same deal...

New Brunswick. (Quebec is officially monolingual French.)

I can't think of a single person that can speak it.

In Quebec if you cannot prove that you or your spouse was educated in English, in Canada, your children have to attend a French school. There are many areas of Northern Ontario, Manitoba, New Brunswick and PEI where French is the language spoken, it's not confined to Quebec.....That would suggest your comment is false.

Our official goverment business is done in English and French, but that is all that is mandated.

oh wait, they don't. FAIL.

Elementary schools teach french. for a small part of the school day. It is just basics.
High school may have one year where you have French but many don't now. French must be on all packaging and street signs as well as English...

Many Canadian towns have English schools and French immersion schools. My grand kids went to French Immmersion school and also there learned English....They are bilingual fluidly at 10 and 12...Then now moved to England and the older one is learning German. It is a very big asset to know languages. Jobs are more plentiful and your horizons widen..

My American brother holds this in contempt...He says it is UnAmerican...I think he is ignorant.

Personally I am to varying degrees fluent in English, Spanish, French and German. I am a native English (American) speaker. I was born in Germany, lived there for 2 years and studied German for a year in middle school. I took French for 2 years in high school and I have studied Spanish on my own for 20 years. I am most fluent in Spanish as I have the most opportunity to practice it living in Florida.

at a disability conference. One has Down syndrome, the other does not. I asked the one with Down's whether she had been given an opportunity to learn French. Her sister, a poised, perky television presenter, stunned me by admitting that she didn't know French, either!

It is better to have the people vote at different times. If the primary had been held several months ago in all the states at the same time, Rick Perry may have been the Repub nominee.

By extending the voting over a longer period of time, the flaws of individual candidates are revealed.

In this Repub primary battle, all of the candidates look worse and worse as time goes on.

In 2008, I thought both Hillary and Obama looked better and better. I thought the long primary season actually helped Obama get elected.

I hope the long primary season for the Repubs will help Obama get elected this time too!

Then there is that whole states having the right to hold their own elections.

Maybe we need a national primary day much like we have a national general election day.

The few small states don't necessarily decide, but the media plays such a large role in the process, they run with the early 'perceptions.'

The parties can, always, change their minds later; they do have conventions, including all the states, during the summer, wherein each state votes.

Y'all may ALWAYS 'butt in!'

They begin with one state and then move on to the next, the winning candidates collecting electors. The candidates that drop out are usually the ones that run out of money and/or supporters. Even if all the candidates drop out except for Romney, there will still be primaries held in all 50 states.

an aging not too smart washed up actor could become President or
a failed businessman with a history of alcoholism, cocaine, a DWI,
and going AWOL could become President either.


But one thing you should know is that the current republicans have
nothing to do w/ the older crop of republicans .... Lincoln, Ike Eisenhower,
Margaret Chase Smith, Chuck Percy, or even Nixon ..... they are
radicals who are working for the very rich and or right wing Christian
nut balls.

But have no fear w/ the current crop of people the republicans have all
but assured Obama's 2nd term.

That's the short answer.

I think the idea is these small, low population states, allow candidates to spend more one on one time with the voters. That way people can judge them up close and personal, instead of just watching them on a podium. It allows people to just walk up to a candidate, shake their hand and ask them a question. Candidates even get invited right into ordinary people's homes and can talk to a living room full of people.

May not seem very logical, but then politics isn't often about logic, but rather emotion.

Because our campaigns are so obscenely expensive, and getting worse all the time, thanks to the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, the front runner in the first few states to hold primaries or caucuses ends up getting the vast majority of financial support, and others are forced to drop out. If you are thinking that this is a crazy system, you are right. It is highly undemocratic, like so much else in this country. How I envy you being a Canadian citizen! I know your country isn't perfect, but you are so far ahead of us on so many things that make a country decent and civilized. I have even at times of total desperation had the fantasy that you would invade us and give us some sensible laws. Oh, well, a girl can dream...

This gives a relatively unknown person the chance to make himself known, to get his ideas on the table, while the contest is still undecided.

If the first primaries were CA and NY, then only the initially best known and best initially funded candidates would have a chance. Same outcome if all states had primaries on the same date. Big money would be even more of a factor than it is now.

My guess is that if the first primaries were CA and NY in 2008, our prez would be Hillary Clinton, or maybe John Edwards.



Feel free to butt into U.S. affairs. Our next Republican prez may annex Canada anyway, just for the oil sands, and the natural gas. Oh, and the beer.

That's a little more peculiar than New Hampshire's primary being first.

I guess in both cases tradition is the explanation.

She has nothing...zero...zilch to do with governing the country.

Or (crazy idea here) for the Canadian people to have some kind of say in who gets to be their "figurehead"?

Help this American here!

We're satisfied with things as they are.

Your Head of State being determined by sex in a Royal Palace 3000 miles away *is* much better than holding an election.

My mistake.

how much do the fool Presidents cost America?

who has NO INFLUENCE or say in how we govern our country. That's the pertinent fact here.

Occam's razor and all.

Even to us.

For the Republican Party. Or rather, it is more like most Republicans wish reality was.

The whole process is a circus. Caucuses shouldn’t even exist in this day and age. Who the heck has the time to caucus? Why should a handful of party activists determine the nominee? How can a candidate get almost the same amount of delegates from winning a primary in a large state by more than 100,000 votes as the candidate who won a caucus state by not even 1,500 votes? Go figure………

I have always disliked the caucus system. Nominations should be done by primaries only, where everyone has an equal opportunity to cast their vote.

Furthermore, the voting order is also ridiculous. Why should Iowa be first and why should the rest of the country give a flying fig about how they vote?

How about the apportioning of delegates and the Democrats' “super delegate” system?

My Canadian friend, we preach a lot about democracy in the USA, but we don’t practice it.

If you do a national primary, it would eliminate anyone who does not have huge money. Money is a big enough problem right now. I do think we need to get all the power out of Iowa and NH though. We should have rotating regional primaries.

I am married to a Canadian, actually got married last summer in Toronto. Sometimes I get so frustrated in the US that people are disconnected from reality in regards to politics etc. That changed, I can't believe the amount of things going on in Canada that the public does not seem to care about. I used to look at canada as this beacon to our north with health care. However, with Harper and conservatives in power you are quickly losing that. Just look around the city of Toronto, all this construction. Then you see who is backing it. It is all asian and middle eastern money. The entire province of Alberta will soon be owned by the Chinese energy companies (government). Canada needs to wake up before it is just bought out and becomes Beijing of the west. Now Harper is trying to defund CBC which is one of the few entities reporting these stories. Is there any outrage up there? Status quo?

Lastly, to the person below who said the Queen does not cost Canada money. Canada pays more person for the Queen then those in England.

I have a friend who is a prof up there, and we talk a lot. It just seems that it is even less mainstream then here with stories like this getting out.

oooo...and Lets Go Rangers

Conservative party what we did in the 1993 election. That year we almost voted them out of existence. They were left with 2 members of parliament.
Harper fooled Canadians...(the majority, who don't follow politics)...into believing he was a moderate conservative. I think it will be different in the next general election and he'll lose.

If we started with a large swing state like Missouri or Florida then the contests would be determined by big media buys and large paid organization, rather than "retail" politics.

Whoever raised the most money nationally before a single vote was cast would almost always win.

I am not saying that Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina are ideal, just explaining the reason for starting with small states.

in that it's something that would never happen in a parliamentary system. So determined were our Founding Fathers to distance themselves from all things British, however, that they rejected the tried-and-true system in favor of our current one, which they sort of pulled out of their, uh, powdered wigs.

Another major advantage to the parliamentary system over ours is that third parties, notably the NDP, are viable. Our system does not allow for coalitions and thus tends very strongly towards two parties. Example: When the Republican Party emerged during the runup to the Civil War (believe it or not, they were the good guys!), they completely supplanted the existing Whig party within a couple of election cycles.

Iowa doesn't even count. They use fucking corn kernels to cast votes in the straw polls.

I'd prefer if the entire clown car of GOP morons was still in the race so they could juts chew threw their money while feeding Obama an even greater wealth of ammunition. As it is, all he will need to do is put together video clips of their own statements and call it a commercial.

The NH constitution is also why the season starts earlier and earlier each cycle. They aren't about to change it. Personally I think the primaries should all be held on the same day, as are the general elections. I doubt it will ever happen, but it would shorten the bullshit season by a lot and level the field a bit. The only reason Mittens, Gingrinch (spelling intentional) and Mr. Frothy are in the race is because they have tons of money to burn. Ron Paul doesn't count - he's a nutjob filling in for Ross Perot this time around.

We didn't have James Madison and that crowd meeting in Philadelphia and setting up this system or anything close to it.

Iowa's a good example. A few decades back, the state Democratic Party was planning its state convention. Convention delegates would be chosen at Congressional District caucuses, the delegates to which would be chosen at county caucuses, and the delegates to those would be chosen at precinct caucuses. The party wanted to allow plenty of lead time between each step, so that the people chosen as delegates at one level could make plans to attend the next level. In addition, the date they'd initially selected for the state convention turned out to be a bad one, because that year there was some other event that was filling up a lot of Des Moines hotel rooms. Accordingly, they moved the state convention up to an earlier date. With that decision made, the need to allow time for each of multiple stages of the process pushed the earliest stage (the precinct caucuses) into January. There was no thought of becoming especially influential by being first in the nation. It just happened.

Nevertheless, on the national scale there has been at least some deliberate planning. More and more states were moving their primaries earlier and earlier, seeing the early positions as more influential. There was a concern that competitive pressures would lead to a system of Iowa one week, New Hampshire the next week, and everybody else within a few weeks thereafter. Such a compressed schedule was thought too favorable to candidates with large initial war chests. The parties added South Carolina and Nevada, comparatively small states that would be amenable to low-budget retail campaigning. The parties also made efforts to keep other states from going too early.

You're right that the early states are mostly white -- but every state in the U.S. is mostly white. One reason for selecting South Carolina was that, unlike Iowa or New Hampshire, it has a sizeable black population. There was also consideration for geographical balance, with the early states being in the Midwest, Northeast, South, and West.

I personally favor the rotating regional primary, but the political realities are that our current system will be very difficult to change.