What's Disappointing About This Election

Don't get me wrong. I'm glad it's here. It had to happen. The damage that harper was doing to Canadian democracy was like letting someone put one drop of weak poison after another into your glass of water. "The first one hasn't killed me. Therefore it's fine to continue to put more in." Yes, the sun still rose in the east after Bev Oda lied to Parliament. Yes, the sky was still blue after harper's government decided that the legislature shouldn't receive any information on the policies they were supposed to vote on.

But if we allow governments to withhold any and all information about what they're doing, it's a bad thing for democracy.

If we allow governments to alter public documents to justify decisions made later or to hide their tracks, how far away is that from having a "Ministry of Truth" as in George Orwell's 1984?

If we allow governments to, at whim, invent and reinvent the rules that we, as a people, created to govern ourselves, how can that be good for democracy?

So I'm glad that we have our election. I'm glad that Parliament ruled that harper was in contempt and defeated him. It was a right and honourable defence of our political traditions and institutions.

But I'm disappointed that the media, while doing a great job of exposing harper's hypocrisy on coalitions, continues, for the most part, to write about him as if he's a legitimate political choice for Canadians. He's a liar. Contemptuous of the system he expects us to obey so long as he controls it. He's a hypocrite. It should be fairly simple. If somebody betrays your trust in a huge, unforgivable way, you don't then consider them as anything but a non-person in your life. (It's kind of like we're thinking like this guy: "You robbed my parents of all their money. You seduced my teenage daughter and got her pregnant. You slandered me at work and got me fired. Should I write you a Christmas card this year?")

harper has decided that it's okay for Canadian governments to use fraud to get elected. To sow regional animosities. To hypocritically condemn acceptable parliamentary practices. To falsify documents. To withhold information. To obstruct Parliamentary committees. To refuse to allow bureaucrats to appear before Parliamentary committees. To bully and slander public servants who do not lie for him. And to castrate the legislative branch of government. It's no longer relevant that he wants to debate Ignatieff on his own or not. It's no longer newsworthy that he's visiting with South Asian voters and learning how to hold a cricket bat. The man is a menace. There's nothing more to debate.

Alas, alack! They still troop on his campaign bus and report how he petulantly refuses to answer more than a few questions a day. Or they make all sorts of fun out of how he chickens out of a one-on-one debate with Michael Ignatieff after challenging him to one.

What's really depressing though is that a lot of the damage has already been done. Our national political culture has been infected with harper's contempt for our fragile and limited democracy. The view that Parliament is a "kangaroo court" where everything is all stupid, self-interested partisanship all the time, is more ingrained in our minds than ever. The view that all politicians are all crooks, the view that our political process is a joke, and will always be a joke, and that this joke is told by a completely inferior grade of people, and is therefore of no account, is more firmly entrenched than ever. Furthermore, the extremes of executive arrogance, secrecy, and abuse of power that harper has tested pushed the envelope for subsequent governments. Will it be the case that just like Obama has in many ways gone beyond the abuses of the bush II regime, that later Canadian governments will use harper's extremism as the new normal and further denigrate our system's democratic restraints on the powers of the executive branch?

I'm disappointed that in this context, Liberal Party zombies, more concerned with the ability of their shit-assed party to dominate others than they are with genuine democracy and genuinely progressive policies, are spewing the same old "Liberal, Liberal, always Liberal" drone. That in this election, which is a battle for the soul of Canada as a democracy, they are more wedded to partisan self-interest than with their country's well-being? When Jack Layton himself is telling people to consider riding-by-riding how best to neutralize the harpercons, these Liberal bloggers are yammering about how our ONLY option is to vote for the party of security certificates, Colombian free trade deals, imperialism, and austerity.

If I'm capable of realizing that the harpercons' and their contemptuous treatment of Canadian democracy makes it important not to defeat a Liberal at the risk of handing victory to a harpercon, why can't they?

I'm disappointed that in the shadow of the biggest post-1930s recession ever, caused as it was by the excesses of a deregulated financial sector and the hollowing out of the people's economy created between 1945-1973, that we still wander around yammering about the same stupid things that Milton Friedman, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan used to say. When I read some ignoramus saying that the NDP remains a party of the past, not attuned to 21st Century realities, I have to ask myself what 21st Century realities they're talking about. Did not the attacks on workers, the slashing of taxes, the neutering of government regulations, the globalization of economic decision-making, the tax-cuts for the wealthiest, the "freeing" of "enterprise" NOT produce an economic disaster that will cost us over one-hundred billion dollars in the long run?

From a media system that normalizes horror and which fails to respond to a clearly authoritarian menace for what he is, to a lazy, self-satisfied, deluded, hypocritical electorate, to our inability to recognize world realities, I'm disappointed with Canada's political culture.