"There are seven kings five parties which are mighty in the world Ottawa."- Ibn Battuta, I mean, your humble scribe
For our sins, Canada still has first-past-the-post elections (ie. whichever party gets the most votes in a riding gets the seat, and whichever party has a majority of seats forms the government). The problem is that in any given riding, at least three parties will get 25% or more of the vote, and which parties varies from province to province. So outcomes are chaotic: the federal Liberals had 36 seats before and 184 seats after the 2015 election. Election campaigns last six weeks and the biggest parties each spend a few tens of millions during that period. Broadly speaking, a Prime Minister with a majority government is a dictator limited only by their own conscience and Canadian tradition. (For example, our main bill of rights has a
'notwithstanding clause': federal and provincial governments can declare that it does not apply in a particular case for five years at a time).
Three of the largest federal parties (the
beige Liberals, social-democratic New Democratic Party, and Quebec sovereigntist Bloc Québécois)
are falling apart: membership is down, donations are down, voters are quite willing to switch parties, and their ideologies don't inspire a lot of passionate support. The fourth, the Conservatives, are a shotgun marriage of two right-wing parties with different regional bases, and they just hived off a former leadership candidate who is founding
the local Xenophobe Party franchise and another who has switched to provincial politics. The federal Greens look like they will gain some seats (about 4 or 5 out of 308, up from 1 at the last election) but they are crippled by our voting system, 10% support does not translate to 10% of seats and some people vote for the least odious party which they think might win their riding.
Another structural issue is
the ongoing collapse and centralization of the media. Its symptomatic that it took the foreign
Time magazine to uncover the first photo of Justin Trudeau in blackface (using old-fashioned legwork to search through published sources like yearbooks!), and
another major newspaper printed an op-ed full of white supremacist talking points because there were not enough eyes in the review process (the career of
Margaret Wente, who recently retired from her job as an opinion columnist, is also worth studying).
Like in most countries, parties and the media respond by
focusing on simple messages about charismatic leaders: Justin Trudeau and the late Rob Ford are obvious, but the Ottawa media have decided to portray Jagmeet Singh the current leader of the NDP as a bumbler. (Jack Layton, the leader of the NDP from 2003 to 2011, also got a lot of attention until he died of cancer). These messages can be sold to a national audience, whereas the audience for research on the five or so candidates in each of 308 ridings is much smaller. In Austria, you can compare how the conservative People's Party is focusing on their leader Sebastian Kurz and a new turquoise colour to replace their old black branding.
In the last election Justin Trudeau used the standard Liberal playbook since the middle of the 20th century: throw out a lot of promises to green, social democratic, and anti-authoritarian voters and warn about the scary Conservatives, then ignore the promises which threatened anyone with power once he was elected. Three typical examples are breaking his pledge that the 2015 election would be the last under First Past the Post (choosing a new system might have been divisive), dealing with the government of Alberta's desire to run pipelines from the tar sands through other jurisdictions to the sea by rejecting the most dangerous one and approving the others (the previous government had a base in Alberta, and candidate Trudeau said on camera that the environmental assessment on all three would be restarted from scratch), and pressuring the attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould to allow a construction company in Quebec to make a plea deal which would have preserved its right to bid for federal contracts (she resigned and is now running as an independent). His biggest policy successes were legalizing pot smoking, negotiating a not-terrible revision of NAFTA with the current US administration, and a cabinet with plenty of women and racialized people (although several of the most prominent have quit the party or just become very quiet).
Alex Usher's take on his record in education policy is probably fair.
The Liberals and Conservatives don't have much to talk about this year: the Liberals have some surgically targeted tax cuts and spending and talk about "going forward not falling back" which does not quite name the current US president or previous Prime Minister, the Conservatives are publicly indignant about running the country on behalf of Quebec construction companies which is totally different from running it on behalf of the Alberta branch of multinational oil companies, I have no idea what the NDP are saying. The Greens have an ambitious program to start seriously dropping our use of fossil fuels (Canada has one of the highest per-capita emissions in the world, the Liberals support a small carbon tax, the Conservatives can't say what they would do to reduce emissions). Currently the Conservatives and Liberals have about equal support in national polls, but
what really matters is support within individual ridings with their individual balance between the parties, and nobody but the parties has money for polls like that. (Éric Grenier is Canada's Nate Silver
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/%C3%A9ric-grenier-1.2765555 ) And because Canada has a federal system, many policies will require negotiating with provinces, their different governments, and their regional rivalries (the Supreme Court of Canada just confirmed that
we do not actually have a right to transport goods from one province to another, despite that having been one of the key reasons for Confederation in 1867).
If you don't live in or want to move to Canada, the only change you are likely to notice is environmental policy: a Conservative majority would return to being actively obstructionist on international climate change treaties, a Liberal-Green or Liberal-NDP coalition government might start to bring our emissions down. A Conservative majority might be more pro-CCP but that is hard to say, the current US president does not like them and the Canadian Conservatives tend to identify with the American Republicans even though they are really a center-right party like the US Democrats (had he been born in Canada, Barack Obama would have been happy as a Conservative backbencher for a Toronto suburb).