we can also look to Japan’s Taro Aso, who, in August of 2009 became only the second Liberal-Democratic Party prime minister since World War II to be unseated by voters, as well as Australia’s Kevin Rudd, who was forcibly removed by his own party in June of 2010.

It’s obviously a bit simplistic to generalize all these all of these unsuccessful incumbents under a so-broad-to-be-meaningless umbrella term like “political victims of the recession.” They may have been primarily unseated over economic concerns, certainly, but in the modern era, the vast majority of ruling party swaps are rarely provoked by anything else. Similarly, the broad “message” being sent by suffering western voters has hardly been consistent; in some cases, as in France and Denmark, anger over conservative debt-fighting austerity measures yielded a swing from right to left, but just as common was the reverse, as in Britain and Spain, where big-government Keynesianism was the target.

Still, the fact that the “recession” — whatever we interpret it to be at the moment — has overlapped with the end of the careers of a number of the democratic world’s most high-profile and previously successful heads of state does reinforce a kind of narrative, and it’s not a narrative that bodes well for President Obama. Unlike Harper and Merkel, who pre-date the crash of 2008 by a couple of years, Obama does fit the archetype of some of the shorter-reigning European prime ministers of late who openly carried themselves as post-’08 “fixers.” As opposed to being a man who merely had economic turmoil thrust upon him, Barack Obama chose to be president knowing full well the specific scope of the challenges that awaited, and, as books like Ron Suskind’s Confidence Men ably document, came to office with a determined strategy for a new style of economic leadership.

It’s for this reason that I’ve often thought Obama is best analogized to Herbert Hoover, instead of the the Jimmy Carter comparisons he usually gets. Fairly or not, Obama is seen by his critics as being an extremely ideological president, necessitating an equally ideological counter-attack. Should he fall, Mitt Romney will be under considerable pressure to lead with an administration as robustly anti-regulation and pro-market as FDR’s post-Hoover government was aggressively statist. A fixer to fix the fixes of the fixer, offering a stark, visible alternative in strategy.

I’m not sure if there are any campaign tips or tricks to be gleaned from any of this. Barring a universally-acknowledged economic miracle in the next five months, those who want to vote strictly on the basis of reactionary opposition to the “economic situation” will have no shortage of statistics to hand-pick to justify their anxieties. Likewise, if America swaps a Democratic White House for a Republican one, it will be easy to avoid reading too much into it, since it will be so easy to simply stamp Obama as “recession victim number 12,” shrug, and move on.

Do you guys see any lessons for Obama from the recession-era fall of other western leaders? If “the economy” kills this President, will it be because voters legitimately see flaws in his ideology and benefits to Mitt Romney’s, or because they’re simply engaging in the time-honored reactionary tradition of “trying the other way” when the incumbent doesn’t seem to be fixing everything fast enough?

In any case, it looks like I will be writing a weekly column on the Canadian media at HuffPo for the near future, so if you’re into that sort of thing, please check out “Media Bites“, which is what it’s now called. I’ll try to add a permanent link somewhere on the site.

In other news, In an effort to pander more to the geeky side of my audience, I’ve recently started a video game character Tumblr called “Play American,” where I draw pictures of various characters from American-made video games. Video game character fanart blogs are a dime a dozen these days, it seems, so I was trying to come up with a fun gimmick that would set mine apart. Check it out, and be sure to post any suggestions you may have!

Lastly, for any Vancouver readers, I want everyone to be aware that I will have a table at the upcoming Vancouver Comic Arts Festival on May 26 and 27. It’s gonna be my first “con” appearance, and I hope that I’ll finally be able to meet and chat with some readers in a non-Twitter setting. Be sure to check out the site for all the deets. It’s free to attend!

I’m also on the VanCAF board, and in that capacity I’ve done a couple interviews with some of the show’s more notable guests. If you’re interested in learning more about some of the personal lives of webcomics bigwigs, you might find them interesting.

Since it’s been going on for nearly 12 weeks now, I’ve had a chance to write a fair bit about Quebec’s student strike over the last little while. Yesterday I even made a brief appearance on the beloved state broadcaster to offer a few more polemic comments (I begin around 6:15).

To quickly summarize the status quo for anyone just tuning in now, the Liberal government of Quebec Premier Jean Charest introduced a plan several months ago to hike the cost of tuition in universities across the province. He has this power because the state foots the bill for the vast bulk of all post-secondary expenditures in Quebec; only around 13% of university costs are actually paid out-of-pocket by students themselves. This big-government generosity has resulted in Quebecers having the cheapest university rates in all of Canada by quite a significant margin, but it’s also one of the many roots of the province’s ever-worsening Greek-style indebtedness.

Anyway, Premier Charest’s initial plan to hike tuition 75% by 2017 (which, though scary-sounding, would still leave it considerably lower than every other province) provoked a massive revolt amongst the student politician set, who unilaterally made all sorts of declarations of strikes and uprisings. Since the first walkouts began in February, it’s now estimated that around 35% of enrolled Quebec students are currently engaged in some form of protest or another, including pickets, marches, sit-ins, and — most recently — outright acts of vandalism and violence.

At a Liberal Party convention yesterday in Victoriaville, for instance, crashing protesters bashed cops in the head with rocks and hunks of cement. The cops blasted tear gas and rubber bullets. Something gouged out a student’s eye and he’s now in a coma. Over 100 people were arrested in the ensuring struggle.

As I noted in my glamorous TV appearance, one of the most marked things about this whole episode is how extremely difficult it’s been to offer sympathetic coverage of the student side. People tell me the reception in the far-left French media has been a bit different, but over here in Anglo-Canada almost all commentators are near-universal in their dismissal of the strike as little more than an economically illiterate exercise in youth self-absorption. Self-appointed student radicals rarely possess attractive personalities, and this particular lot has fulfilled every Marx-quoting dreadlocked, keffiyeh-clad stereotype imaginable. But more importantly: they’re still going to be paying the lowest tuition in Canada, something which could only be seen as an affront to human rights in the federally-subsidized theme park of entitlement that is 21st century Quebec.

If there’s a dark humor to all of this, however, Premier Charest is sadly immune. Claiming the students voices were being heard, last Friday he announced plans to further soften his five-year hike by extending it by another two, meaning the average Quebecer’s annual tuition will increase by a grand total of $1,625 by 2019, or about $232 per student per year. The protesters were not satisfied of course — many of them have openly stated that nothing less than free tuition will suffice — so the talks continue. Even after violence of yesterday, the Charest administration remains committed to the idea that a negotiated solution will eventually be reached though open channels of government-radical dialogue. Not that a compromise will be much skin of his back, of course. In this, as in so many cases, it’s taxpayers in the rest of Canada who will wind up covering the difference, through transfer payments and federal grants, for whatever Quebecers can’t afford to give themselves.

Former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff scandalized the nation couple weeks ago when he suggested, in passing during a BBC interview, that Quebec and the rest of Canada had effectively become two separate countries already, and that their eventual, formal separation was thus a fairly forgone conclusion. French and English Canada operate according to vastly different cultural norms that neither side really respects or understands, he said. How do you forge a single workable country out of that?

In the wake of Quebec’s student strike — an event forged by almost an almost impossibly foreign series of variables in a land that seems to operate according to a twisted political-cultural logic all its own, it’s hard to see why everyone gave him such a hard time.

Noted sexpert Dan Savage, whom we may remember from an earlier, slightly less grotesquely-exaggerated comic, is back in the news, and once again it’s for displaying a massive degree of say-versus-do hypocrisy.

Speaking before a gathering of teenage journalists earlier last month (but captured on a video that was only widely circulated this weekend), Savage delivered the sort of speech he has become increasingly famous for — an hour-long appeal to end bullying and gay-bashing. And kudos to him for that. Trouble is, as I discussed in my last column on the matter, Dan is stubbornly incapable of promoting his cause as anything less than total warfare against a subhuman foe. Thus, in the most quotable moment of the hour, Savage’s lecture contained a long rant against all the “bullshit” inherent in Christianity.

“We can learn to ignore the bullshit in the bible about gay people the same way we learned to ignore the bullshit in the bible about shellfish, about slavery, about dinner, about farming, about menstruation, about virginity, about masturbation,” he said. “We ignore bullshit in the bible about lots of things. The bible is a radical pro-slavery document. Slave-owners waved bibles over their heads during the Civil War.”

And so on. I’m sure you know all the cliched places this line of argument goes. As Dan’s rhetoric got snarkier and angrier, a bunch of Christian students ostentatiously began to leave the auditorium, and it’s the captured footage of this children’s revolt that has given the story such legs. Noticing his audience rebellion, Savage sniped that it was amusing “how pansy-assed some people react when you push back.”

“Push back,” is the key phrase, since it sums up the Savage approach so well. His basic strategy for making America a safer, jollier place for GLBT youth is to make it a much more hostile place for everyone else, where he personally enforces thought compliance by emphasizing the vicious consequences of dissent. It’s that underlying rule-by-fear agenda, already manifest by his cruel campaigns of personal destruction waged against Rick Santorum and Marcus Bachmann, that explains why the man is rapidly starting to fall out of favor even amongst allies, and why this latest “bullshit in the bible” episode should be troubling regardless of your personal views on the actual “bullshit” in question.

It’s not a very controversial observation, after all, that no one really follows the bible to the letter. That’s one of the complexities of any modern faith based on millennia-old scripture, and it’s why we have theologians and clerics in the first place. There are tons of gay-friendly Christians (not to mention gay Christians themselves) who have made some manner of peace between their faith and their views on homosexuality, sometimes after a great deal of serious thought, and sometimes just through strategic indifference. To summarize this whole situation as little more than evidence that the bible is full of “bullshit,” however, is to jump to the most mean-spirited and intentionally offensive, generalized conclusion just for the sake of sadism. It reveals a lack of interest in engaging with, or converting critics through any sort of tactic other than evoking their fear of public shame or belittlement. It is, in short, bullying.

The consequences of playing to type have been predictable. Christian leaders, unsurprisingly, have not been particularly won over by this fresh line of attack, and have instead simply gained a new piece of evidence to cite in future allegations of collusion between homosexuals and the larger far-left campaign against the validity of their faith. Savage’s “It Gets Better” campaign, previously one of his few almost universally-applauded, non-ideological achievements, is now likewise in significant danger of being undermined. “Dem elites team with anti-Christian bully” says FOX News, referring to the Obama Administration’s backing of the anti-bullying initiate, which, for all we know, they may soon be forced to recant.

Since his video went viral, Dan Savage has (sort of) apologized for his comments, at least for the “pansy-ass” line, but it’s clear he is still a man lacking much sense of introspection or empathy. The idea that equal rights for gays will arrive on a jet fighter after an endless barrage of profanity, vulgarity, and personal attacks have thoroughly decimated not only all critics, but all those who waver or moderate, too, is still the underlying motivator, and will no doubt be the instigator of many more headline-grabbing moments to come.

Which should cause anyone who truly values the cause of homosexual acceptance and dignity to shudder.

Well, here it finally is, after much promising and anticipation:

J.J.’s Complete Guide to Canada

I hope you guys will have a lot of fun with it. I’ve spent a ton of time on it over the last few months, mostly reading and researching in an effort to provide a really good, comprehensive, accessible summary of everything worth knowing in order to properly understand Canada.

I have to give a huge thank-you to my proofreader Nathan, who I owe so, so much for helping me out as tirelessly as he did.

Other than that, just check it out! And if you enjoy it, be sure to share it with all your buddies. I’m going to the Calgary Comic Con this weekend, so I’m afraid this is gonna be the only update this week. But please don’t hesitate to offer up any and all feedback you may have.

A fun piece of Canadian political trivia is that the province of Alberta has never once re-elected a party it’s previously cast out of power. Thus, while a list of premiers in any other province will feature back-and-forth battle between alternating Liberal, Conservative, and, in some cases, NDP or other third party administrations, in Alberta the chronology is much more clean and organized.

First there were three Liberal premiers. Then three premiers from the short-lived, Depression-era “United Farmers” party. Then three premiers from the Social Credit Party. Then five premiers from the Progressive Conservative Party, the fifth of which — Premier Allison Redford — rules to this day.

But perhaps not for long.

The PC party has been in power since 1971, and if Alberta history has proven nothing else, it’s that all dynasties must eventually come to an end. Premier Redford — who only became premier once her predecessor, Ed Stelmach, resigned this past October — called a provincial election last month, which she is now widely expected to lose after the polls close on Monday.

Along with the inescapable phenomena of PC fatigue, Mrs. Redford’s electoral troubles stem from the fact that she is tragically miscast for her current role. As a member of the most liberal wing of her party, Redford was initially considered something of a long shot to win the Conservative leadership in the aftermath of Premier Stelmach’s resignation, yet due to a crowded field and the party’s convoluted “ranked preference,” multiple ballot voting system, she nevertheless managed to squeak into the top job with a 51% victory. Almost immediately, she set about rerouting her party in a far more progressive direction, surrounding herself with former advisers to Joe Clark — the most famously left-wing Conservative leader of the last few decades — and pushing a number of controversially liberal initiatives through the legislature, including a high-spending budget and a bill to tightly-regulate homeschooling.

Image-wise, the Premier has never done much to downplay the fundamentally un-conservative nature of her life story, which is that of a globe-trotting, globalist-minded professional bureaucrat who has worked for the UN and the EU but spent precious little time in the province she now runs. In one particularly infamous moment, she even quipped that her overall goal was to “change the character” of Alberta, presumably from the cartoonish gun-totin’, bible-thumping redneck she’s always reading about in the Toronto Star. “Not your father’s PC party,” her ads proudly state.

To be fair, this repositioning has worked to some degree. Certainly the polls suggest that Redford’s move to the left has made the Liberals and NDP even less competitive in an already historically hostile province. Unfortunately, this has left the PC’s conservative flank hugely exposed to a credible challenger from the right, and oh, look, here comes one now!

The Wildrose Party, named after the provincial flower, is very much the Tea Party of Alberta, forged by right-wing PC dissidents who have grown increasingly frustrated with their former party’s steady drift to the mushy middle. Led by Danielle Smith, a pretty former anchorwoman with zero political experience who has been repeatedly compared to Sarah Palin, the Rosers have welcomed conservative voters with open arms, and are now poised to begin Alberta’s fith political dynasty.

If elected, Smith will be an interesting premier in that she’ll probably be the single most doctrinaire libertarian since New Mexico’s Gary Johnston to lead a North American government. On social issues she’s just as left as Redford herself — pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, and even pro-prostitution at one point — but on economic matters she’s far more unapologetically conservative than polite Canadian society is generally used to, supporting controversial initiatives like private health care, charter schools, and deep cuts to government spending, as well as various libertarian gimmicks like adding a “right to own property” to the provincial Bill of Rights. If this race is a “family feud” between two segments of the right, it’s fiscal matters that are the main field of battle.

Of course, there’s been much discussion as to just how representative Mrs. Smith’s personal libertarianism is of the larger Wildrose brand. During the current election, critics have eagerly called attention to what the press has dubbed “bozo eruptions” from various far-right, first-time Wildrose candidates, such as a former pastor who vividly wrote about gays burning in “the lake of fire”, and another former pastor who bragged about the political advantages of being white. And since Smith herself has pledged to make citizen-inspired referendums a bigger part of her approach to governing, the idea that “divisive social issues” could once again be back on the table is hardly outside the realm of possibility, given the sorts of matters that tend to dominate voter initiatives south of the border.

My own concern, however, is that Danielle Smith is simply not experienced enough to be premier. Because premier candidates are selected internally by political parties for their own self-serving marketing reasons — in Smith case, it’s clear the Wildrose saw great promise in her youth, charisma, and attractiveness — much-needed discussions over matters like executive experience and career history are often ignored in the shuffle. The result is the rapid rise of politicians whose familiarity with real-world issues is either only theoretical, as seems to be the case with Smith, or warped through a lifetime of status-seeking in the unrepresentative government subculture, as is the case with Premier Redford.

If citizen-led governing becomes more common during the Smith administration, in other words, it may very well be because the alternative isn’t up to the task. Considering how rare new beginnings are in Alberta, it seems like a bit of a tragedy to begin this one so unprepared.

Prime Minister Harper wrapped up his weekend trip to Colombia, where he had been attending the 2012 Organization of American States summit, by making a fairly rightward turn in Canadian foreign policy. Joining forces with President Obama, the two leaders effectively vetoed Cuba’s invitation for the organization’s 2015 get-together, something the OAS’ various other member nations had been actively demanding. Since the OAS requires unanimous consent to pass any decisions, Cuba will be staying off the guest list — just as it has every year since 1962.

“We do believe that the Summit of the Americas should be restricted to democratic countries and that Cuba should be encouraged to come as a democratic country in the future,” said the PM, heralding his first major foreign policy decision regarding the Communist-run island.

Under previous governments, Canada had taken a famously soft line with Cuba, maintaining full economic and diplomatic ties in open defiance of American efforts to isolate the Castro regime. This sucking up to a Marxist dictatorship at the expense of Canada’s relationship with the United States was obviously never hugely popular with the Canadian right, meaning Harper’s new, more confrontational posturing is as much a way for his administration to placate the base as curry favour with Washington. At a time when full White House approval for the Keystone pipeline remains outstanding, after all, acting as one of the world’s last supporters of America’s increasingly eccentric five-decade Cuba policy is probably worth at least a few brownie points, even if it makes Canada look fairly hypocritical in the process.

The un-invite, needless to say has angered much of the left, both at home and abroad. Many of the Latin American nations that make up the OAS, we may remember, are currently led by far-left Castro allies, and they’re none too happy. Several of the region’s most flamboyant socialists, including Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa boycotted this year’s meeting because of Cuba’s continued nonclusion, and doubtless many more will do so in 2015. Domestically, Harper will almost certainly face flack from the opposition for compromising Canadian foreign policy independence in the face of the Yankee hegemon, and doubtless we’ll hear much about how Canada’s “global reputation” for progressive tolerance has been irreparably harmed by this reactionary step backwards.

Now look. I get the idea that much of America’s anti-Castro posturing is overblown. I know it’s an obvious electoral sop to Florida’s immigrant community, and I know there are worse tyrannies to which the United States (and Canada, for that matter) maintains much cheerier relations. And I know the 50-year boycott clearly hasn’t worked, at least in the sense that isolation was supposed to weaken the Communist regime, whereas it’s now the world’s second longest-running dictatorship.

But still. We’re not asking the world here. All the other left-wing Latino strongmen have figured out a way to make their socialist revolutions compatible with some form of constitutional democracy, even as they pay explicit tribute to the Cuban model in their deeds and policies. As far as games of diplomatic chicken go, the Cuban people are winning a very grotesque prize for their government’s pride and stubbornness, and I’ve never understood why this is something the rest of the world is expected to applaud.

Harper deserves some kudos for at least calling the regime out, after years of self-serving Canadian equivocation on Cuban human rights. Considering the Prime Minister’s newfound interest in sucking up to China, it’s undeniably a disingenuous stance to some degree, but meaningful change in Canadian foreign policy will only come when we devote as much effort to applauding the small victories as we do moping about the larger imperfections.

Canadian finance minister Jim Flaherty gave a speech in New York this week, and, as is often the case when a Canadian politician speaks before a US audience, apparently spent a fair bit of time bragging about the swift efficiencies of the Canadian parliamentary system.

Traveling Canadians evoke this trope a lot because it’s seen to play into a certain kind of American insecurity over their country’s supposed inability to “solve big problems.” Canada, it is proudly stated, never has a House and Senate stagnant in bitter deadlock, or a president who keeps vetoing things, or a Tea Party style insurrection that turns the party system upside down. We simply have the clean, efficient, Crown prerogative system where a few people at the top pretty much get to do as they please. The guys at the top decided that Canada should do certain things to fix the economy, so all those things were done and the economy was fixed. It was no sweat at all, says Flaherty.

It’s not a partisan talking-point; many years ago I did a cartoon on a very similar speech by the previous Liberal government’s then-ambassador to the United States, Frank McKenna, who also went on about how “dysfunctional” American Congressional governance was compared to Canada’s “efficient” top-down model.

The great irony is that Flaherty’s speech occurred against the backdrop of a significant scandal back in Canada which is basically born from the deficiencies of the very system he was praising.

In a damning report released by the Auditor General of Canada last week, it was revealed that the Harper Administration’s defence department has been engaged in some manner of systematic effort to cover-up the true costs of one of its most major military initiatives — the purchase of 65 American-made F-35 warplanes. While Defence Minister Peter MacKay and others have often gone on the record stating the price to be somewhere in the range of $15 billion, the AG said the real number is more like $25 billion, and suggested the defence ministry has been claiming otherwise despite full knowledge of the actual figure.

As I wrote in the Huffington Post this week, there’s a degree to which this whole episode is somewhat overblown as far as scandals go. No money has yet been spent on the planes, so the gist of the outrage is basically that our politicians have been lying about how much some theoretical pipe-dream might cost — which I’d argue is hardly unprecedented enough to cause the sort of career-ending damage to Harper that his critics are anticipating.

The fact is, when you have, as Canada does, an excessively strong executive branch coupled with an excessively weak, rubber-stamp parliament and an excessively weak, unqualified, hack-filled cabinet of unaccomplished, middling politicians like Peter MacKay, a great deal of decision-making power naturally pools in the executive branch bureaucracy. Bureaucrats can in turn be corrupted by outside influences — in the case of the F-35s, the allegation is the military and American lobbyists helped pushed through what the Auditor General claims was an improperly rushed bidding process — and before you know it, a bad, overpriced decision has been quietly reached.

This is very much the core of Canada’s “efficient” governance model; the maximum consolidation of decision-making power in the hands of non-partisan “professionals” at the expense of elected politicians. That’s why it’s so adorable when Canadian pundits suddenly start expressing outrage that boondoggles like F-35gate “went over the heads of parliament” or “raise questions about ministers’ control of their own departments,” as if the Canadian House of Commons was ever an effective, independent check on the executive branch, or if our cabinet ministers were ever able to effectively reign in their employees (indeed, it wasn’t too long ago that we had a whole other scandal when Minister Bev Oda awkwardly tried to do just that).

If Canada wants a system of government where there are significant checks in place to scrutinize bureaucrats, ministers, spending decisions, executive branch priorities, lobbyists, and who-knew-what-when scandals, then it has to accept some degree of slowdown, gridlock, and inefficiency as well. Preventing runaway government requires things such as powerful legislative committees, a stronger separation between the executive and legislative branches, a more qualified, independent cabinet, and greater public scrutiny of bureaucrats, all of which — as the United States has proven — will invariably generate a lot of delays, fights, and division in the process of working correctly.

But political reform has never been Canada’s strong suit. Instead, the opposition parties will merely ratchet up their outrage and indignation at the current prime minister, as they accuse him of helping undermine values that never existed in a broken system they continue to idolize.