With apologies to my non-Canadian readers this time I am going to do a deep dive into Canada's electoral system. Just a few days ago we had an election where it turned out we dodged a bullet by not allowing the Conservative Party of Canada, Canada's answer to Donald Trump and the Republicans, to form the government. This came at the expense of losing representation in Parliament of the left, which is a serious loss for Canadian society in my opinion, and to make matters worse it is, as I show below, an artifact of the electoral system.

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What if the different political parties were represented in Parliament in proportion to the number of votes they got? This is called proportional representation. It implies that everyone's vote has exactly the same weight. This is only fair, which is why it is also called fair voting. Fair Vote Canada is a national organization devoted to promoting the idea of fair voting. They have a lot of information which you may find interesting.

More specifically we can ask how many seats each party would have ended up having if the number of seats was proportional to the number of votes.

The United States are attacking their neighbours and allies to the north and to the south with costly tariffs on their exports. This hits especially hard because the US is by far the two nations' main trading partner.

Donald Trump has at various times offered different justifications for the punitive tariffs:

• To encourage Canada to give up its sovereignty and become the 51st state;

• To disadvantage Canadian exports and make American producers great again;

• To force Canada and especially Mexico to stop the flow of drugs at the border, particularly fentanyl.