The Fredösphere

Yes, Canada.  Another one of my unhealthy obsessions, along with anti-popes and zeppelins and all the rest.  It's a fascinating country, really.  So big, so empty.  For example, an astonishing number of provincial capitols are located on islands.  Well, okay, it's only three, but hey, that's 30 percent!  The southernmost point of Canada is Pelee Island in Lake Erie.  I'm told the B&B there is a nice place to visit.

Canada's politics can be entertaining too, in spite of what they say.  You should really read up on the odd Social Credit Party who ran Alberta for some years.  They tried to print their own quasi-currency, which was derided as "funny money," and they forbade the serving of alcoholic drinks aboard commercial aircraft while in Albertan airspace.  Here's the kindest possible spin on the movement.  Although it's prosperity bonds resembled a redistributionist scheme, it was based on the theory that the wealth that disappeared in the stock market crash could be somehow rediscovered and returned to its owners.  I wonder if kids vacationing in Alberta can buy replicas of these bonds in gift shops the way they buy confederate currency when they visit civil war battlefields.  That would be cool.  Cool in a deeply geeky history buff kind of way.  Which isn't cool.

Our own (milder) version of this movement (I hope I'm being fair) was the Minnesota Farmer - Labor Party, which was rural, pious, and motivated by a concern for collective prosperity.  It eventually folded into our left wing party, but the Albertans evolved into right wingers.  This weird history explains much of the hostility that eastern Canadians feel toward western Canadians, especially western Canadian politicians.  To be tainted by association with the SCP is to see your national political ambitions die.

You did know they had an election up there yesterday, didn't you?  They have a new prime minister.  Colby Cosh says it's all his fault.

"Prime Minister Stephen Harper"?  These words are like a dream come true, but I don't mean that idiomatically, as a matter of self-identification with the Conservative Party. I mean that the incoming results are like a dream, the way it would be "like a dream" if your fifth-grade Social Studies teacher suddenly bicycled past you in the nude.

The political culture is even more relaxed than in the U.K.  Politicians are free to grow facial hair and dispense with ties.  The CBC starts reporting returns when only a few dozen votes are counted.  You see a number like "53" and you assume they mean precincts, but then you realize that's the current raw vote count for the front runner.