The looming federal election has me thinking a lot about the medically induced coma. You know, Israel’s prime minister Ariel Sharon was put in one after his stroke, and two Canadian soldiers received the coma treatment when they were wounded in last weekend’s suicide bomb attack in Afghanistan. Now I’m ready. Just put me out for a few days, until the election has meandered to its conclusion on Monday, and wake me when it’s over.
This is a new feeling for me. Usually an election—any election—makes me swell with civic pride to the point of bloating, and I earnestly gush about the honour and duty all voters have to exercise their franchise. My belief in democracy tends to be naive and passionate, far from the knowing detachment I’ve seen in friends who are political professionals of various stripes (although not too far, as even the most cynical of these people still cares deeply about the system). During this campaign, however, I lost my moral compass and went down the road of voter apathy.
Once I found apathy road, I was surprised to discover it’s a two-way street. I don’t give a shit about the election; it doesn’t give a shit about me. Maybe I was too much of a chump to notice during previous campaigns but this time around, while I’ll still vote (see “naive,” above), I feel genuinely excluded from the decision-making process.
Take, for example, the flagship media events of the campaign, the televised debates with the four guys who lead the county’s so-called “major political parties.” For the sake of argument, let’s assume these painfully straight, white guys and their predominately white-guy parties actually care about the main issues they discuss, which focus on childcare, aboriginal rights, same-sex marriage and tax rates. (At least the tax part is believable.) Let’s assume I sit through a debate or two—or all four—and decide on the best candidate to represent me. No matter how excited I am about that candidate, I can’t vote for him.
The Canadian parliamentary system comes with a certain amount of estrangement built in, so it only lets me choose between the party representatives running in my local riding. Fair enough, that’s indirect democracy in action. Yet even in my riding I can’t vote for Gilles Duceppe’s Bloc Quebecois, which has candidates exclusively in Quebec. And the debate gets further out of touch with my riding by leaving out the Green Party, which is running candidates in each of Canada’s 308 ridings (more than the Liberal Party, the Conservative Reform Alliance Party or, obviously, the Bloc party).
Media coverage beyond the debates is further compromised. Like bookies watching—and selling—the odds, most news organizations have a slavish devotion to opinion polls, those putatively scientific snapshots of the public mindset. You probably know the narrative arc of the campaign as told through the polls: Liberal prime minister Paul Martin managed to lose the inertia and support that comes with leading a thriving country, and just in time for the January 23 vote Stephen Harper and his regressive Conservatives are gaining public momentum.
But this story bears little resemblance to Nova Scotia reality. Here, the New Democratic Party is strong, and people can remember that despite Stephen Harper’s new camera-friendly veneer of approachability, he is a longtime prickly ideologue, and his Alberta-born party is driven by revenge fantasies against eastern Canada to make up for decades of perceived western-bashing. It’s as if two elections are happening simultaneously, and during ours the emperor keeps forgetting his pants.
Nova Scotia isn’t sticking to the script, and coincidentally we are rarely included in the Globe and Mail’s otherwise thorough election coverage. The Globe has published several articles that look at the ups and downs of polls across the country—without once mentioning us. Then again, the province has just 11 seats out of the nation’s 308. So if we are going through a different election than the one in the news, is it because we don’t care about the rest of the country? Or because it doesn’t care about us?
Will you move to Mexico if Stephen Harper wins? Send your travel plans to me at: editor@thecoast.ca
This article appears in Jan 19-25, 2006.
The following is from CBC website url : http://www.cbc.ca/canadavotes/voterstoolkit/projecting.htmlRE: excerpt from on line article’s paragraph : Election stock markets”Sometimes, the most reliable indicator of how an election will turn out has come from the futures market. The idea is that when people put their own money at risk, they’ll do a better job at predicting who will win than polling. Polls ask who people want to win; futures markets look ahead and ask who they think will win.”I bbelieve the federal election also impacts common shares of many well connected Canadian corporation. For example, Power Corp., a well connected Quebec firm, is being recommended as a very good buy right now partially due to the uncertainty in the federal election.
The following is from CBC website url : http://www.cbc.ca/canadavotes/voterstoolkit/projecting.htmlRE: excerpt from on line article’s paragraph : Election stock markets”Sometimes, the most reliable indicator of how an election will turn out has come from the futures market. The idea is that when people put their own money at risk, they’ll do a better job at predicting who will win than polling. Polls ask who people want to win; futures markets look ahead and ask who they think will win.”I bbelieve the federal election also impacts common shares of many well connected Canadian corporation. For example, Power Corp., a well connected Quebec firm, is being recommended as a very good buy right now partially due to the uncertainty in the federal election.
Before the election I spoke to a lot of people about who they were going to vote for and those who had the strongest opinions said they were not going to vote at all. Now, I am not trying to pick a fight here but I have been apalled by how many people are willing to express their disdain in government while choosing to abstain from voting or taking political action themselves. Choosing not to vote is not a legitimate option. Getting involved in a party that represents your interests is, however. If our choices for Prime Minister are different shades of middle-aged white men, whose fault is it but our own for letting these men on television and into our parliament? Why are not more young or racially diverse people involved in political parties and running for office? In a democratic society the people are the ones who are supposed to be making the decisions as to who will be representing them. Choosing to sit on your couch and collect EI while going to the emergency ward for every sniffle does not help the process. To everyone who did not vote in the past election: if you did not like what you saw, get off your duff and do something about it!