The endless campaign trail

Yesterday evening saw the first debate for the upcoming Toronto mayoral election.  Incumbent Rob Ford squared off against four of his main rivals, and by all accounts did quite well.  Ford's new BFF, Jimmy Kimmel, tweeted in amazement that the sweaty, oafish Ford "is JFK compared to some of these candidates".

Guess when the election is.  October 27th!  That's right -- seven months from now.  Torontonians, and the rest of us covered by that city's TV stations, have so much to look forward to.  There could be over a hundred candidates' debates before election day, though mercifully, only a few of them will make it onto the airwaves.

For senior levels of government in Canada, the setting of election dates follows the UK practice.  A government has a maximum term in office -- generally five years -- but the actual timing of the elections is chosen by the government of the day.  Federal and Provincial election campaigns tend to be relatively short. Municipal elections, in contrast, have fixed election dates, which encourages the kind of ludicrously long campaign season that's now underway in Toronto -- and in other municipalities, of course, but none of them has Rob Ford to contend with, so the interest level is much lower.

American commentators are routinely amazed that incumbent politicians in Canada and the UK get to choose when they face the electorate.  However, the system of fixed election dates and relatively short terms in office, as seen in the United States, has downsides of its own.  It's always campaign season, and when the major parties are particularly polarized, as they are at present, it becomes all but impossible to get any actual governing done.  In Toronto, where Ford is a uniquely polarizing figure, the same is true.  Effective governance became all but impossible by the middle of last year, as the scandals surrounding the mayor intensified, and it's impossible to imagine anything other than a ghastly political knife fight in the city until after election date.

It's way too late for change now, of course, but it would surely make sense to disallow candidates from campaigning until after Labour Day.  Or would it?  The candidates would find ways around any such rules, and a ban on early campaigning would surely give a clear advantage to the incumbent, given his higher public profile.

So,  is the UK-derived system of flexible election dates preferable? It certainly means the official campaigns are shorter, but that doesn't prevent the parties from out-of-season mudslinging.  Right now the federal Tories are running a vicious series of TV spots suggesting that Liberal leader Justin Trudeau is "in way over his head".

Even worse -- because the voters are paying for them -- are the ostensibly public service-oriented ads that are in truth nakedly political.  The federal government is constantly touting its so-called "economic action plan", featuring a bar of the national anthem turned into an annoying jingle.  The Ontario government's at it too, as the incumbent Liberals set themselves up for a possible spring election.  There's an endlessly repeated spot bragging about all the infrastructure projects currently underway across the Province, which presumably includes the totally unnecessary roundabout being built at horrifying expense not far from here.

Even more ludicrously, there are ads promoting local produce, reviving the decades-old slogan, "good things grow in Ontario".  Not right now they don't, with the ground only starting to reappear after one of the coldest and snowiest winters anyone can recall.

In the end, I'm agnostic about whether we're better off with fixed or flexible election dates.  It wouldn't really matter anyway, if we had more honourable politicians, but who am I trying to kid?