Here's a "shake-up-your-assumptions" moment for you: If Barack Obama wins in November, and - here in Canada - Stephen Harper (our current Prime Minister) also wins in October, Americans will have a more left-wing government than their supposedly socialist neighbours to the north. For the first time since...? (Maybe ever?)

Picture it: Canadian celebrities threaten to emigrate en masse to California - the ones that aren't already settled in Hollywood, that is! Margaret Atwood declares that she's "moving to Illinois," while Dan Ackroyd announces that he's selling his winery in Niagara, pulling up stakes and retiring to one of his other fabulous homes stateside. Canadian soldiers flee across the border from Quebec to Vermont, seeking to avoid tours of duty in Afghanistan.

It's a strange shift, up here in the Great White North. I've watched my country slide hard to the right in recent years with puzzlement, worry, and - sometimes - anger. But more and more, I'm realizing, it's not just a strange shift, but an important one - and not just for Canadians. For anyone who's not so burnt out on US election coverage that they can't bear to read another political word, here's Part One of an Occasional Primer on the Canadian Election:

The Players:

Stephen Harper - Leader of the Conservative Party (aka the Tories), current Prime Minister

Stephen Harper's party is a recent creation - the amalgamation of the Progressive Conservative Party (a fiscally conservative, traditionalist party dating to the first days of the country's democracy) and the Canadian Alliance Party (formerly the Reform Party, a breakaway party created in the late 1980s by conservatives who felt the Progressive Conservatives were too liberal). In the mid-90s, the once-powerful PCs were utterly crushed by the Liberals (long story); in their wake, the Reformists gained strength in the Prairies (and especially their Alberta power base) using a combination of libertarianism and "family values"*, along with a good dose of xenophobia. Reform, though, could never break into more multi-culti, progressively-minded Ontario - and, run by unilingual Albertans, couldn't get near the Quebec vote, even after re-tooling themselves as the Canadian Alliance.

(It's worth noting here that it's numerically impossible to form a government in Canada without substantial support in Ontario/Quebec - much to the resentment of other regions...)

Finally, tired of their humiliating status as Parliament's smallest party, a group of the remaining Progressive Conservatives (the move wasn't without vehement opposition from socially progressive fiscal conservatives, so-called Red Tories) finally tossed their lot in with the Canadian Alliance, and the Conservative Party of Canada was born. It wasn't a true merger, though - essentially the Reformers acquired the PC brand (read: acceptability in Ontario and maybe even Quebec) without putting any moderate Red Tories anywhere near the levers of power. Finally gaining some traction outside of their regional base, the Conservatives won a minority government in the 2006 election.

As for Harper himself? He's known as a strong leader, decisive and determined, who rules his party with iron discipline. (This discipline is the key to his success: without it, the more extreme elements in his flock tend to blurt things out about AIDS being God's punishment for the gays, Aboriginal people being lazy drunks, and the like.) He has a combative style and little tolerance for the media. His fans say he's what real leadership looks like; his detractors (myself among them) think he has some worrying authoritarian tendencies.

Stephane Dion - Leader of the Liberal Party (aka the Grits), current Leader of the Official Opposition

Ah, the once-mighty Liberal Party. The party that has spent the most time in power over Canadian history, the self-styled "natural governing party of Canada." From 1993 to the early 2000s the Liberals enjoyed a string of completely dominant majority governments. They balanced the country's books, dabbled in socialist-lite policies like universal daycare, told George W. Bush to go fuck himself in Iraq. They catered to all sides with a potent mix of fiscal responsibility, commitment to the military (via the vehicles of peacekeeping and NATO) and social progressiveness - it was under their watch that Canada saw new gun control restrictions, same-sex marriage, and decriminalized marijuana. They got the immigrant vote, the upper-middle-class Ontario vote, most of the Quebec vote. They also got a little high on themselves, and were levelled in 2006 after months of scandal: shady deals, envelopes full of cash, mafia ties, and large sums of federal money re-directed to private companies in exchange for donations to the Liberal Party.

Even after a complete house-cleaning, the Liberals are still reeling. Stephane Dion - the man chosen to right the ship - is, by most reports, a brilliant academic. But he has the charisma of a pile of wet potato peels, he has difficulty communicating (in English or French), and his party is far from united behind him. (He won the leadership as a default third-place choice, after two more powerful candidates split the vote.)

Even with all that, the Liberals remain a solid second-place in the polls. Old habits die hard, after all - millions of Canadians have been voting Liberal for generations.

Jack Layton - Leader of the New Democratic Party

The New Democrats have been Canada's third party (and self-styled "conscience") since the days of Woodstock and Kent State. Thanks to the (generally quite socially progressive) separatist presence in Quebec, they've never been able to get any traction there - and in the rest of the country, the politically-amorphous Liberals have consistently stolen the bulk of the left-wing vote. (While also, until recent years, swiping the bulk of the right-wing vote. Neat trick!) Several times, though, the NDP have held the balance of power during a minority government, giving them rare leverage to force the issues that matter to them to the fore.

In the past few years, Jack Layton - He of the Fabulous Moustache - has helped the party make big strides. He has forced the media to pay attention to him, landed the party's first-ever Member of Parliament from Quebec, and made his name on issues from the environment to American renditions of Canadian citizens. The knock on Jack, though, is that he's a big-city sophisticate - a cocktail party Socialist, if you will - who has little (or, uh, nothing) in common with the party's one-time base: farmers and unionized blue-collar workers.

Gilles Duceppe - Leader of the Bloc Quebecois

The Bloc stormed onto the scene in the 90s - at one point, following the destruction of the PCs but before the rise of Reform, even serving as Official Opposition. That's an impressive accomplishment for a one-issue party that only runs candidates in Quebec, but hey - that's Canadian electoral geography for you.

The sovereigntist (or separatist) movement in Quebec is in a bit of an identity crisis these days (thank God), as its proponents are caught between their left-wing, academic origins, and the pragmatic reality that a more right-wing populism (with a light coating of xenophobia) is what will get them the big numbers these days. The provincial wing of the party - the Parti Quebecois - is in total disarray, having slipped to 3rd place in the most recent provincial election.

But the Bloc Quebecois is still a force to be reckoned with - for one thing, because Quebecers don't necessarily view a vote for the Bloc as a vote for independence. Only the provincial wing can call a referendum and make a bid for secession, so many Quebecois vote Bloc simply because they know it's one way to ensure that their interests are well represented in Ottawa.

Elizabeth May - Leader of the Green Party

The Greens were, until recently, a non-factor in Canadian politics - but they've been shaking things up this election season. They recently acquired their first-ever Member of Parliament - a Liberal who "crossed the floor", rather than someone who was actually elected as a Green. They poll around 10% nationwide, but never manage enough concentrated support to win seats. This year, though, with the Liberals in such a mess, they could pick up some votes there - and they have disaffected NDP voters in their sights, too.

Knowing the threat the Greens pose, Jack Layton recently teamed up with Stephen Harper to try to keep May out of the televised leaders' debates, arguing that the Greens didn't have any duly elected Members (the vague, unofficial standard for participating). May - sadly, playing the sexism card, when it was clearly pragmatic politics at work on Layton's part - managed to raise enough ruckus that Harper and Layton were forced to back down. Round One goes to you, Green Party.

Stay tuned for more exciting Canadian politics fun!

*Personally I find these two notions incompatible - logically, if you believe that government has minimal business in its citizens' lives, you should also believe that it has no business trying to stamp homosexuality out of society, too - but hey. It seems that plenty of people can handle the doublethink of simultaneously supporting a party that wants to radically downsize government's role in our daily lives, while also proposing (at one point, and I swear I'm not making this up) that immigrants ought to be branded for easy identification.