What time of year were Canadian elections held back in the days when we did have outdoor rallies?

my vote in Manitoba HAS NEVER been counted/effective for the 30 years I’ve been voting.

It’s decided by Ontario and Quebec…I no longer vote.

No point.

However, I was at a Bush senior Republican event in Plymouth, Michigan, in 92. Unbelievable: bunting, fife and drum bands, not a dry eye when they sang God Bless America. warm up speeches by regional popular politicians. crowd of thousands upon thousands.

I think it speaks to the cultural differences of our countries. If you tried that rah, rah patriotic stuff here, it wouldnt fly, we are too cynical a bunch. Naturally, it follows that thousands of us wont congregate to hear a politician speak.

Maybe if they sent out more invitations ….

The sides are so desperately far apart on the political spectrum in so many respects that you come out for your guy and against the other guy. It’s a show of support that seems necessary because of the disparity of the body politic in this country.

Points like Canadians’ inability to vote directly for the PM, and the relative shortness of the Canadian campaign + the largeness of the country’s geography factor in.

It’s also true to say that rallies aren’t a focus for campaigns anymore.

But what remains is the fact that Dion and Harper are battling over a carbon tax and the Green Shift. Compared to a battle over whether or not America should even consider(!) public health care. Or whether the wealthy should be subject to progressive taxation.

Those (and so many more) issues are ones the opposite side loves to hate. That’s enough to get me out the door.

Maybe, if the Canadian campaign had gone on for a few months, you might have seen a rally for arts funding.

Not in this decade. And in 2008, the USA might outpace Canada by 10%.

1. Geography

Canadian politics have a strong urban-rural/suburban cleavage. As a result the places with a high population density that could produce big rallies are not electorally contested.

2. Rallies are inefficient

Any big rally will draw people from a large region around where the rally is taking place, and will tend to dominate local news organs (but not national ones). In presidential elections or multimember districts, you can hold your rallies in swing regions. In Canada that is less feasible, because rallies really only make electoral sense in places where lots of battleground ridings are close by to each other.

Moreover, the riding association is the basic organizing unit of Canadian politics, and is ill-suited to organize rallies, which if big, will draw from multiple ridings.

3. Canadians (and Brits) have the lowest identification with political parties in the advanced industrial world. Americans are registered as Democrat and Republican. Here you have to buy a membership to a party and few people do.

The fact that there are large rallies for causes, but not parties in the UK is significant, I think. The networks (trades unions, Greenpeace, farmer’s associations) that gather people in Trafalgar Sq for a protest don’t seem to be as available to political parties. I don’t know that any party in Britain would try to hold a large rally, but were they to, I doubt they’d see anything like the turnout.
Incidentally, because rallies are usually in London, and it’s accessible from most of the country, there’s an added attraction for participants. I was in Westminster during the Police Union protest a year ago, and thousands had hired busses, come down early, protested, and were planning to spend the afternoon on a day out. The pubs in Victoria were jammed from 12 onwards with off-duty coppers from Bath and Coventry.

Second, the weather – it’s almost always cold when we have elections.

And finally, we don’t have compelling speakers as leaders who speak from the heart. We’ve career politicians with the soul of wordprocessors who’d be lost without their poll-tested and sanitized 30-second soundbites.

Bingo

If there ever was to be a large rally for the Liberals it would have been for a speech by Chretien.

But on the whole, I agree with Paul and was something I thought about during the campaign as well.

The politicians don’t appreciate those people who can bring others out to a rally and that is, incidentally, likely the biggest reason for voter apathy too.

Also, our campaigns are very short. How many huge rallies are you going to have in a 35 campaign? How are you going to book the venue on such short notice, especially in winter? In the Pearson days, Maple Leaf Gardens was rented for large rallies but this is no longer practical. When the Air Canada Centre is not being used by one of the local sports teams, it is hosting a concert or other event. And, of course, no other democratic country limits an individual or corporation’s right to contribute financially to political parties as much as Canada. There simply is not enough money for these things.

UK does not have large rallies during election campaigns but they do have massive demonstrations if there is a policy/law they don’t like.

That’s no way to run a *democratic* railroad.

That said, I am surprised how little real human contact there is between leaders and actual human beings during a campaign. PW’s big magazine article on the campaign documenting the opening day or so of the last campaign highlighted how little real contact took place.

Far as I can see, Canadian leaders tours now seem to spend hours and hours safely in the air for no apparent reason other than to avoid being on the ground, where unpredictable things might happen.

My favorite faux event of the campaign was the NDP guzzling airplane fuel over the tar sands so as tyo hand out press releases describing the environmental horror below.

I don’t recall a single reporter publicly reporting how bizarre this was.

- JV

Or when they’re hippies. That helps.

We’re a very spread-out population. Many of us can’t just stroll to the nearby rallies at the “town square,” it takes plenty of time and energy for many of us.

Who wants to come home at the end of the working day after driving 25 km in traffic, later having to drag themselves to some partisan rally at 8pm.

Or maybe there’s the “U.S. factor” in play as well.

Some Canadians and their politicians may think of big, partisan, energetic rallies as being conventional practice in the “bigger is always better” American elections. Therefore, we may turn the other way and embrace smaller, quieter venues simply to defy the Yanks and create something boringly Canadian.

Maybe Canadians have become so fearful of movements and distrustful of our politicians that we wouldn’t want to be caught dead at one of their rallies in case a scandal breaks out.

Canadians arent’ as engaged in rallies because most of us don’t participate in picking the leader. In many states you can participate in primaries as an independent or even as a registered voter in the other party, whereas participants in Canada are limited to the committed few who join a party and then travel to go to a convention. Canadians are also less partisan-identified because we don’t have to register as Liberal or Conservaitve or NDP etc. we can be free to vote without identifying with a party or free to keep that to ourselves.

Maybe Canadians like to gather in large masses when it’s something worth leaving the house for.

You feel like a nerd, they are uncomfortable and all the “whooping” is embarassing.

Other countries do it because they are nowhere near as cool as us. One day, when they get it out of their heads that politicians are exciting, they too will drop rallies.

Or course I could be totally wrong. Does Britain have big rallies?

What draws a Canadian crowd, on a voluntary, I went out of my way to be here, basis? Grey Cup. Stanley Cup. NHL. Remembrance Day. Highway of Heroes after another of our fallen arrives at CFB Trenton. Rrroll-up-the-rrrim. 80% off something I might like to think I would one day need right there on page 2 of the Canadian Tire flyer.

What doesn’t? Harper, Dion, Layton, et al.

Personally, I see all that as a feature, not a bug.

The answer might be that Canadian political culture seems to militate against big mass rallies, but it’s probably more that the “natural governing party” seemed to have so little interest in actually attracting honest to goodness activism that mass outpourings of support are seen as unnecessary.

(Sure, big ticket cheque-writers are nice, and every organization needs staffers and such, but actual passion about politics smacks of the Reformers or, worse, NDP. Ick.)

Are you implying that the Harper Conservatives aren’t a fascist movement? :)

Also, to no one in particular, the fact that rallies are expensive, risky, and necessitate the purchasing of costly thundersticks, is one that would assumedly apply elsewhere as well (except those socialist European countries, where thundersticks are free for all). Of course, I don’t really have any better explanation as to why big rallies are uncommon here, other than the fact that our party leaders are, by and large, dolts.