Ah, that Donald Trump! He sure knows how to get the media elites to talk about him every day.  He famously refused to accept the results of the pending US-election during the debate, and later clarified that by saying he’d respect the results if he wins.

Here in Canada, the previous election was fought under the guise that Canada’s first-past-the-post electoral system needed change.  That ‘every vote needed to count.’  That everyone deserved an ‘equal’ vote.  That the system needed to be ‘fairer.’  That the system should not permit parties with less than half of voter support to have carte blanche to govern.  That Harper’s government was implicitly illegitimate and governed without concern to the voices of the general public.  In effect, the system, we were told in subtle but serious ways, was rigged and it needed to change.

Even the social movements supporting democratic change fueled that concern of a rigged system.  One of the leading groups advocating for change even called themselves “Fair Vote Canada.”  One must automatically assume that this means that they think that the current system is unfair – that all the governments that have been elected since Confederation had won without real mandates. The system is rigged, in other words.

As a political scientist, I can tell you that we even teach students that the system is rigged.  Saying so makes our material far more exciting!  It helps with the BIS, the acronym we use for ‘bums in seats.’  (Funny how politically incorrect that is! After all, bums usually belong to people, but it also is an ambiguous term since the word is often used to pejoratively brand certain kinds of people too.)  How many studies have shown the alignment of political/media/business elites controlling elections and skewing public policy to protect the interests of political and economic masters?  Ah, the system is rigged!  Knowing this is a prerequisite to graduating with a political science degree these days.  There are no shortage of political science graduates working on the Hill.

Once elected, the Trudeau government told us some pretty remarkable and shady constitutional things.  They told us they had a mandate to change the electoral system, yet their mandate only contained a duty to consult Canadians without mentioning what system the Liberals preferred.  They suggested that parliament alone could pass such sweeping changes, without concern to legitimate constitutional claims that there was some duty to seek consent from voters for that change either through a fresh mandate or a referendum.  In effect, the system is rigged and only Trudeau could fix it.

After a year of this saga, after a parliamentary committee took time to listen to the concerns of Canadians and experts, Prime Minister Trudeau took to a French-language newspaper to say, well, maybe Canadians are satisfied with their electoral system after all, especially that it can produce the sort of ‘real change’ they were looking for.  In other words, ‘the system is rigged, unless I win.’

In the United States, the media complain that the presidential nominee of the GOP would even fathom not respecting the results of a rigged election, when our fair Prime Minister used the same kind of rhetoric without a whimper.  Now that the system supported Trudeau and his vision, the system isn’t so rigged after all.  Imagine that!

In the US, many pundits are saying this sort of rhetoric disqualifies Trump from his presidential bid.  In Canada, it’s business as usual.  What an interesting comparison! Pretty remarkable stuff.