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149 years without a revolution

It’s a bit tricky to definitively rank the world’s oldest continuously operating governments. But Canada — tiny, young, unassuming Canada — is easily in the top 10, noted Peter Loewen, an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto. Every other country in the G20 save for the United States and the U.K. has had to rejig their government at least once in the last 150 years, sometimes violently. France, for one, drew up an entirely new republic as recently as 1958. It’s admittedly easier to keep a country stable when it’s rich and has secure borders, but parliament-watchers like Loewen urge Canadians to appreciate the staying power of the current system. Just like an Ikea dresser, that European-style proportional representation system might look good now, but it’s a whole different story if the handles break off in a few years.

New ideas aren’t shut out — if they’re good and popular, they’re just stolen

Tommy Douglas is widely revered as the father of socialized healthcare in Canada. But of course, it wasn’t a Prime Minister Douglas who ushered in the change, it was a bunch of savvy Liberals and Tories who stole his idea because they could see which way the wind was blowing. More recently — as the satirical website The Syrup Traphas pointed out — the Liberals won their majority government in 2015 with a platform eerily similar to that of the 2008 Green Party. A critique of FPTP is that it essentially hands the government to two parties, and shuts out alternative voices. But new ideas do find their way onto Parliament Hill, just in a skulduggerous way that is obviously quite frustrating to political upstarts: You have to run a quixotic Bernie Sanders-style campaign and, if you get enough votes and shake up enough ridings, your best ideas will simply be co-opted by faceless “big tent” competitors. “That’s the joy of brokerage under FPTP,” Ottawa-based Westminster expert Philippe Lagassé said. “New and fringe ideas aren’t ignored. They’re co-opted based on how good and potentially popular they are.”