If you were one of the people who, after the 2004 election, thought about moving to Canada, after today you should be really glad that you didn’t.

While this space is usually devoted towards the endless over-analysis of American politics, my attention today was drawn to our friendly neighbors to the north, where today’s ridiculous political events have made me thank God we fought a revolution to get away from the British Crown.

Apparently, though reelected to stronger minorities in Parliament under two months ago, the Conservative coalition of Prime Minister Stephen Harper has fallen out of favor—something about failing to respond adequately to the financial crisis. Smelling blood, a majority coalition of the Liberals, New Democrats, and the Bloc Quebecois recently signed a document agreeing to oust Harper from power in a no-confidence vote this coming Monday.

Make sense so far? An unpopular head of government was going to be removed from power by the people’s representatives (don’t you wish we could do that?). But here is where things turned truly arcane. Facing certain electoral doom, Harper went to the Governor General—someone appointed by Queen Elizabeth, in England, who in practice doesn’t really exercise much power—and got his permission to arbitrarily shut down Parliament, precluding Monday’s vote, over the expressed intentions of a majority of the people and their representatives.

Let me get this straight. In Canada, the Prime Minister can go to some unelected figurehead appointed by the supposedly powerless Queen of another country as a means to hold on to power that the people he claims to serve seem to not want him to have? What year is this, anyway?

In all likelihood, this will only delay Harper’s inevitable downfall. According to analysts, no PM has ever done something like this before. But it’s comical to think that in 2008, this kind of thing could happen in a democratic society. If I were Canadian, there’s no measure to how angry I would be. I’m just glad that I’m not. Here’s to the Boston Tea Party, Yorktown, and today, to being American.