THE WHOLE WORLD IS WAITING.

Sophisticates and Marxists always argue that democratic elections don’t really matter. The candidates are Tweedledum and Tweedledee and in the end the ruling classes get what they want.

This time is clearly different. The candidates are Tweedledum and the Mad Hatter and the ruling classes are thrilled to support Tweedledum even though he and all his friends, including his running mate, a San Francisco liberal, want sharper change than anything since the 1930s, including 1937- style packing of the Supreme Court.

“The whole world is watching,” demonstrators always chant. Most times it isn’t really. But it will be tonight, watching and waiting, with almost literally bated breath — and for the rest of the week and maybe even the rest of the year and, Lord help us all, into 2021, if the ballot-counting and associated court cases take that long. (Some day the United States will sink under the weight of all its lawyers.) More than a few of us will be sitting by our screens tonight channelling Macbeth: if it were done … then ’ twere well it were done quickly.

Talk about a massive externality. Who the U. S. president is affects almost everyone on the planet. It certainly affects Canadians, as we have seen over the last three and a half years, but already knew from almost two and a half centuries of continental coexistence with the American republic. Economics says that if you don’t take into account the costs and benefits of everyone who’s affected by a decision, you may get the wrong decision. On the other hand, economics doesn’t offer clear guidance about how to internalize this particular externality.

The Americans aren’t likely to grant us property rights, i.e., a vote. (“No vexation without representation!” won’t impress them.) There’s no world regulator to adjudicate which presidential candidate would be better for humanity ( and what chance would a regulator have of getting it right, in any case?). And the only remaining option recognized by standard externality theory would be for us to pay the Americans to come up with a solution we like. However susceptible Donald Junior or Hunter Biden might be to that, the U. S. Constitution would frown on it, even if it might not strictly be an offence to the “emoluments clause” if what the recipient of a really big foreign payout did was withdraw from the race, not suborn the functions of office.

Russian President Vladimir Putin doesn’t seem well versed in externality theory but, whatever we may think of his methods, he’s not simply standing by as American voters decide his future. Maybe he could save us the suspense and announce the final vote early on this evening.

Actually, we Canadians don’t exactly stand idly by, either. Our leaders never miss an opportunity to give long, coded answers to silly questions from the press about which presidential candidate they’d rather work with. They should learn the rote of hockey players, who never say which team they want to face in the next round of the playoffs. “The U.S. is a democracy. Americans choose their president and we happily work with him or her.” Eighteen words. Enough said.

Granted, the rest of us do sometimes wonder why, in what claims to be the world’s oldest continuing democracy, they have such trouble with voting — even in cities and states where suppressing voter turnout is unlikely to be the reason. What’s the longest you’ve ever waited to vote in Canada? I always vote early and can’t remember it ever taking more than 10 minutes. Of course, in our bureaucratic heaven Elections Canada and its provincial equivalents spend tons of money administering the ballot, so it would be outrageous if we didn’t have an oversupply of facilities. But the U.S., with its greater wealth and ingenuity, should be able to handle what is after all a relatively simple data-processing problem. Maybe subcontract it to Apple or Google.

The U.S. election is more to us than simply a chance to exercise our customary schadenfreude towards Americans, however. From the liberal hour of the '60s to the conservative awakening at the end of the ' 70s through the managerial politics of the '90s and into the current century, political trends established in the U.S. inevitably ripple northward to Canada.

The direct reason is that changes in U. S. tax rates and regulations alter the impact of Canadian tax rates and regulations. If the U. S. moves its corporate or personal taxes up or down, that affects policy choices made here. The indirect reason is that the U.S. university and think-tank world is at least 10 times the size of ours. And we get free access to it.

Justin Trudeau is a dedicated practitioner of identity politics. But he didn’t invent identity politics or critical race theory or, for that matter, Black Lives Matter. These are all imports from the U. S. coasts, brought in at the usual five- to 10-year lag, a lag that probably is getting shorter, given that you no longer have to write away to request the latest paper or book on this or that trendy policy subject, as was the case 40 years ago, but can download it to your laptop even before the podcast where you first heard of it is over.

Whatever this election’s outcome, it will alter our policy future.