Canadians can't fathom the length of our political campaigns

Despite all the election-year talk about border security, a Canada goose brazenly honks as it croses the U.S.-Canada line with impunity. For our fowl friend, only differing brands of discarded fast food distinguish northern Minnesota's Eighth Congressional District from the Rainy River and Thunder Bay constituency in Northwest Ontario.

It's not much easier for humans to tell these districts apart. Both feature cold winters, glacial lakes, hard rock and vast forests.

Natural resource-based economy? Yup. Great Lakes shipping? Oh, ya. Mining? Tourism? Native communities? Aging demographics? Economic struggles? Pretty much, ya. And hockey to boot.

The Americans and British negotiated this border sight unseen two centuries ago. Yet these kindred forests, lakes and lands sustain the same kinds of people. Thunder Bay and Duluth are remarkably similar cities. Layered clothing rules.

What's more, both Minnesota's Eighth and Ontario's Rainy River-Thunder Bay constituency are electoral battlegrounds where outcomes affect their respective national political scenes.

In last year's Canadian federal elections, Don Rusnak, 41, of the centrist Liberal Party won Thunder Bay-Rainy River from the leftist New Democratic Party, helping elevate Justin Trudeau to prime minister. Rusnak, son of Anishinaabe (Ojibwa) and Ukrainian parents, became the only indigenous person to represent Ontario in parliament.

Some of Rusnak's distant Ojibwa relatives live in Minnesota, where the Eighth District has become one of the nation's few swing House districts, site of a biennial backwoods fracas between Democrats and Republicans.

Here is where the twin districts separate. The campaign experience of voters in Fort Frances, Ontario, bears little resemblance to that of their neighbors in International Falls, Minn.

"The differences I can see involve the length and the amount of dollars thrown into these campaigns," said Rusnak, when I spoke with him recently. "The major difference is the length of time. Our last election was the longest in recent memory in Canadian history, stretching more than two months from the end of August to Oct. 19."

That 2015 contest was such an unusual event that Rusnak even used the rare tactic of taking out a few local TV ads.

Rusnak said the extra few weeks of campaigning in 2015 were hard on political volunteers. "I couldn't even imagine the length of campaigns in the U.S.," he added, "the amount of resources involved."

The length of the election unnerved so many Canadians that the new Liberal government is exploring electoral reforms to ensure campaigns won't last that long in the future.

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were running even earlier. Election 2016 has endured almost as long as John Franklin's ill-fated 1845 attempt to traverse the Northwest Passage — and we aren't done yet.

Not only that, but Rusnak didn't even need to wear a full suit of orange while holding a gun for a photo shoot, a staple of MN-8 advertising for both Mills and Nolan.

"But I am a hunter and there are a lot of hunters in our [constituency]," he was quick to point out. The importance of not offending hunters remains important on both sides of the border.

I asked Rusnak what features of the U.S. election system Canadians might want for their own. After polite admiration of our shared democratic values, he said some of his constituents have mentioned presidential term limits as one thing they admire.

Like any good Northerner, he delivered the rest of the answer in the silence that followed.