David Alex Lamb

There’s a federal election in Canada on Monday, April 28, 2025. Back on January 6, when Justin Trudeau announced his eventual resignation as Prime Minister, my American-born wife asked me to explain how transitions of power worked in Canada. We quickly realized thing were more complicated and, to an American, confusing, than I initially thought. I wrote up some explanations, to which she responded “my head hurts!” So here I am again, trying to explain things to Americans who might know little or nothing about civics in Canada.

If you want a conventional explanation there are plenty of sites that lack my feeble attempts at humour:

• The Elections Canada website is the ultimate source, by the people who actually run the elections. It’s bilingual, so your first choice is the English or the French version.
• Wikipedia explains things in its usual mostly coherent and boring style, with links to a lot of related stuff.

Selecting a Prime Minister

The Prime Minister (PM) is the Head of Government, which is sort of like a combination of the top people in the American Executive branch (president, vice president, and cabinet members) and a subset of the legislative branch (Congress, specifically the House of Representatives), because that’s the way parliamentary systems based on the British model work. The prime minister and cabinet members in Canada are members of parliament (the House of Commons) as well as having executive responsibilities.

The American president is both head of state and somewhat equivalent to a head of government in the British sense. Other countries generally completely separate the head of state and head of government. In Britain, at the moment the head of state is King Charles, and the head of government (prime minister) is Keir Starmer of the Labour party. In many other countries the two positions are president and prime minister.

Canadians don’t directly elect a prime minister, much as they might want to. He or she is appointed by the Governor General (GG) to whom the Head of State, the current monarch of Canada (currently always the same as the monarch of England) delegates their power to select a Prime Minister. The whole system has a very long history, evolving over hundreds of years from the time when there were (nearly) absolute monarchs deriving their legitimacy (such as it was) from the divine right of kings.

The Governor General selects a new prime minister within a few days after one of two things happens:

• An election is held.
• The governing party selects a new leader.

The GG always picks the leader of the plurality party: the one with the most seats in the House of Commons in Parliament (I don’t know what happens if there is a tie). Theoretically, he or she can pick anybody, but at the federal level, since the constitutional crisis of 1926 (the King-Byng Affair), it’s always been the leader of the plurality party. There was a minor hiccup in Ontario a few decades ago but that’s irrelevant at the moment.

So, on March 9, Mark Carney was selected as leader of the then-governing Liberal Party. He did not become prime minister immediately; that happened on March 14, when Mary Simon, the current Governor General, called on him to form a government. In the meantime, Justin Trudeau (or, Trudeau II, since his father was also PM) was still prime minister.

As of this writing, Carney does not have a seat in the Commons (see above: the GG can pick anyone) and isn’t guaranteed to win one in the election. But he’s still prime minister, if the Liberals win, until he resigns in embarrassment and his party selects yet another leader. He just can’t participate in debates in Parliament – he has to watch from the gallery overlooking the House of Commons.

The Election Campaign

The Governor General decides when there will be an election, more or less, but there are constraints. The Constitution calls for an election at least every 5 years, but the GG can call one earlier. There’s a “fixed election date” law, but it’s a law, not a constitutional requirement, and the GG can ignore it. And she just did, since our next fixed election date was supposed to be October 27, 2025, but she had an excellent excuse: the Prime Minister requested one. The GG pretty much always does what the PM asks (about which, more in a hypothetical future post).

Unlike the American system, in theory people don’t obviously campaign constantly, starting immediately after the previous election. You can’t campaign until the Governor General “drops the writ” (a popular but completely inaccurate phrase). What happens is:

• On the advice of the Prime Minister, the Governor General issues a proclamation of an election date (what people generally mean when they say the GG “drops the writ”), which must take place 36-50 days after the proclamation. That’s now April 28.
• Elections Canada issues the actual writs, plural, one to the returning officer of each riding (our equivalent of an American congressional district). I’m not going to look up how returning officers are selected.
• There are limits on how much political parties, and even third parties, can spend on campaigning. In theory there isn’t any of this Citizens United, billionares-have-the-right-to-buy-elections stuff; I’m sure rich people have ways around this, but maybe I’m too cynical in my old age (70.5 and counting).

But, really, every obnoxious speech in Question Period should probably be considered to be campaigning, as well as every interview with a party leader, and every political editorial in a newspaper, and those can happen at any time.

How Voting Works

You get to vote if you are a citizen and Elections Canada knows who you are. Elections Canada is an independent agency that is not (or at least less) susceptible to political pressure. They set riding boundaries (subject to constitutional constraints) and run the actual elections. Gerrymandering and voter suppression are really hard in Canada.

They send you a card via snail mail; you take it to your polling station, show it and one piece of government-issued ID, and you can vote. You can claim the right to vote at the polling place, but I’ve never needed to learn that part of the process.

By American standards the process is very fast! You walk into an almost-empty school gym or apartment lobby, present your elector card (see above), get handed a ballot with maybe six names, walk over to a table with a cardboard shield for privacy, carefully make an X with a pencil, and go back to hand your ballot to someone who puts it in a box. When we had our first election after my wife and I moved to Kingston, she thought I must have forgotten my ID or something when I came home within about fifteen minutes. Cities larger than my hometown, Kingston, might have longer waiting lines in some ridings, but I have never heard of multi-hour lineups like in many voter-suppressed American congressional districts. Toronto residents: is it different where you are?

Or, you could loudly Decline Your Ballot, handing it back to the bewildered person who expects to collect ballots normally. This sort of means “none of the above” and is a form of protest a little more brazen than spoiling your ballot; they have to count and report how many people do this. I sometimes dream of None of The Above being able to win, meaning “try again with a different bunch of choices; none of these dudes can run again for 5 years.” My dear departed American father-in-law would have loved to have this option.

Who Do We Vote For

Yes, I know, that whole thing about the Excited States of America electing dogcatchers is a joke other countries make. But, depending on the state, they elect sheriffs, judges, district attorneys, and a bunch of other officers. In Canada, the equivalents are all appointed. All we vote for are members of the federal and provincial parliaments, mayors, city councillors, and members of school boards – the latter of whom have a lot less power than in the USA. In Ontario, school funding is set by, and mostly supplied by, the province, so there is less of an issue of disparity between rich and poor districts.

Is this better or worse? There are trade-offs. In Canada the people don’t have a say in who takes on these roles that can have a profound effect on their lives. On the other hand, those office-holders don’t have to play politics to stay in their jobs, which means they don’t have to bow to political pressure. If they’re dedicated to their jobs, and not corrupted by other factors, they can make unpopular decisions that might actually be the right thing to do.

But they might not.

More Confusion Deferred

There is a lot more Americans probably don’t know about Canadian civics, and I might write about them someday. For example,

• How Parliament works, particularly how the Executive (the Cabinet) overlaps with the Legislature (the Commons and Senate).
• What the PM’s actual powers are (probably too many).
• Political parties (by American standards, most of us are left-wing crazies, even, at times, some people in the most right-wing parties).
• Minority governments.
• Anything my foreign friends ask about when they read this.

For Potential Immigrants

Some of my American friends are seriously considering moving to Canada because of What Is Going On Right Now. Getting to the point of citizenship and ability to elect people is beyond the scope of this post. What is relevant: If you’re 55 or over, you no longer need to pass a civics test to become a citizen. Yay! Sorry to all of you under 55.

My website and social media bios identify me as “scholar, writer, computer geek.” Now that I’m slowly becoming more active on BlueSky (https://bsky.app/profile/davidalexlamb.bsky.social) and Mastodon (@davidalexlamb@universeodon.com), I figured I should say a bit more about what all of that means, so people have enough information to decide if they want to follow me.

Computer geek is pretty straightforward. I’ve been programming computers (both professionally and for fun) since the fall of 1970 and have advanced degrees in Computer Science, including the PhD that got me a job as a professor. I play video games as one of my major recreational activities.

Scholar used to be straightforward: it goes with the “publish or perish” side of being an academic. If you look for things I’ve written, you’ll find professional publications from my time as a professor: a textbook and relatively few journal papers (hence my retirement at the end of 2023 at a lower rank than Full Professor). I doubt I’ll ever publish in a journal again. Am I still a scholar?

Writer requires more thought. I’ve definitely written things, but you won’t find much recently except blog posts. I’ve been writing fiction since 2006, when I wanted something to exercise my brain while on disability leave for chronic depression. It’s all in the form of partly-completed NaNoWriMo projects, plus a couple of rejected short stories. So you won’t find any of my fiction. Am I still a writer?

Mary Robinette Kowal says “you’re a writer if you write” even if you aren’t published. She discourages her students from calling themselves “beginning writers” or even “unpublished writers.” J. Michael Strazynski, on the other hand, wouldn’t have considered me one, even at the height of my professional career; he apparently has said “You’re not a writer if you write; you’re a writer if it’s the only thing you can do.” So, deciding whether I am or have ever been a writer depends on where in that spectrum you sit.

The reason I list both scholar and writer in my bio is that I am still exercising my scholarly skills, and applying them to writing. Over the years I’ve written several blog posts that amount to short scholarly essays. When I learn enough about something, I

• find a lot of sources on the subject and read them;
• make notes on what I have read;
• organize them into a survey on the topic;
• include links to all my sources so you can read them yourself and decide if my summary is reasonable; and
• try to provide some original insight to the topic (which is what makes it “original research” rather than “a list of stuff”).

These are pretty much the instructions I always gave my students when assigning a term paper. So I’m still a scholar (aside from not having to go through peer review, which is a whole complicated Thing to evaluate).

You can find most of these on my website, such as (in reverse chronological order):

• What I’ve Learned About Mastodon This Month
• Unifying Three Story Structures
• First Acts, Chapters, Pages, and Lines
• Character Wounds and Lies
• Writing Engaging Characters
• What is a Bridging Conflict?
• Two posts about writing mysteries.
• Quirks for Characters

There may be others, and they’ll be easier to find when I get tag search implemented so you can look for “survey.” There are other posts about writing, but I don’t count them as scholarly unless they summarize and link to sources; opinion pieces don’t count.

Scholar, writer, computer geek: that’s me. I hope you find my blogs and social media posts worth reading.

This past Monday was Remembrance Day in Canada, November 11, where we remember the service of our military and especially those who died during that service. Many cities have cenotaphs or war memorials where the local citizens gather for special ceremonies, and some will put aside the thoughts that arise on such a day until the following year.

In Ontario, though, there is a constant reminder that you can spot on any day you travel along Canada’s superhighway, the 401 (“Macdonald–Cartier Freeway,” after two of our country’s founders), from Exit 362, Keele Street in Toronto, to Exit 526, Glenn Miller Road at Trenton. Every so often you might catch a glimpse of a blue sign bearing a poppy and the text “Highway of Heroes / Autoroute des Héros,” and you might wonder why that stretch of road, and no other, might get such a designation.

Exit 526 is the closest point on the 401 to Canada Forces Base Trenton, which has what amounts to a military international airport. Exit 375 is where you turn off the superhighway (16 lanes at that point) to get to the Centre of Forensic Sciences in Toronto. It is the route taken by convoys conveying fallen Canadian solders in the last journey of their military service.

Most memorials are created by politicians, but this one (aside from its official naming) was created by the people. Ever since 2002, ordinary citizens, many with no connection to the military, would line every single overpass on that route (or its older, shorter version) to mourn and honour the dead.

Canada has a small military, but every since the battle of Vimy Ridge in 1917, it has “punched above its weight” in both armed conflicts and peacekeeping missions. When I was a teenager, it had provided 10% of all U.N peacekeeping forces to that point, in part because former prime minister Lester Pearson had been instrumental in creating peacekeeping in the first place. We might be reluctant war-fighters, but our troops do it bravely and well.

Canada’s role in Afghanistan started in October 2001, when, secretly, our elite special ops team, Joint Task Force 2, sent its snipers to aid our American allies. Regular troops joined them in January 2002, took on a larger and more dangerous role in Kandahar in 2006, and finally withdrew in 2014.

During its time in Afghanistan, Canada had the highest per-capita rate of casualties of all coalition members, and the third-highest absolute number of deaths. It wasn’t our war, and after the American withdrawal in 2023, when the Taliban took over again within about a week, the whole thing had proved pretty much pointless. But no matter how futile the war, and how intense our feelings about conflict and the people who start it, it is fitting to remember those who died serving their country with the ultimate sacrifice.

The Highway of Heroes is a quietly Canadian way to do it.

True patriot love, There was never more. — The Trews, Highway of Heroes

Once upon a time I used to teach software development (at the 3^rd year through grad levels), and one of the subjects I taught was “system analysis.” Towards the end of September 2023 I started playing phone games for the first time, and it occurred to me that one subset I liked a lot would serve as a good example – not in enough depth to count as a “case study” in the pedagogical sense, but complex enough to expand students’ thinking about systems. I think it’s also an interesting example even for people who never expect to analyze systems professionally.

The definition of “system” I used when I was a Computing professor was “a collection of parts, with relationships among them, interacting with an environment across an interface.” The parts and relationships can be anything, not necessarily related to software or computers. The solar system is (duh) a system – the parts are celestial objects, and primary relationships include orbital paths and gravitational effects. The US government is a system, usually described as consisting of three parts: judicial, legislative, and executive (though, as you can imagine, there are lots more parts and relationships when you delve into more detail).

Software (Mostly) Components

So, when you start delving into phone games on an Android device, a few parts are fairly obvious. As for purely software parts, you use Google Play to download your game, and the game itself to play. Most games I looked at involve multiplayer aspects, and that requires “servers” – collections of computers running software that manages whatever interactions you have with other people. “Client/server architecture” is a big part of how the Internet works.

Those servers are a critical part of keeping a multiplayer game working, and the company that runs them needs money to keep them going; in all likelihood they see the aspects of the game that require servers as a way to generate income. A lot of phone games are free-to-play (sort of; some seem to be “pay to win”), and the money thus can’t come from paying a one-time fee as happens with desktop and console games (well, one time per update or down-loadable content (DLC)). So this introduces more parts, all related to money. This involves two “subsystems” – other systems that are parts of the overall “main” system. The two main money-acquisition mechanisms are ads and in-game purchases.

The “ad server” subsystem selects videos to play. At least, that’s what it looks like from the gamer’s perspective. Behind the scenes, there is infrastructure taking care of several other aspects of getting money to those who run the servers:

• Google Play, which gets used if you click “install” on the ad.
• In many cases, you get in-game rewards when you play the full ad (often 30 seconds’ worth), so the ad server has to feed information back into the game. This means communication isn’t a one-way street; it requires some form of “communication protocol” – a set of rules about what information gets passed back and forth.
• A payment infrastructure, that gets money from the gamer to those who run the servers. This requires a mechanism to deal with money transfer, so there are relationships (and more communication protocols) with banks or other online payment systems.
• Some means of picking which ads to serve, which may involve some means of associating with each game some information about what kinds of ads make sense, and yet another protocol between games and the ad server.

In-game purchases are simpler, and involve their own protocols with some of the same elements as ad servers. The primary protocol is a means of communicating to the payment server (often Google Pay, for Android games), which, completely separate from the game (so you don’t have to give out your financial information to a lot of companies you don’t really know you can trust), has its own protocols for letting you confirm that you approve the purchase and letting the game know the purchase is complete.

Non-Software Components

You could call everything above “the system” and be done with your analysis – and a lot of software professionals might do that. But there is always an issue of where to draw the boundary between the system and the environment. For example, where does the solar system “end”? The Oort cloud? The heliopause? The systems analyst has to make a choice; defining the boundary depends on what purpose you intend for your model of what is going on.

The word “model” is critical. There is a “fundamental law of data modeling:” the only completely accurate model of the real world is the world itself. Because of limitations of the human brain, a model always leaves some things out.

For the gamer, there is at least one more component: the financial institutions in which you store the money you use to pay for in-game purchases. Those are not just money-transfer subsystems. The way in-game purchases work, you’re likely to make a large number of small purchases in a fairly short amount of time, and the financial institutions’ fraud detection systems may flag your account as suspicious and suspend payments (guess how I know). This requires you to interact with the financial institution to (a) unlock your account and (b) prevent it from being locked again in the future. At this point in the development of artificial intelligence, that’s likely to involve talking to human beings, who are thus also part of “the system.”

Finally (at least, for the purposes of this particular essay), there is the very complex subsystem that works to encourage gamers to pay for in-game purchases: the collection of marketing and psychology experts, and their huge body of research and practice, about what motivates people to spend money, and what that “subsystem” tells the game developers (those who design and construct the software) to include in gameplay. A “good” free-to-play game gives you an enjoyable experience, but offers enticements that, for example, speed up slow activities, such as building new facilities in a game with city-building aspects, or which appeal to aesthetics, such as cosmetic upgrades to your characters or buildings. The temptations start small, with microtransactions such as a dollar or two for a minor benefit, and work up to more and more expensive bonuses. When someone makes lots of small purchases, especially while engrossed in an activity that captures their attention, they may not notice how the small purchases are adding up.

In some cases, there are things to buy that are essential to completing the game, or at least to achieve some of the in-game goals that other players are completing. People refer to this as “pay to win,” and all the gamers I’ve talked with about this hate it.

Conclusion

For someone like me, who has done system analysis for decades, picking apart how a system works is fun in and of itself. For my former students, and perhaps for future students of my colleagues, seeing how a system like this works is educational, and helps prepare them for jobs where they will help develop such systems, or other very different kinds of systems. I’d like to think this way of looking at some games is interesting for the average gamer, too.

“Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.”

Recently (November 2023) the National Novel Writing Month website had to shut down its forums, right in the middle of said month, for a very serious child endangerment issue. The Board has posted a thoughtful response on the site, so I won’t detail what the problem was, and how they’re handling it.

Except for one issue: Who are they talking to about the right way to solve the problem?

The NaNoWriMo site is essentially a social medium for writers, with a focus on encouraging sharing experiences in writing marathons at specific times of year. Social media sites go a long way back, and the people who dealt with Trust and Safety issues for early social media, such as LiveJournal (created in California in 1999), are still around and posting about it (cw: swearing). The issues are very, very tricky to handle, and you need a lot of experience with what does and doesn’t work – which, apparently many of the recent Twitter replacements haven’t been as aware of as they should be.

I am far from expert, but after the birdsite started melting down, even I have heard of a few of the issues.

• Compliance with laws in the legal jurisdiction where your servers live, including how you will deal with court orders such as police demands for the IP addresses of users.
• Extraterritoriality processes of other jurisdictions (e.g. suing Board members who happen to live in, or are citizens of, or have assets in, that jurisdiction).
• The complex process for responding to a U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown (hint: you can’t just delete the offending material).
• How your Terms of Service have to be worded, and how you will deal with violations of it.
• Training for Trust and Safety staff – plus volunteer content moderators, if you dive into the morass that involves, instead of relying on reporting to staff.

I included the quote, and the link to many of its variations, because ignoring the past is widespread, and occasionally deliberate (not that I’m accusing NaNo of it – it’s a comment about my own field). In my research area (Computing), one of my colleagues told me that the editor of a journal to which they were submitting a paper insisted they remove all citations to sources more than 20 years old. Sometimes it’s simply not thinking to go looking: Another colleague reported that in their field they were seeing articles solving problems already solved, years ago, albeit in new contexts. I suppose it could be deliberate in some cases, since there’s a definite “selection pressure” (a metaphor from evolutionary biology that fits with “publish or perish” in Academia): It is more impressive to write a long paper about solving a “new” problem than a short letter about how you applied an old solution to a new area (which, in Computing, is harder to get published).

I wish NaNoWriMo well. I’ve been participating since 2006, and get a lot of value out of it. I won’t be suspending my annual donations (well, maybe if the Board, given time, still hasn’t addressed the primary issues in a responsible way). I hope y’all keep supporting them, too.