Vox Sentences: Canada’s 78-day-long national campaign nightmare is over

Election day in Canada; fears of a famine in Ethiopia; and why both liberals and conservatives love Denmark.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

vOte, Canada

(Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images)

• After the longest campaign in modern Canadian history (a whole 78 days), Canadians finally went to the polls today to elect a new federal government.

• The slightly-left-of-center Liberal Party is projected to win more seats than any other party, though it probably won't win an outright majority.

  [CBC / Eric Grenier]

• If no party gets a majority, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservatives technically remain in charge — though Harper has made it clear that if another party gets more seats than the Conservatives, he and his government will resign and let a new government form.

  [Maclean's / Paul Wells]

• Harper isn't leading in the polls, but he's still defined the campaign. Canada has spent the fall debating whether Muslim women should be allowed to wear face scarves during citizenship ceremonies, after Harper came out against it.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• Harper and the Conservatives are often described as center-right, but they've been leaning into their right-wing base this year. Harper spent the weekend campaigning with former Toronto Mayor Rob Ford (the crack-smoking one) and his brother Doug Ford, who rose to power representing angry white Toronto residents.

  [The Guardian / Nicky Woolf]

• But it's the Liberals, led by Justin Trudeau (the son of former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau), who've gained momentum in the polls over the past couple of months — sinking the left-wing New Democratic Party and staying ahead of the Conservatives.

  [CBC / Eric Grenier]

• That means Trudeau, who is young and handsome but isn't regarded as an intellectual heavyweight, is the most likely next prime minister of Canada. This 2002 profile of the then-30-year-old Trudeau is amazingly awkward reading, but also gives a sense of the reputation he's trying to outgrow.

  [Maclean's / Jonathan Gatehouse via The Canadian Encyclopedia]

• The most immediate global difference between Harper's and Trudeau's Canada: climate change. Harper was strongly pro-Keystone pipeline; Trudeau is willing to work with the US to mitigate environmental concerns, and could be a key voice in December's UN climate summit in Paris.

  [Foreign Policy / Geoff Dembicki]

The Denmark debate

(Handout/Getty Images)

• At last week's Democratic presidential debate, Bernie Sanders cited Denmark as a model of democratic socialism. Almost a week later, pundits are still debating whether Denmark is a model — and whether it reflects Sanders's views.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• Liberal pundits have been looking to Denmark — with its low child poverty, high taxes, and green environmental policy — with envy for years. This Jonathan Cohn piece dives into the Danish model of "flexicurity."

  [New Republic / Jonathan Cohn]

• But the right-wing Heritage Foundation rates Denmark as more "economically free" than the United States.

  [Heritage Foundation]

• Denmark also beats the US in terms of free trade and how easy it is to start a business. This isn't an accident: The goal of "flexicurity" is to combine relatively deregulated labor markets with lots of redistribution.

  [Foundation for Economic Education / Marian Tupy]

• The result is a country that's much more egalitarian than the US — the bottom 40 percent of earners get more disposable income in Denmark than they do in the US.

  [Demos / Matt Bruenig]

• The ultimate lesson (according to libertarian think-tanker Will Wilkinson): You can have a really big welfare state, but you need business-friendly market regulation to do it.

  [Niskanen Center / Will Wilkinson]

Drought in Ethiopia

(Minasse Wondimu Hailu/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

• Ethiopia is suffering from massive crop failure — causing widespread hunger and raising the possibility of famine.

  [New York Times / Jacey Fortin]

• The culprit is El Niño — which climatologists have warned could be stronger than ever in 2015. The weather pattern has caused an inhumanly dry summer in Ethiopia (only three days of seasonal rain).

  [Vox / Brad Plumer]

• Drought (and potential famine) is a problem throughout much of southern and central Africa. The UN is particularly concerned about the southern countries of Malawi, Madagascar, and Zimbabwe.

  [World Food Programme]

• But Ethiopia looms large for two reasons: the horrific famine of the mid-1980s, which killed more than a million people, and the fact that many development experts hoped Ethiopia had developed enough to prevent future famines.

• The country is one of the few in Africa that's actually on track to meet its Millennium Development Goals.

  [Overseas Development Institute / Amanda Lenhardt, Andrew Rogerson, Francesca Guadagno, and Tom Berliner]

• And throughout the past several decades, widespread famine has only been a problem when it's intersected with wars (as happened in Ethiopia in the '80s) or at the hands of an indifferent state (North Korea).

  [The Lancet / Alex de Waal]

• As recently as last week, observers believed that Ethiopia's safety net programs and investment in infrastructure would be enough to ensure that people got the food they needed.

  [Global Post / Arron Reza Merat]

• But the New York Times reports that 8 million people (more than previously thought) need emergency food aid — and points out that the most successful safety net program ended for the year in June.

  [New York Times / Jacey Fortin]

MISCELLANEOUS

Sean Smith accidentally shot and killed his sister when he was 10 years old. Twenty-six years later, he's finally learning to forgive himself. [The Trace / Monica Potts]

• Venezuela's currency is so worthless that even carjackers have stopped accepting it.

  [NYT / William Neuman and Patricia Torres]

• Azealia Banks was poised to be a massive hip-hop star. But has she trolled too many people to make it?

  [Vulture / Lauretta Charlton]

• This is a great explanation of how the Civil Rights Act led the Republican domination of the South.

  [Storify / Kevin M. Kruse]

• "The Obvious Child" is quite possibly Paul Simon's best song, but this argument that The Rhythm of the Saints is his best album is just madness.

  [Slate / Dan Kois]

VERBATIM

"You can die in such anonymity in New York. We’ve had instances of people dead for months. No one finds them, no one misses them." [Gerard Sweeney to NYT / NR Kleinfield]

• "Except for the ten to twelve million people who use them every year, just about everybody hates payday loans."

  [Liberty Street Economics / Robert DeYoung, Ronald J. Mann, Donald P. Morgan, and Michael R. Strain]

• "[Joanna] Newsom even avoided listening to all other music in case it influenced hers."

  [The Guardian / Tim Lewis]

• "The violinist Mari Kimura gave a midnight performance of her own compositions, which feature notes so low they should technically be unplayable on a violin. These subharmonics, made through a bowing technique of her own discovery, allow her to produce notes as low as a full octave below the bottom G, the instrument’s lowest string."

  [NYT / Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim]

• "Actress Angelababy is suing a clinic for defamation after it alleged she had plastic surgery done on her face …. It came a week after her widely-publicised wedding to actor Huang Xiaoming, who has defended her, saying she "sometimes looks quite ugly."

  [BBC]

WATCH THIS

Thin underwater cables hold the internet. See a map of them all. [YouTube / Phil Edwards, Gina Barton]

(Vox/Phil Edwards, Gina Barton)

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