Unify Action - August 26, 2025


Canada vs. USA： Which Government is a Ticking TIME BOMB？


Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

181.73193

Word count

2,107

Sentence count

110

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
00:00:00.000 If you spend any amount of time watching American podcasts or TV in the conservative realm,
00:00:06.320 you're inevitably going to hear, oh, how amazing the United States is and how awesome their
00:00:11.100 constitution is and how, like, everything has just worked for 250 years. As Canadians,
00:00:16.820 that makes us look at them and go, but many of us don't even know how our governmental system
00:00:23.920 compares to theirs. So hold on to your socks. You're going through a crash course on Canadian
00:00:30.140 government. Let's go. All right, let's start with the basics here. So most democratic countries
00:00:37.880 have three basic branches of government. All right, so that is the legislative, the executive,
00:00:43.900 and the judicial. And let's run through their functions. So the legislative is where bills
00:00:47.820 start and they have the power to decide the direction of the country. They're also by far
00:00:52.820 the most powerful of the three branches. Then the executive decides how they're going to implement
00:00:58.660 those laws. So they basically execute the laws that are on the book. They can't create new laws
00:01:04.460 in essence. And then the judicial. The judicial branch's job is to ensure that the constitution 0.89
00:01:09.620 is always upheld. They basically make sure that justice is always administered. And this is by
00:01:14.340 far the weakest of the branches. That was the three branches of government. Now let's see how
00:01:21.020 they work out in Canada's political system. So in Canada, we aren't just a democracy. We are a
00:01:27.820 constitutional monarchy and a parliamentary democracy. So what that means is that we,
00:01:34.000 instead of just having a bare majority or mob rule like they have in a lot of democracies,
00:01:39.440 we have a constitution that must always be upheld and the laws that we implement must always stack
00:01:45.200 up and fall in good order against the constitution. In Canada, our legislative branch is the
00:01:50.840 Parliament, as you probably well know. And this consists of the House of Commons, or the Lower
00:01:54.760 House, and the Senate, which is the Upper House. Now, the Lower House, the House of Commons, is the
00:02:01.240 only spot where we have elected representative government in Canada. That's the only spot where
00:02:05.280 we elect our leaders. And the Upper House is not even elected at all. In the States, they have
00:02:10.680 both elected Lower and Upper House. Now, our Fathers of Confederation did this on purpose.
00:02:15.660 Their goal was to model the British system of government as much as they could.
00:02:20.360 Except in Britain, they have a House of Commons and then a House of Lords.
00:02:25.140 Now, a seat in the House of Lords is not something that you get elected or that you win.
00:02:30.180 It is an inherited right for a lot of nobility.
00:02:33.420 That has changed in Britain, but back when our Fathers of Confederation founded Canada,
00:02:37.740 the majority of the House of Lords was nobility that earned their title through basically nepotism.
00:02:43.240 and there were also other church leaders in the house of lords so that was not an elected branch
00:02:49.380 so our fathers of confederation because we didn't have aristocracy here in canada and no real
00:02:53.700 nobility they instead made our senate appointed by the governor general as it is today so that
00:03:00.100 gives the governor general quite a bit of power and because the senate is not elected they basically
00:03:05.980 limited the things that our senate can do that's why you don't hear about them often because they
00:03:11.140 aren't really the major part of the lawmaking. How our government works is that bills actually
00:03:15.720 can be put forth both in the lower and the upper house, but money bills always have to start in the
00:03:21.720 lower house with the elected branch. And then once they pass with the majority vote, both the upper
00:03:27.720 and the lower house, then those become law, and then they're signed into law by the governor
00:03:31.900 general. In the lower house, the leader of the party with the most seats, so the most members of
00:03:38.140 their party elected to the house of commons that leader becomes our prime minister and that person
00:03:43.260 is in effect the leader of the executive branch as well so here's where the executive and the
00:03:48.360 legislative branches collide a little bit and there's not as much separation of powers what
00:03:53.000 this separation of powers means is basically a clear division of power between the executive
00:03:57.880 and the legislative branch so the executive can't have power over lawmaking and the lawmaking can't
00:04:05.020 have too much power over how the law is executed. That's a separation of power that they have in
00:04:10.180 the United States, but in Canada we don't have as much of that. And also a word on Parliament. So
00:04:15.560 Parliament, if you know any French, parler means talk. So basically what they do in Parliament is
00:04:20.540 they talk out the bills, and the hope is that through that honest debate, truth will prevail
00:04:25.900 and the best bill will win. Now let's get to our executive branch. So the figurehead of the
00:04:31.660 executive branch in Canada is the governor general. Now they basically are the replacement for what
00:04:37.640 the British monarch would do in Canada and because we follow the British system in Britain the monarch
00:04:42.600 is basically the head of state and the commander-in-chief of the military. In Canada the
00:04:47.660 governor general has that same job. Now alongside that the governor general has a bunch of different
00:04:52.560 roles. So first of all they can appoint the prime minister so how that happens is once there's an
00:04:58.260 election, the governor general basically invites the leader of the party with the most votes to
00:05:04.140 form a government, and then they become the prime minister, and then the governor general swears
00:05:07.900 them in. The governor general also can swear in other high officials, like the senate, the supreme
00:05:13.760 court, and members of the privy council, among others. Alongside of those roles, the governor
00:05:20.680 general can control when parliament sits, they sign bills into law, they represent our military,
00:05:26.300 and they approve all executive actions of the cabinet. Now, all of this is on the advice of
00:05:33.420 the prime minister and the prime minister's cabinet. So the governor general really doesn't
00:05:38.640 have any power to do any of this on their own. They are bound to follow a lot of that advice in
00:05:42.940 all of these areas. And as a result, the governor general is really just a ceremonial role, not
00:05:48.520 really any power in it. And before we move on from the governor general, here's a fun fact.
00:05:52.540 Before 1952, the governor general was actually British, not Canadian. So all the governor
00:05:58.120 generals before then were British citizens, not Canadian. And this kind of drove a link between
00:06:02.180 Canada and Britain. But in 1952, that link was severed. And since then, we have had entirely
00:06:07.740 Canadian governor generals. Now, the real power in Canada doesn't lie with the governor general.
00:06:12.480 The real power lies with the prime minister and the prime minister's cabinet, because the prime
00:06:17.080 minister draws his cabinet members from the legislative usually. They aren't always MPs,
00:06:23.800 but that is usually how it happens. So these people are part of the legislative and the
00:06:29.880 executive, and they could decide what bills that they want to enact, and then they put those
00:06:34.880 through parliament before they can actually sign them into law. Yes, the prime minister has all
00:06:39.780 this power, but he can't simply wield it to his own liking. He has a wide range of advisors,
00:06:45.800 such as those in the Privy Council, but every one of his policies has to be in compliance with the
00:06:52.340 policies of the National Council of whatever party he represents. His personality or his experience
00:06:59.600 only affect how well he can carry out those policies. If he performs poorly, his leadership
00:07:05.920 can be called into question. There has been no change in policy between Mark Carney and Justin
00:07:12.060 Trudeau because the party itself has remained the same. Mark Carney ran on Justin Trudeau's
00:07:17.420 platform, the platform that was formulated for Justin Trudeau in the April 2025 election. That's
00:07:23.540 what makes it so incredulous that the liberals actually managed to pull off another election win
00:07:30.260 even though the party itself hasn't changed because the majority of the Canadian population
00:07:34.700 does not know the role that the party has in creating the policy. So really in effect,
00:07:39.960 the Prime Minister is just a puppet, a powerful figurehead, but bound to his party's council.
00:07:46.420 That was the executive branch. Now let's move on to the judicial. So despite our Fathers of
00:07:51.120 Confederation's hatred for the American Republican system, they actually modeled our Supreme Court
00:07:56.400 after the U.S. Supreme Court. So we have nine Supreme Court justices and one chief justice in
00:08:03.500 charge of it all. Now, different from the United States, these judges in Canada are appointed by
00:08:07.920 the governor general on the advice of the prime minister and cabinet so here's a funny separation
00:08:13.900 of powers for you so the prime minister basically decides who becomes a supreme court justice
00:08:19.240 and then the supreme court justices are supposed to make sure the prime minister stays in check
00:08:24.440 the supreme court is supposed to be the arbitrator of the biggest legal cases in canada they are
00:08:29.800 supposed to ensure that justice is always upheld and the constitution is also always upheld now
00:08:35.980 do they always do this? No, because they're appointed by the Prime Minister.
00:08:43.840 All right, so that was Canada's governmental system. Now that we know it, let's hold it up
00:08:48.180 against the United States. So the United States has the same three branches of government, but
00:08:53.600 because their political system is different, those three branches interplay a little differently.
00:08:58.900 So the United States is a constitutional republic, whilst Canada is a parliamentary democracy. So
00:09:04.500 what a republic means is that the rule of law in the constitution is upheld above everything else.
00:09:10.540 So a republic, in essence, grants as much power as possible and as much sovereignty as possible
00:09:16.580 to the American people while still preventing a mob rule. So like a majority rule where the
00:09:21.920 majority, even though they might be wrong, still gets their way. That's a mob rule, but a republic
00:09:26.700 is different in that they cannot violate the constitution. In Canada, the prime minister and
00:09:32.240 his cabinet are everything. The executive and the legislative branch intermingle far too much for
00:09:37.320 their powers to be considered separate, so all the power resides in the prime ministership.
00:09:41.540 But in the United States, the president is both the head of state and also the head of government.
00:09:46.720 He is the head of the executive branch, so he's in charge of executing the laws. He cannot have
00:09:53.000 any role whatsoever in creating the laws. Now what you might be saying is, well what about the
00:09:58.160 executive orders that we see the president issuing all the time. So these executive orders have to
00:10:04.440 be within the bounds of the law. If they are not, then the Supreme Court has full grounds to shut
00:10:10.700 them down and tell the president no. Now I'm going to be a little critical of my own government here
00:10:17.660 for a moment, and you could probably tell which political system I prefer, and I have good reason
00:10:23.080 for it. See, the Canadian parliamentary system does not have enough checks and balances in it
00:10:27.620 to prevent the rise of a dictator. The American system is the way it is because the Americans saw
00:10:34.320 the British monarch as being a dictator and having too much say in their lives. The Canadian system
00:10:39.480 doesn't have the checks and balances that they have in the United States, and it scares the tar
00:10:44.000 out of me to think of what could happen if a prime minister were to arise who doesn't care for our
00:10:48.740 constitution or our rights. On several occasions, we've seen Mark Carney take actions that are
00:10:54.780 totally in opposition to our constitution. For example, we've seen him cut the tax rate for
00:11:01.540 middle-class families by just only a small amount, but that was entirely in violation of our
00:11:08.260 constitution because he didn't take that through a parliamentary vote. So he violated our constitution
00:11:13.440 in the effort to look more appealing to middle-class voters. If he's done it there in that
00:11:19.980 one small area, then we can have good grounds to assume that he probably will do that again
00:11:25.000 in the future. All right, I hope you enjoyed that breakdown. Thanks so much for watching.
00:11:29.620 If you like the video, please hit the like button down below, comment, and subscribe.
00:11:33.360 It really helps the channel out. Thanks. Bye.