Wednesday, January 11, 2012

The Time For Lesser-Evilism Has Arrived: Last Chance For Canadian Democracy

Let's be clear. We have a semi-democracy in Canada. But even the low-level of corporate-capitalist democracy was too much for stephen harper. Too many restrictions on his arbitrary policies.

Anyway, I was reading Orwell's Bastard and he was talking about how the Liberals should reconcile themselves to their third-place status and the NDP should be extending an olive branch to them so that they can come to some sort of arrangement to defeat the greater evil of harper's Rovian-style garbage here in Canada.

Canada is in the same place that the USA was in with the bush II vs Kerry campaign. At the time, I said that were I a US-American I would hold my nose and vote for Kerry, just to reassert that electoral politics wasn't completely hopeless. Stop the criminal bush II.

But bush II stole his second election, Kerry caved, and then, when the Democrats retook the legislature, they showed that elections are entirely meaningless in the USA.

Has the "conservative" wave stopped? We have one last chance to try to do things legally.

5 comments:

Beijing York said...

Too many politicians have not caught up with public dissatisfaction with representative democracy these days. They are perceived as being self-serving or serving some interest other than the constituents they represent.

Then you have the new right in the US and Canada that have mastered to tap in to some of that public dissatisfaction in the most disingenuous (Struassian manipulation) of ways - lying to the "little guy" about how they are there to represent them when in fact they are cementing the privilege and entitlement of the 1%.

thwap said...

Beijing York,

I agree with you. A lot of these people come from comfortable middle-class professional backgrounds, or they've been career politicians making a very decent income for years.

They don't see the anger created by insecurity and exploitation of the 50% of the population making less than $25,000 a year.

They don't see the disenchantment of the threatened sectors of the middle class, being forced to jump through hoops to avoid being "right-sized" in response to the global competition of wages.

Carmichael said...

The majority of sitting LPC or NDP MPs care less about you, me or the state of the nation than they do about what their party whip says.

And the party whips and leadership of all parties don't give a rats ass for Canada beyond whether their pensions will still be paid.

If you're a bigoted, redneck, gun lovin' asshole or an unthinking reflexive me-firster you'll love the new Canada.

The rest of us can die as far as the politicians and Conservatives are concerned.

thwap said...

Carmichael,

You might be right. But a lot of centre-left Canadians are calling for some sort of arrangement.

The drubbing the Liberals took and the likely decline in NDP polling numbers might produce something approaching a sense of reality amongst the professional politicians.

Carmichael said...

Maybe sometime during Harper's next majority but unlikely in the extreme before that.

By which time, of course, there will be nothing remaining of the Canada we've known all our lives and Harper's work will be complete.