Two disadvantages of the Canadian political system

The Canadian political system on the whole is a pretty good one, and is also intricate enough to provide a lot of drama for political addicts like me and others. Compared to a number of other countries as well it's also not that hard to enter, as the money required to run for Parliament is quite low, costing on average $62,000 for a seat in Parliament in Canada compared to $800,000 in the US.

There are some pretty major disadvantages though, two of which have to do with a centralization of power in Parliament as opposed to the country as a whole.

One disadvantage is how the Prime Minister is chosen - the PM is the leader of the party with the most seats. To become the PM then, the general progression is 1) work your way up in the party you are a member of, eventually run for leader, then 2) win an election. That means that the only thing an independent can hope for is a single seat in Parliament. The US is a two-party system, but every once in a while an independent or third-party candidate (Ross Perot) can come out of nowhere and shake things up. Sure it costs a few billion dollars, but it can be done through support from individuals alone.

A second disadvantage: the PM has to choose ministers from what is often a very small pool of talent. At the moment Canada has a minority government, and the ruling party (the Conservatives) have a mere 143 seats out of 308, and when they first won power in 2006 they had even less than that, 124. A landslide in an election (1997 for example) can bring 175+ seats. From this pool the PM has to create the Cabinet, so someone out of that group has to be the Minister of Finance, another has to be Minister of Defence, and so on. The current cabinet has 38 people, making a full one in four MPs a cabinet minister. Added to that is the idea that cabinet ministers should sometimes be appointed out of loyalty instead of ability (two parties merge, the leader of the larger party eventually becomes PM, the other one gets a cabinet appointment later on). In the US, however, anyone can be appointed as Secretary, allowing Barack Obama to make superb choices such as making Nobel Prize winner Stephen Chu the Secretary of Energy.

On that note, here's the article that led me to write this post. The Canadian parliament right now is apparently composed of less experienced, less educated, and less diverse people than it was before. Less experienced isn't necessarily a bad thing in politics, but in Canada's case it could be, considering the more or less steady hand the Canadian government has been throughout the 1990s and a bit after. A lot of people from that era have retired, and considering the good job they did the "fresh blood" in Parliament might not be a good thing.