Just finished reading Simon Jenkins’ piece in the Guardian today (A Coalition for cuts? Canada, not Thatcher, is the model). The comment piece is buried deep in the paper.

It got me thinking.

When was the last time a story about Canada appeared on the front page of a UK broadsheet?

Can’t remember? Mind gone blank?

That’s understandable. Although, in constitutional terms, Canada is our closest sister democracy, we treat her like a distant relative. Out of sight and, very definitely, out of mind.

This feeling is not reciprocated. Canadians are very interested in what happens in the UK. But they are not obsessed by events in Britain.

We share the same Head of State. The Canadian House of Commons has green upholstery. The appointed Upper House, the Senate, has red. We have the same “first past the post” voting system.

I could be back at home.

Even the political plot lines seem eerily familiar

The Canadian press zeroed in on Broon’s resignation as Prime Minister. Inevitably, reports focussed on the uncanny parallels with Paul Martin, the former finance minister in the Liberal Government led by Jean Chretien, who ousted his boss.

Broon, desperate for the top job, worked relentlessly to destabilise Blair. In the same way, Martin schemed and manoeuvred, eventually supplanting Chretien as Prime Minister. After just over two years as PM, Martin went on to lose the election that put the Conservatives into minority Government.

Since 2006, the Conservative Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, has bobbed and weaved to stay in office, avoiding confidence votes by using procedural devices to wrong foot his opponents.

Canadians are getting used to minority Governments with elections in 2004, 2006 and 2008 producing no clear winner.

The country has been uncharitably dubbed “a banana republic with snowflakes” by the leading Canadian academic, Fen Hampson.

Hardly surprising, then, that there has been such interest in recent developments at Westminster.

The Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper, carried the story of Britain’s new coalition Government on its front page. So too did the Toronto Star, the main daily newspaper in the nation’s biggest city.

Would coalition Government work in Canada?

Everyone over here seems sceptical. They have good reason to be.

Until a week ago I would have bet my last dollar on there never being a Lib-Con coalition in the UK.

But they’ve tied the knot and they are going to give it a go.

I give these strange bedfellows a year at most before it all falls apart in acrimony.

I can see the resentments building already.

Just look at the cartoons in the press. Poor old Cleggy portrayed as the poodle.

At PMQs will Clegg be nodding approval as Cameron speaks? Or, if he disapproves of his partner’s line, will he be stoney faced?

We shall all be reading Clegg’s face.

This coalition business is just too delicious for words!

Anyway… To other matters…

As we look forward to the promised referendum on voting reform in the UK, I am reminded there have been two recent attempts in Canada to change the First Past the Post voting system – in the provinces of British Columbia and in Ontario.

Both failed.

Voters held on to nurse for fear of something worse.