Canada: About Canada
From ExecutivePlanet.com
About Canada
Location: Canada is a country occupying most of northern North America, extending from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west and northward into the Arctic Ocean. It is the world's second largest country by total area, and shares land borders with the United States to the south and northwest.
Population: According to Canada's 2006 census, 31,612,897 people call Canada home, an increase of 5.4% since 2001. Population growth is due to immigration and, to a lesser extent, natural growth. About three-quarters of Canada's population lives within 150 kilometres of the US border.
Language: Canada's two official languages are English and French. Official Bilingualism in Canada is the law. English and French have equal status in federal courts, Parliament, and in all federal institutions. The public has the right, where there is sufficient demand, to receive federal government services in either English or French, and official language minorities are guaranteed their own schools in all provinces and territories.
Capital: Ottawa is the capital of Canada; it is the country’s fourth largest city, with a population of 812,129, according to Canada’s 2006 census.
Administrative Divisions: Canada is a federation comprised of ten provinces and three territories. It is a parliamentary democracy and a constitutional monarchy with Queen Elizabeth II as its head of state. It is a bilingual and multicultural country, with both English and French as official languages at the federal level.
Government: Canada's Parliament consists of a Monarch and a bicameral legislature: an elected House of Commons and an appointed Senate.The government is comprised of the party with a plurality of seats in the House of Commons, ie., more seats than any other party. Presently, the Conservative Party makes up the current government having won the federal election of October 14, 2008 with a plurality of 143 seats out of possible 308. Because it only holds a minority government, the Conservative Party has had to rely on other parties to help pass its legislation. Prior to the Conservative Party’s first victory in 2006, the Liberal Party had held power for 13 consecutive years with three majority governments. The Conservative Party’s breakthrough was the first ever electoral victory for a right-of-centre party in a federal election. Traditionally, the left-of-centre Liberal Party could rely on the vast majority of seats from the ultra-moderate province of Ontario, where nearly 40% of the nation’s population resides. In the 1993 federal election the Liberal Party had won 98 out of a possible 99 seats in Ontario, and 101 seats out of 103 in the 2000 election. However, after the “Unite the Right” movement was successful in merging the right-of-centre Canadian Alliance Party and the moderate Progressive Conservative Party in 2003, the Liberals were not as successful in Ontario, winning only 75 out of a possible 108 seats in the 2004 election. In the 2006 election, the Conservative Party won 40 seats out of 108 in Ontario—the then best showing for any right-of-centre party in decades in Ontario. In the 2008 election, the Conservatives won 51 seats. Undoubtedly, in the 2006 election the Conservative Party’s improved showing in Ontario was caused in part by a major scandal involving the Liberal Party’s misappropriation of over $100 million of government funds in Quebec related to advertising contracts. As a result, voters in Quebec abandoned the Liberal Party in droves reducing its seats in that province to 13 in 2006 from 21 in the 2004 election. The Conservative Party was able to gain 10 seats in Quebec, the most a moderate-to-conservative party was able to win in Quebec in four previous federal elections.
Unlike the system of government in the United States, where citizens vote separately for the President and their local candidate for the House of Representatives, in the Parliamentary system of government such as Canada’s, a citizen votes only for his or her local representative. This has the effect of combining power between both the executive and legislative branches of government. Executive power is exercised by the Prime Minister and Cabinet ministers, all of whom are sworn into the Queen's Privy Council for Canada to become Ministers of the Crown and responsible to the elected House of Commons. The Prime Minister and Cabinet are formally appointed by the Governor General (who is the Monarch's representative in Canada). However, the Prime Minister chooses the Cabinet, and by convention, the Governor General respects the Prime Minister's choices. There is no committee that confirms or disconfirms the Prime Minister’s choice of a cabinet minister.
The Prime Minister exercises vast political power, especially in the appointment of government officials, civil servants, Supreme Court and provincial appellate justices, as well as appointments to various boards, commissions, tribunals, crown corporations, and even the Senate—all with little or no oversight. This has led many critics inside and outside of government circles to argue for some controls/oversight on the vast amount of patronage positions afforded the Prime Minister’s Office. This power was cited by many critics as the reason for the corruption scandal which rocked the Liberal Party in 2004. The current Prime Minister has said that he intends to put oversight mechanisms in place to restore public confidence in government. To that end, against intense opposition from the Liberal Party and in the halls of academia, in February 2006 Canada saw its first-ever public hearing of a proposed Supreme Court justice. Marshall Rothstein was eventually approved in the same month.
General elections are called by the Governor General when the Prime Minister so advises. While there is no minimum term for a Parliament, a new election must be called within five years of the last general election. Increasingly, provincial governments are passing laws implementing set election dates to restore confidence in government after the scandal that put the Liberal Party out of office after the 2006 election. Ontario is holding its first set election date on October 10, 2011. The federal government under the Conservative Party passed similar legislation but then called an election only two years later citing the world recession as the reason. In the past, provincial and federal governments have called surprise elections for no other reason than to take advantage of their leads in the polls. Set election dates are seen to be fairer to opposition parties. Members of the Senate, whose seats are apportioned on a regional basis, are chosen by the Prime Minister and formally appointed by the Governor General. This has been a continuing subject of controversy. It has been argued that the upper chamber of a bi-cameral system of government should be “Triple E”, i.e., elected, effective and equal among the provinces. Currently, the Senate is made up of former cabinet ministers and MP’s, ex-premiers, etc., and other party loyalists. Critics have argued that unelected Senators have no moral authority to block proposed legislation of elected members of the House of Commons. The current Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, has proposed that when a Senator retires, the person that fills that seat should be elected. The proposal has run into stiff opposition from many quarters who have cited constitutional grounds, as from provincial premiers, who would rather be seen as the voice of their respective regions rather than elected Senators.
Economy: Canada, one of the world's wealthiest nations with a high per capita income, is a member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Group of Eight (G8). Canada is a free market economy with slightly more government intervention than in the United States, but much less than most European nations. Canada has traditionally had a lower per capita gross domestic product (GDP) than its southern neighbour but higher than the large western European economies. Since the early 1990's, the Canadian economy has been growing rapidly with low unemployment and large government surpluses on the federal level. Today Canada closely resembles the US in its market-oriented economic system, pattern of production, and high living standards. As of October 2009, Canada's national unemployment rate stands at 6.3% and is still low compared with other industrialized nations. According to the OECD’s 2003 ranking of nations by GDP, Canada came in 8th, well above Germany, Italy, France, the United Kingdom, and Sweden. Canada is one of the few developed nations that is a net exporter of energy. Atlantic Canada has vast offshore deposits of natural gas and large oil and gas resources are centred in Alberta. The vast Athabasca Tar Sands give Canada the world's second largest reserves of oil behind Saudi Arabia.
Canada and the Credit Crisis: While the US economy has been in a deep recession since the credit crisis first took hold in September 2008, Canada has not suffered to the same extent and has only sunk into a mild recession compared to its southern neighbour. For example, unemployment in the US has increased from 8 per cent to 10.2 per cent in the last year; meanwhile, Canada’s unemployment rate has marginally climbed from 7.5 to 8.6 per cent. Moreover, while bankruptcies and foreclosures are still at record-high levels in the US, they are only at levels that are usual during a recession in Canada. Why has Canada escaped the depth of the recession in the US? The main reason is that Canada did not experience a bubble in real estate prices such as the US did from the late 1990s to the late 2000s. When that bubble burst it left millions with homes whose prices had fallen below the value of the mortgage remaining on the homes. As a result, bankruptcies and foreclosures have skyrocketed in the US, while in Canada they have not. That is not to say that Canada has avoided the recession. The hardest hit province has been Ontario, which relies heavily on manufacturing of autos and auto parts. With the bankruptcies of General Motors and Chrysler, thousands of autoworkers in Ontario have been thrown out of work. Moreover, the situation is actually worse than that. The manufacturing sector has always relied on a weak Canadian dollar relative to the US dollar to sell cheaper goods in to the lucrative US market. However, the Canadian dollar is trading at near parity with the greenback, and according to most economists, is expected to trade at levels above the US dollar for most of 2010. This is bad news for the Ontario economy and will very likely mean a sluggish recovery for Ontario, the industrial engine of the country.
Global Warming: The Canadian Approach In 1997 the Liberal government under then Prime Minister Jean Chretien passed the Kyoto Protocol in Canada’s Parliament. Canada’s obligation under the treaty was to reduce carbon emissions by 6% below 1990 levels. Despite much lip service given to the Accord, three Liberal majority governments under Chretien never devised a plan for meeting the country’s targets. Had Chretien attempted to implement the Kyoto target, which called for steep tax hikes on fossil fuels to discourage their use, it would no doubt have lead to a deep recession in the manufacturing heartland of Canada, i.e., Ontario, where the Liberals had taken 98 out of a possible 99 seats in the 1997 election. Chretien very likely did the math and figured that the targets amounted to political suicide. The Conservative party won the election in 2006. The current government is skeptical of claims that man is responsible for global warming. Consequently, it rejected Kyoto outright, which is a major policy shift. The Conservatives, it would be fair to say, are climate skeptics who argue that man-made global warming does not exist as the earth has not warmed for the past 11 years, which the climate models of most climatologists cannot explain. If the models for measuring global warming are wrong, so the argument goes, then maybe the whole theory is wrong. With the advent of the election of the liberal-leaning Obama Administration in the US, which is in favour of global schemes to reduce carbon emissions, the Conservative government is having to walk a fine line; on the one hand it remains quietly skeptical of the theory of global warming, while on the other hand it does not want to antagonize the new administration by publicly rejecting any policy initiatives coming from south of the border. Its policy toward global warming appears to be a readiness to go along with any schemes coming from its southern neighbor, all the while hoping that they are never passed into law.
