No, I'm from *sigh* The States. Yes, it's hard to get rid of our wingnuts here, too. I just assumed that Canadians were far more progressive & was baffled that they haven't ditched Harper by now. At least in the States, deciding who's in charge is...generally...based on the people voting them in & out directly.
So, a Parliamentary System, if I'm correct, is when the people don't vote for Head-of-State but instead vote for the politicians who then vote for the Head of State. If the US Govt. were, in a hypothetical alternate universe, a Parliamentary system, this would be like the people voting for only the Congresspeople but only the Congresspeople can vote in the President, amirite?
The Head of State of Canada is the Queen, Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom, Canada and Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith. (She isn't actually the second Queen of Canada by that name, but every current Commonwealth Realm accords her the regnal number.*) The heir apparent is her eldest son, Charles, Prince of Wales. Her viceroy is the Governor General, His Excellency the Right Honourable David Johnston, and she also has a viceroy in each province, the Lieutenant Governor (who have the style His/Her Honour the Honourable), and a Commissioner in each territory. Each viceroy is appointed by the Queen of Canada on the advice of her Prime Minister, the Right Honourable Stephen Harper. (Although the viceroy is not Head of State, he or she typically undertakes state visits on behalf of Canada.)
The Prime Minister is the Head of Government. He or she is usually a Member of the House of Commons, and is elected as such by the voters in his or her riding. (In the case of the current incumbent, he is the Member of Parliament for Calgary Southwest.) He is leader of the Conservative Party because the members of that party voted for him to be leader and, as the leader of the party holding a plurality of seats in the House of Commons after the 2006 general election, was invited by the Governor General (then Her Excellency the Right Honourable Michaëlle Jean) to form a (minority) government in which he would be Prime Minister. He retained the position as he remained leader of his party and his party again held a plurality of seats after the 2008 general election, and then a majority of seats after the 2011 general election. However, while he is not nominally the head of the executive branch of government (that would be the Queen), he is so for all practical purposes.
The President of the US is certainly the Head of State of that country, but it is difficult to say who the Head of Government is, due to the fact that its Houses are much closer in power than the lower and upper houses are in many parliamentary systems and the fact that the President is not a member of a legislative body. (He can only accept or reject bills passed by Congress in whole--he cannot approve some parts while rejecting others. Some state Governors have this power of line-item veto.) It is of course easy to say who the heads of the two Houses are--The Honorable John Boehner for the House of Representatives and The Honorable Joe Biden for the Senate, in his capacity as President of the Senate--but neither could be said to be Head of Government. (Indeed one could well argue that The Honorable Harry Reid, Majority Leader of the United States Senate, has more of a claim to being Head of Government than the Vice President.)
I have best seen it put more or less thus. The US model is based on a strict separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches. The Westminster model is based on a fusion of the powers of the legislative and executive branches. The government in effect wields the executive power, but only so long as the legislature allows--the executive must retain the confidence of the legislature and is responsible to the legislature (hence the term "responsible government" for the system). This is usually not an issue as the executive can under normal circumstances control a majority of the votes in the legislature. In the US system, on the other hand, the executive in general does not serve only at the pleasure of the legislature. (There is of course provision for the President to be removed from office, but it has only been attempted twice and has never succeeded. By contrast, multiple Canadian governments have fallen on matters of confidence: Arthur Meighen's government in 1926, John Diefenbaker's government in 1963, Lester Pearson's government in 1968**, Pierre Trudeau's government in 1974***, Joe Clark's government in 1979, Paul Martin's government in 2005****, and Stephen Harper's government in 2011*****.)
*Apparently if Scotland secedes from the United Kingdom they will remain a Commonwealth Realm with Elizabeth as Queen, and will likely not accord her the regnal number. There's sentiment in Scotland that the Queen should not call herself Elizabeth II while there, as she is the first Elizabeth to be Queen of Scotland (or, rather, Queen of Scots), and should simply call herself Queen Elizabeth. Similarly, while Prince Charles is given the title Prince of Wales almost everywhere else (except in Cornwall where he's Duke of Cornwall) he is Duke of Rothesay in Scotland as that is the traditional title of the heir to the throne of Scotland, and his wife, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall (she is also Princess of Wales but declines to use the title, and Duchess of Cornwall is her second-highest-ranking title) is called Camilla, Duchess of Rothesay in Scotland.
**The government did not actually resign as a result of this loss--the Liberal Party was in the process of replacing Pearson with Pierre Trudeau as leader, and none of the parties were ready for an election, so they decided that the matter on which the government had lost a vote was in fact not a matter of confidence. Trudeau nonetheless asked for a dissolution of Parliament not long after he had settled into his new role as leader of the Liberal Party and Prime Minister, and won a majority in the House in the ensuing general election.
***He may have rigged this one specifically to incite a vote of non-confidence in his government--he had had to garner the support of the New Democratic Party in order to retain the confidence of the House, and while Pearson had done the same during his minority governments after the 1963 and 1965 general elections, the NDP were rather more demanding of Trudeau than they had been of Pearson, and Trudeau, reading the polls, decided the time was right to anger the NDP into voting against his government on a budgetary matter, which are automatically matters of confidence.
****This was the first time that a Canadian government fell on an explicit motion of no confidence, with no other matters of confidence on which they were likely to fall anyway being considered.
*****This too was an explicit motion of no confidence, in which the House voted to agree with a committee that had found the government in contempt of Parliament--the first time that had ever happened in Canada or any other Commonwealth country. Harper had also asked for and received a prorogation of Parliament (which causes all bills under consideration to die on the order paper) to avoid losing a vote on his government's budget earlier in that term. Somehow this is how you win majorities these days.
