What We Can Learn from Canada

This most unusual of presidential elections has become an all-consuming drama. The projection of 300 million sets of hopes and fears onto John McCain, Barack Obama, and Sarah Palin is getting a wee bit close to the neurotic.

Whoops, sorry, Joe Biden, didn’t mean to leave you out, but your public profile seems to have gone out with the tide during the last two weeks.

Anyway, sometimes it helps to calm down, take a step back, and find out what we can learn from others about elections, policy debates, and leadership.

Take Canada, a great country, our biggest trading partner, and longtime friend that doesn't get enough attention from its giant, self-absorbed neighbor. It ought to be a tradition that a new U.S. president always goes to Canada for his or her first foreign trip.

Canada is holding a national election, which is getting scant notice south of the border. Parliament was dissolved last week and Canadians will go to the polls October 14. That’s the first thing that we can learn from our neighbors. What is taking us two years, Canada will accomplish in five weeks.

Yes, Canada’s population is much smaller than ours, but still. If American politicians devoted a comparable percentage of their time to governing, as opposed to campaigning, as their Canadian counterparts do, our federal government might get more done for the citizens.

We can dream, but a five-week presidential campaign likely won’t happen in our lifetimes. But climate will be a top issue in the Canadian campaign, and their debate can inform our own deliberations next year, regardless of whether McCain or Obama is negotiating a climate deal with Congress. The arguments that Canadians trade back and forth will be a valuable sneak preview of arguments that will be heard in Washington DC next year.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a Conservative, Canada’s analogue for our Republicans. His leading opponent is Stephane Dion, leader of the Liberals, the analogue to our Democrats.

Until recently, Harper was a climate skeptic, but seems to have come around to accepting the science. In last year’s Speech from the Throne, which is sort of like our president’s State of the Union speech, Harper advocated caps on major industrial sectors aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions 20 percent below the 2006 level by 2020 and 60-70 percent by 2050.

Dion favors a carbon tax of $40 per metric ton, to be fully offset with cuts in other taxes. The Liberals call their plan the “Green Shift,” and say it will spur the market for cleaner technologies.

Harper argues that a carbon tax will send more taxpayers’ money to a distant federal government and cause a recession. Critics of Harper’s plan say it won’t reach its 2020 goal because the largest block of emissions cuts is put off until 2018. For example, the carbon-intensive oil sands industry won’t face carbon sequestration requirements until that year. And so it goes.

The polls show Harper with a solid lead. Regardless of who forms Canada’s next government, however, climate will be the biggest serving on his plate of issues. Canada will get a head start on trying to figure out an approach to the most vexatious and far-reaching issue of our time.

If we look up from our political self-absorption and look north, we might learn something.