Justin Trudeau’s victory in Canada’s national elections on Monday followed what he called one of the “nastiest” campaigns in Canadian history. That may be true, to the degree that much of the campaign was about him and some bad decisions he made, and it featured a lot of name-calling. At one point supporters of his Conservative challenger even chanted “Lock him up, lock him up.”But Canadian “nasty” should be seen in the context of a country whose people are deemed among the most polite in the world, with election campaigns capped by law at 50 days. This is a far, far cry from the marathon, multiyear, mud-clogged political wars that perennially contort the superpower to the south. Note, for example, that the far-right candidate Maxime Bernier, whose People’s Party sought to emulate Europe’s populists with an illiberal, anti-immigrant, climate-skeptical and socially regressive platform, failed miserably, losing his own seat in Parliament and falling short of 2 percent of the vote nationwide.

Source: New York Times October 22, 2019 23:26 UTC