The U.S. Election Is in Its Final 11 Weeks. Canadians Wonder, ‘Why So Long?’

You can do it. You can make it through 11 more weeks.

That’s all that remains before the United States presidential election on Nov. 8. It’s a drop in the bucket, really, considering how long the country has been at this.

To weary Americans beat down by this divisive, chaotic campaign, 11 weeks may sound like nothing, but Canadians disagree. Last year, that country’s official election season was extended to 11 weeks from its typical five or six — still light-speed by American standards, but many Canadians saw the extension as an excruciating marathon.

“It was frustrating as a Canadian to watch time being wasted, essentially,” Victoria James, 28, a university administrator in Toronto, said this week.

In Canada, the prime minister dissolves the Parliament during the designated campaign season, generally on four-year terms. When campaigning begins, advertising by third parties is limited, so political parties ramp up their own ads, financed primarily by the government. Lawn signs quickly dot the streets.

“I have a clear sense of when the Canadian election campaign started, because I know it was a long weekend in August last year,” said Lisa Buchanan, 32, who works in fund-raising for the United Way in Halifax.

“And I know it ended in October, and it didn’t feel like it was ‘campaign mode’ prior to that to any great degree,” she said.

But the sense is much different as she observes what’s happening in the United States.

“I feel like I’ve been watching this election coverage for two years — or at least a year and a half,” Ms. Buchanan said.

That’s pretty accurate. It’s been 17 months since Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, became the first major candidate to officiallyannounce his bid for presidency on March 23, 2015.

Hillary Clinton, now the Democratic nominee, kicked off her candidacy less than a month later on April 12, while Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee, descended the Trump Tower escalator in New York on June 16 of that year.

It hasn’t always been this way. In 1960, John F. Kennedy didn’t announce his run until January, 11 months before the election. In 1972, Iowa moved its caucuses earlier to the first month of the year, requiring candidates to begin their campaigns well before then; other states followed in the 1980s.

There’s plenty of United States election coverage in the Canadian news media, leading America’s northern neighbors to look south with a mix of amusement and bewilderment.

“Most Canadians think that the length of the presidential election cycle is truly, truly absurd,” said Renan Levine, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

Fair. Many Americans think the length of the presidential election cycle is absurd, too. But when compared to Canadian traditions, the potential absurdity becomes clearer.

Last year, Stephen Harper, the former Canadian prime minister, called federal elections in early August 2015 — a maneuver that appeared to be designed to give his Conservative Party an upper hand in campaign spending.

C. E. S. Franks, a prominent parliamentary scholar and professor emeritus at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, said at the time that the move would be “about as welcome as a root canal” to Canadians who were more intent on enjoying their summers than thinking about politics.

The election, won by Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party, was the first time in decades that the campaign extended beyond about 50 days, said Richard Johnston, a professor of political science at the University of British Columbia. It was the second-longest campaign in Canadian history, behind the 1872 election, he said.

That one occurred five years after Canada was founded, and the lack of a railway to the Pacific slowed down the process.

The Canadian aversion to long election cycles comes partly from emotions that a lot of Americans could relate to, he said.

“Canadians are like Americans: They hate politics,” he said. “It’s a thing Canadians just want to get over with.”

Naturally, there is positioning and posturing before the campaign officially begins. In recent years, “more and more of what looks like a campaign, even if it’s not officially a campaign, does seem to be happening early on,” Mr. Levine, at the University of Toronto Scarborough, said.

But the creep of a perpetual campaign in Canada still pales in comparison to what they observe in the United States. Ms. Buchanan, of the United Way, described the American election cycle as “maybe an inefficient use of people’s time.”

“I don’t know how helpful it is in terms of fleshing out the issues and having constructive debates and conversations about the country and the future,” she said. “I don’t think the length necessarily has helped clarify anything for anybody.”