In the most recent Canadian elections, the Liberal Party of Canada, one of the oldest and most dominant political parties in the world, lost badly and fell into irrelevance. That fall, however, may lead the country to adopt more democratic election reforms, and Canada could serve as a case study for how to do it.

The Liberal Party of Canada, the country’s oldest federally registered party, has endorsed a resolution calling for the legalization and regulation of marijuana in Canada. This would be roughly equivalent in the US to the Democratic national convention adopting a non-binding resolution in favor of marijuana legalization.

Talk about a body-blow to all of the Americans — including me and my wife Kate — who flocked to Canada to get married. Stephen Harper’s conservative government has declared all marriages from any countries where there is not marriage equality null-and-void.

Canadian PM Harper suggested that Canada intended to be an oil supplier to Asia, implying that even if the Keystone XL pipeline is stalled, Canada will see other routes to get tar sands oil to markets.

President Obama, asked about the Keystone XL pipeline in a local news interview, took full responsibility for making the decision. He related a full understanding of the public health risks, though he limited that to the immediate risks of a pipeline spill, rather than the extraction and burning of tar sands oil in general.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu is a scientist and a scholar. He surely knows the effects of production of tar sands oil on climate change. He knows that it takes a massive amount of energy to do the strip mining necessary to extract tar sands oil. He knows about the potential for environmental damage from a 1,700-mile pipeline to distribute that tar sands oil from the source in Alberta, Canada to refineries in Texas. He’s a smart man.

But he happens to work for an Administration that supports the tar sands pipeline.

Folks, right now, we need to support Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein, Wendell Berry Call for Civil Disobedience on Tar Sands. We need to stop the ‘Keystone XL Pipeline’ from Canada’s tar sands straight to Texas refineries…

The big topline story from the federal election yesterday in Canada is that the Conservatives won a solid majority of seats in parliament. Prime Minister Steven Harper will have extensive power to govern the country as his party desires. The Bloc Québécois was effectively wiped out at the national level. Last night it went from 49 seats in parliament to a mere 4, causing it to lose its official party status. Liberals lost over half their seats, falling from 77 to only 34. The NDP had overwhelmingly its best national showing ever, going from 37 seats to 102, making it the official opposition.

Today is election day in Canada, so to all our Canadian readers: go vote! To our non-Canadian readers, today’s election could be a truly historic event worth keeping an eye on.

With less than a week until the the federal elections in Canada, the left wing New Democratic Party is experiencing an almost unprecedented 11-point surge in the polls.