Serenity now
Election gives illusion of choice
Andrew Lodge Volunteer Staff
It’s been a little over a week since some Canadians went to the polls and “voted for change.” It’s still winter in Winnipeg, though, and no tanks are rolling out of the garrisons yet.
The lie-ridden Liberal minority government was voted out and the socially conservative Conservatives were voted in with an even slimmer margin than the Liberals. The Bloc Quebecois is still doing their schizophrenic dance out in Quebec, a separatist party participating (and performing very well, actually) in a federal contest. And the NDP, well, the NDP managed to stay the course and maintain irrelevance.
So now we have Tory blue “stand[ing] up for Canada.” Sort of like Brian Mulroney back in the ’80s, when he sold the rights to our economy to the Americans.
But last Monday’s result wasn’t a victory for homophobia. It wasn’t a victory for “pro-life,” nor was it a victory of disease over poor people. Stephen Harper won’t be able to join his friend, George of the South, on his imperialist adventures, as much as he’d like to. This government will be even weaker than the last one, impotent like a cuckolded old man. And that’s just fine.
A Tory majority would have been something to worry about. But then again, so would have a Liberal majority. But these aren’t majorities. They are weak and ineffectual minority governments, and that’s perfect. Anything to prevent these guys from actually governing should be fair game.
The overwhelming majority of politicians care about power, money and self-aggrandizement. That explains their near-pathological lying and clandestine maneuvering. They don’t care about you or about me or about “people.” If they cared about “people” (whatever that means) they’d become teachers or nurses, not politicians and businessmen.
The results of January 23 all but ensure that the new government will fall sometime before its term is up. It won’t be right away, though. The Liberals need to lick their wounds for a bit and find a new leader. And regardless, the opposition parties will be wary of forcing another election too soon for fear of pissing off the public, whose tolerance for parliamentary shenanigans may be wearing thin.
I don’t mind elections. Sure, they’re expensive, but so is the gun registry and military spending. And elections can be entertaining. Besides, all the campaigning prevents politicians from trying to actually lead, which is probably the most dangerous problem of having a government in the first place.
The past election, albeit in most senses boring old politicking as usual, did have its moments. Most fun of all was election night coverage. The best was watching Liberal leader Paul Martin and now former deputy prime minister Anne McClellan try not to cry after they lost the election, and in McClellan’s case, her seat.
All Paul has wanted from Santa since he was five years old was to be prime minister, and when finally given the chance, he went and wrecked it. Pathetic does not do descriptive justice to the man. Nothing left to do in this life but slink off and count his hundreds of millions.
Also entertaining in a sort of bizarre way was Jack Layton’s election night celebration. If you watched that display on mute without having a clue about the Canadian political scene, you’d think that Layton and the New Democrats had just pummeled the opposition and won a landslide victory.
But no, the NDP came through the gates in last place among the four major parties. Sure, they won a few more seats, but that really only means that they’ve gone from stinky to smelly. They’re still so far from actually winning an election that the true story of the night is how Layton managed to turn their usual dismal objective performance into such a triumphant subjective reaction. Now that’s theatrics.
The strangest thing about election time is the moderating influence it has on people. I know people who rant and rave about Paul Martin and the Liberals all year. Then, an election arrives and they start talking about voting and it comes out that they’re going to vote for Martin. Why? “To prevent Harper from winning,” is the stock response. That’s a negative vote and a distortion of the democratic spirit, and more than a bit of a contradiction.
The same thing happened in the United States in the last election. Just before the vote down there, I attended a talk by a leading, avowed left-wing intellectual who railed for two hours about the “new imperialism” of the American state. He argued, as these types do, that it’s an empire whether it’s being run by Democrats or Republicans. Later, during the Q&A, he let slip that he was planning to vote for John Kerry. What! You just said that either way, Democrat or Republican, the president of the U.S. project is the President of an Empire. You’re voting for Kerry’s right to become Emperor!
But maybe that’s the point of elections in the current political economic structure: give the population a couple of middle-of-the-road alternatives, create an artifice of “choice,” and keep the machine rolling.
Andrew Lodge is a third-year medical student.
