A political earthquake is taking place in North America – and it’s completely off the radar of the mainstream media in most countries.

In another week, it is entirely possible that Jack Layton (pictured), a democratic socialist, will be elected as Prime Minister of Canada.

Polls this week have been showing the New Democratic Party, traditionally Canada’s third party, pushing the Liberals into third place in an election likely to be won by the incumbent, the Conservative Stephen Harper.

But the very latest polls which show the New Democrats taking as many as 100 seats in the 308-seat Canadian House of Commons — which is nearly three times the number they have today — indicate the possibility of a coalition government led by the NDP, with the Liberals as junior partners.

As recently as a week or two ago, such a scenario would have been dismissed as nonsensical.

The NDP — successor the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation — has always been at best a third party, sometimes a fourth. Its best-case scenario for several decades has been to hold the balance of power, something it has done from time in time.

Its best result ever was 23 years ago when the popular Ed Broadbent led the party to win over 20% of the vote and capture 43 seats. But in the following election, only five years later, the party had plummeted to less than 7% of the vote and only nine seats. It has been a long climb back, and Layton has now led the party through three elections, nearly doubling the number of seats it held.

What has happened now is a sudden and unexpected surge in popularity that may require the party to consider, for the first time, who would be its ministers in a federal government.

Fortunately, the party has had executive experience — it has ruled a number of Canada’s provinces, most famously Saskatchewan where the Canadian system of socialized medicine was created by the CCF under the legendary Tommy Douglas — grandfather of actor Kiefer Sutherland (Jack Bauer from “24”).

I got to know the NDP well in the late 1970s in the course of several visits to Canada, where I attended federal and provincial conventions. In 1980, I worked for 6 weeks on an NDP federal election campaign in Toronto (we won, ousting an unpopular Tory). As a young democratic socialist from the United States, I couldn’t help but admire — and feel a bit jealous — of my comrades across the border.

The USA never had a sizeable socialist movement. At best it polled 6% of the vote in a federal election back in 1912. It had a couple of members of Congress, some mayors and state legislators. But in Canada, from the 1940s on, the CCF and the NDP which followed were able to build and sustain a mass, social democratic movement, one which was able to run entire provinces and make real changes in people’s lives.

But never came close to winning a federal election.

Very few Americans ever paid much attention to this. Even today, I doubt more than tiny minority could name Canada’s prime minister, let alone talk about the upcoming federal election taking place there next Monday (May 2nd).

And yet Americans and the world may wake up on Tuesday morning to discover that a party of the democratic Left — albeit a very moderate and reasonable one — had come to power in a country no one had been paying attention to.

If all of this is coming as totally new to you, blame your local media. And I don’t just mean your local newspapers which may expected to ignore Canada. But even a global giant like the BBC as recently as a week ago had nothing at all about the Canadian elections on their “US & Canada” page on the BBC News website.

They are covering the American election intensively, including speculation on whether or not Donald Trump will throw his hat in the ring.

But they’ve ignored the impending election in Canada.

Nothing is certain, of course. We are talking public opinion polls here. The Conservative Party still holds a healthy lead. But it is now possible that overnight, the political map in North America will change beyond recognition, and that Canada’s democratic socialists will be given the chance to realize Tommy Douglas’s dream of a better society for all Canadians.

I wish them luck.