I suspect some of that dynamic lives on.
Practically speaking, there is no differences in the freedom Canadian and European citizens have regarding expression compared to Americans even though EFFECTIVELY certain types of speech are restricted (e.g. holocaust denial)
That is because the list of restricted speech is incredibly miniscule, and there are strong protections in place otherwise that prevent a "slippery slope" situation from occurring. ("First you ban me from freely speaking about the holocaust not happening, next you ban me from criticizing the president!")
Practically, non-US democracies have demonstrated a stronger commitment freedom of assembly and freedom of the press than the US has over the last 4 years.
The only difference is that in the US these protections are guaranteed by an effectively "sacred document" that supercedes all laws (The constitution)
But it is more and more clear that that is a bug not a feature of the system, and is causing legitimate harm as your supreme court is getting stacked with "textualist originalists" who think that the wisdom of slave-owning cotton farmers applies unquestionably to 21st century technology and societal concerns.
And this is before we even get into the question of what it means for something to be "democratic", which is to say there is a "Democratic electoral process", which we're about to find out just how much the US process has been degraded as seemingly HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of people's votes will either be not counted, or will be denied the opportunity to vote. What is happening in the US would be impossible in any other Western Democracy.
As you say, the commitment to basic democratic rights is considerably stronger in other western countries than in the US. The kind of abuses the Republican party habitually conducts with the aim of disenfranchising Democratic voters would not be tolerated elsewhere; this is reflected by the fact that the US constitution only explicitly prohibits certain forms of electoral discrimination (i.e. it's a blacklist policy) but does not explicitly grant a right to vote.
1) Post an approving image of weed on Facebook
2) Write ACAB on Twitter (this one also got a journalist arrested)
3) Have a shirt that says "ruling party - thieves" (which, as an aside, is pretty accurate)
4) Are a journalist and publish an article which the court rules has caused "mental pain" to suing party (usually politicians and judges - this happens all the time)
You are delusional to think the European media is freer.
The U.S. ranks 45th in press freedoms. There are 25 European countries who rank better. Heck, there are even 5 African countries who rank higher.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index
This infamous clip from The Newsroom might shed more light on how the U.S. is actually doing in comparison to other democratic countries (all statistics quoted are easily verified if you want to look into it) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTjMqda19wk
“Yes you have fewer free speech rights in Europe and Canada but that doesn’t actually matter”
https://www.ips-journal.eu/topics/european-union/voter-suppr...
The spread in riding (electoral district) size in Canada only varies by a factor of 4.5 if the (mostly unpopulated) northern territories are included (the three territories have one MP, each, to represent populations of less than 30,000) and a factor of 1.5 among the populated provinces.
Canadian federal governments are generally comprised of whichever party received the largest share of votes nationally. This is not always the case in the US.
I'm going to disagree with you on this. In Canada, the general votes usually result in 1/3-1/3-1/3 split between the Conservatives, Liberals, and NDP. It's our first past the post system for MPs that results in the uneven split at the final tally. The only reason that the system hasn't succumbed to gerrymandering as badly as elsewhere is that district changes must be prompted by a change in the number of provincial seats from the census. The changes themselves are proposed by an unelected third-party with members chosen by the judiciary of the province and the speaker of the house (who is chosen by the MPs through a secret ballot vote). Otherwise, it would be all too easy to gerrymander an election in Canada and end up in the same situation as the US.
Contrast this with countries that use proportional representation which means everyone's vote basically means more or less the same as anyone else's vote.
The US is currently ranked 25th in the world by "democracy ranking"
On the other hand, we do use proportional representation (single transferrable vote, STV) to elect the senators for each state, which is different from the first-past-the-post method the US uses. In a normal election, half of a state's senators are up for re-election; exceptionally, the government may call a special "double dissolution" election, in which the whole Senate is re-elected, if the Senate repeatedly refuses to pass legislation sent to it by the House of Representatives. Our use of STV means that minor parties (Greens on the far left, One Nation on the far right, various centrist/populist independents and other small parties) end up controlling the balance of power in the Senate. Some people don't like that because these minor parties end up sometimes extracting all kinds of concessions from the government in exchange for letting government legislation through.
I think some kind of unequal representation – like the Australian and US Senates – is essential for a federal system to work. Look at the United Kingdom – England has almost 85% of the population, so a big enough majority in England can always overrule the other three smaller constituent countries (Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland), and there are no constitutional mechanisms to prevent that from happening. That's a large part, I think, of why the UK looks like it isn't going to last, with Scotland likely to break away sooner or later, quite possibly followed by Irish reunification some years further down the track, and once its just England and Wales, maybe even Wales will eventually decide to follow Scotland's example. If the British House of Lords was more like the Australian and US Senates, and gave the smaller constituent countries the ability to block an English-dominated majority, then the UK would be more likely to survive.
edit: CA accounts for 15% of the US GDP
U.S. is at place 25 and is categorized as a flawed democracy, lower than Canada and some European countries (but far from all).
Electoral college
Could this strange state of affairs be the result of a political system that is highly polarized and less fundamentally democratic than the Canadian and European system?