The absolute and rigid loyalty of Americans to their respective political parties, whether Republican or Democrat is a mystery to me. It’s just one of those things that makes Canadians different from Americans. Most Canadians will admit to voting left at times, other times for the right and most often safely down the middle depending on who is touting the best middle ground platform. We don’t actually vote for our Prime Minister but instead have to consider each party’s respective stand on issues we care about such as health care, the economy or perhaps the environment. Then, we vote for the individual in our riding who represents the party or issues we support and hope that he or she gets the majority of “seats” to carry the election. The leader of that chosen party gets to be head honcho (Prime Minister) and run the country on our behalf.

With the exception of my ninety-year-old father who in seventy-two years of voting has never cast a single vote for anyone other than a Conservative (except for that one time he voted for a pseudo-Conservative running as Reform party candidate), Canadians are fairly open-minded and flexible about who we vote for. We take the time to understand the issues and while many of us have specific political leanings, unlike Americans, we’re not locked in to a party ideology that may have shifted from what we believe in. Most of us can claim at least one vote for each of the three major parties over the years.

It boggles my mind how intelligent, educated people in the United States can support someone like Donald Trump simply because he’s Republican. Would it kill these people to vote Democrat rather than have a egomaniacal misogynistic liar running their country? Hillary comes with more than her fair share of baggage too and it baffles me how these two people got short-listed in a country of nearly four hundred million people. Was everyone drinking beer and watching football when they should have been following the lead-up to voting? It seems to me that if the Republicans ran a goat, then life-long Republican voters would elect said goat so long as it was painted red. I would like to think that the current circus playing out for the American presidency south of the border couldn’t happen in Canada but Toronto once had a certain mayor that precludes us being smug.

They said Brexit would never happen in Britain and it did. The pollsters are increasingly wrong but the horse-race for the Presidency is getting scarier and scarier. And we’re just the neighbours, not the people who have to live in the United States post-November 4th. Let’s keep our fingers crossed and hope it’s not a total disaster. Either way, whether it’s red or blue, it’s the people’s choice, for better or worse. That’s what democracy is all about. Buckle up for the shock waves across that invisible wall. And while we’re at it, paint it black.

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