The main candidates will cram two debates into the six-week campaign. They will fly from coast to coast on chartered jetliners, alight from retrofitted “battle buses” — big, lumbering coaches that will take Mr. Scheer to rural events in Canada and Mr. Trudeau to campaign stops in urban Canada, and they may cross paths in suburban Toronto, Ottawa and Windsor, Ontario, prime political battlefields. They’ll speak at factories and day care centers. Then everybody will go home.

No long periods on the road. No moments when, as the 1984 and 1988 candidate Gary Hart used to say, a presidential candidate has to look at the phone book in his hotel room when he awakens to be sure what city he is in.

Canadian elections, of course, are different from American contests in more respects than just the time they consume, and some of those differences account for the variance in campaign length. As in Britain, election competitions here are among parties, not individuals, and the prime minister is the leader of a party that wins legislative majorities or who can cobble together a coalition to produce a parliamentary majority.

And though the competition for party leader can be bitter and divisive, there is no need for a parade of primaries or for the retail politics that chews up so much time in places like Iowa or New Hampshire.

Of course, concise campaigns come at a cost. A candidate like Mr. Delaney — or like Gov. Jimmy Carter or Senator Barack Obama, both of whom were polling low before campaigning in Iowa and winning the caucuses there — would have no chance north of the 49th parallel. Lesser known candidates have a shot in the United States; in Canada, it’s usually a battle of the elites.