Election

Seven or eight weeks ago I made a conscious decision not to post comments on the election. One reason was that I assumed that there would be lots of information for people to read and furthermore that there would be far more intelligent analysts than I to decipher the absurdities that would pour out of the mouths of the want-to-be politicians. I think I was right in the former assumption. There, in part because of the length of this election, has been a lot of information available for anyone who has access to the most basic of news services. In terms of the main stream press, CBC and the Globe and Mail have both provided interesting and useful analysis of who said what, and even more importantly what those comments or promises mean. I have been impressed particularly with the Globe and Mail who in spite of the fact that one always assumes that their editorial board is somewhat right of centre and that they are pro- business have, on a regular basis, been critical of the Conservatives, their platform and their leader. In fact that news organizations has been far more neutral or at least balanced in its reporting than some of the left-of-centre news organizations.

In the first half of this year, when I was ranting on an almost daily basis as to the absurdities of the government, I was genuinely afraid of some of the decisions that the government was making.  Specifically I was concerned about the not so gradual destruction of both our personal freedoms and all of the rules that protected our environment. It felt as if we, as a country, were becoming more like the Americans then they were. While those laws (or the lack thereof) are still issues, they have been identified by at least three of the four parties as things that will need to be in some way fixed after the election.

I also had a profound concern about the non-participation of some Canadian voters - particularly students, the poor and those in First Nations Communities. It has been a great frustration of mine that with the percentage of voters bothering to cast their vote decreasing every election, Canada was at risk of becoming a country where only those who were economically secure voted. This would mean that succeeding governments would only need to pander to smaller and smaller numbers of citizens. It felt as if we were on a ever decreasing spiral towards a near dictatorship. While there is of course, no way of knowing five days before the election how many people will actually vote, if the advance polls are any indication, it may be that there will be a significant increase over previous years in the number of people who vote. It may be that there is just more of a public media focus on the topic, but it appears that certainly both on university campuses and in remote aboriginal communities people are at least talking about whether or not they should vote.

In the past few weeks there are a whole range of issues that have been identified and hundreds of promises have made. Most of these issues and promises, regardless of who gets elected, will be forgotten or at best put on the back burners of the various political machines. In all likelihood it is probably irrelevant which of the two parties that are promising to bring change to the Canadian political landscape become the ruling party. They will make decisions that will irritate people like me. But if the number of people who vote increases and the level of intelligent analysis continues - perhaps just perhaps we may yet still live in a functioning democracy.