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.
