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There would be a LOT less money involvedTime is money, as the saying goes. And as we've seen with the Trudeau blackface scandal, even a short campaign has plenty of time to devolve into very American kinds of political scandal.With legal limits on the length of the campaign, however, elective politics could be kept mostly out of sight for vast stretches of time. Americans wouldn't have to think about campaigns, debates, candidate television adverts, non-stop cable news coverage and a seemingly endless stream of horserace for another year.Sure, Canada has leadership races that determine the heads of the various parties and, well, politics is never totally out of mind. Image copyright ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images Image captionJoe Biden and Elizabeth Warren at the September Democratic debate in HoustonPause, for a moment, to imagine such a scenario in the US. A proportional representation system would really shake things up, though.Sadly, that hypothetical will have to wait for the yet-to-be-scheduled 'what if the US were run like Belgium' feature.

Either change would have done even more to give smaller parties a crack at representation in the legislature, as it does in many European countries.Maine is the only US state to try ranked choice - and in 2018 it resulted in a congressional seat switching from Republican to Democrat. He ended up proposing a ranked-choice voting set-up, but then abandoned the idea once in the prime minister's office. In fact, this could be unfolding right now in Canada, after the 2018 founding of the Canadian People's Party - a group of self-styled conservative populists that is running parliamentary candidates across Canada this year.And while a Quebec-style separatist movement doesn't exist in the US, is it impossible to envision Californians (or New Englanders or Texans) getting so fed up with Washington politics that they strike out on their own? Image copyright Lucas Oleniuk/Toronto Star via Getty Images Image captionPrime Minister Justin Trudeau on the election trailBack in 2015, then-candidate Justin Trudeau promised to enact electoral reform - which some hoped would include switching the Canadian parliament to proportional representation.

Image copyright GEOFF ROBINS/AFP/Getty Images Image captionCanada has five established political parties at the federal levelThe American equivalent of the New Democrats is probably the Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren wing of the Democratic Party - so it's not too difficult to imagine the US left fracturing under a Canadian set-up.The same could happen on the right, of course, with Trumpists breaking off from the corporate/free-trader and small-government true believers of the Republican Party (instead of, you know, just burying them with insults and beating them in the primaries box). Image copyright Mark Horton/Getty ImagesSo, what if the Americans were to scrap their constitution and go Canadian (or British, or Australian, or Japanese take your pick)?First of all, US elections would look a lot more like the 2018 mid-term congressional contests than the 2016 presidential race.