Reply #96: Parties in Canada

[HappyCynic]

Not sure how serious you are about an answer but here's here goes:

The major parties we (I'm Canadian) have are the following:
Conservatives
Liberal
NDP (New Democratic Party)
Bloc Quebecois
Green

Here's a brief description of each (with my opinion as to where they would be under the US system):
The Conservatives are the right wing establishment party. The US equivalent of the Conservatives nowadays would be the average Republican (and by that, I mean to the right of the moderate Republicans but left of the Tea Party Republicans) but Harper is closer to GBW and appears to want the party pushed further right.
The Liberal party is actually our centrist party. The US equivalent would be the moderate Republicans (if any still exist) and the Blue Dog Dems and some centrist Dems as well.
The NDP is our establishment left wing party. Its US equivalent would a mix of progressives, left wing Dems, and some centrist Dems (but to the left of the Blue Dogs).
The Bloc is a regional party that is in national politics due to their size and to historical reasons. In the last election, they suffered a severe reduction of votes but still managed to get 6% of the popular vote. This sounds horrible but it's enough for almost a quarter of the only province they ran in (23.4% of the Quebec vote). In the past, their vote share was much higher and given a multi-party system, you don't always (or even often) need 50% of the votes to win.
The Green Party is a relatively new party and they have been slowly increasing their influence, finally winning a single seat in the last election. They're generally speaking, the US equivalent of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

(In the above, when I refer to an "establishment party", I mean it in the sense that they've been one of the major political party for decades and are a major component of the political landscape.)

There are a lot of other parties but they're pretty much fringe groups and have no effective power nor any chance of it in the near future (< 20,000 votes out of 14,720,580 - 0.13% for the largest group).

The primarily three party system (as the Bloc only operates in one province and the Green Party is still a minor player) has resulted in a much more fluid political landscape and limits the "us vs them" mentality. (A bigger role in this may be a much reduced sense of political identity - people here usually say they vote for a specific party rather than identifying themselves as part of the party.)

One important thing to note is that the Canadian system has several advantages that gives new parties like the Green Party a chance. Any party that manages to achieve a specified percentage of the popular vote (I think it's 3%) qualifies for public funding. Our elections have much stricter spending limits (regardless of whether you accept public spending or raise the money on your own) so we generally don't have corporations pouring huge sums into campaigns. So, with the Green Party, they struggled through a few elections before they qualified for funding (they still didn't have a seat). Then, with the funding, they managed to keep the momentum up and gained a seat.

Side note: There's no real equivalent of the Presidential vote here. Each party leader runs in their district as normal. They're expected to win at least their home riding. If they lose their seat, on top of being extremely embarrassing, someone else in their party must give up their seat. It would be akin to having then-senator Obama running for his Senate seat as normal, and when the Democratic Party comes out on top, elevating him to President.