What do you get the Country that has everything? A new Prime Minister?

All this talk of Barack and John and the American election is interesting enough but now we have a REAL political battle to think about. Oh yes folks, on the 14th October, Canada will go to the polls.

I have to confess to being less than clear on the rules for calling a Canadian election; it may be something to do with the fact that there is a minority government in Ottawa, or maybe it's based on phases of the moon, the mating schedule of the loon, Jack Layton's tea leaves or even Stephen Harper's crystal balls.

Regardless, it's coming and how quick! I feel like the U.S. race has been going on since I was about 15 but, with the nominations and then the actual campaign, it's actually been about a year. Canada, on the other hand, only needs a month! In America, the electorate are wooed in a leisurely courtship full of sweet economic promises, emotional rhetoric, tearful party workers and God. Up here, we have been thrown into a frenetic orgy of what I can only really describe as political fetishness that is building up to a huge spurt of an election.

I really thought the Canadian campaigns would be dull but they are anything but! Who cares about the first African-American or the oldest American president in history when you have Canadians who talk about things like the 'green shift', bringing a kitchen table into the cabinet room and home retrofits, who hold press conferences on planes that aren't actually going anywhere, who arrest people for being too nice to the prime minister, who help the smaller parties by giving them the kind of publicity that Paris Hilton would kiss a homeless man for.

This is great stuff, and we're only in week one!