Thank God election campaigns only run for 30 days. I don’t think I could take any more. I care about politics but elections are the political equivalent of being stopped at a red light – nothing is really happening – it’s all talk and most of that talk is unproductive, meaningless, and annoying.
If you watched the so called debate(s), you may ask yourself: was that a debate? A debate would imply that facts and arguments were used to persuade the listener that one policy is better than another. That was surely not the case in the recent leaders’ debate. There was almost no policy discussion. Election after election we endure this childish bickering that only politicians and kids can descend to. This isn’t the first time someone has written about how infantile election campaigns have become. But if they can’t even agree on how to fix the debate, how will they govern the country? Jack Layton said what millions of listeners were thinking that night. How can anything be accomplished in the adversarial climate which characterizes parliament today?
In the last 3 elections, “policy” was upstaged by fear mongering and character assassinations. The media has been no help. Most broadcasters have an “editorial slant” and by inflaming emotions, they circle the wagons around their readers and solidify their “brand”. They learned this from the Americans. It is good for profits but bad for the democratic process. The details of policy are rarely discussed, nor are the finer points of executing that policy – the devil is always in the details. The average Canadian has no idea what is really going on, especially when a part of the elective body’s job (they believe) is to spread disinformation. Sadly, the political process has become degraded to the bickering of school kids and the brutality of WWF knockdowns.
These are perilous times and the economic crisis is far from over, in spite of what stock prices look like. Goldman Sachs estimates that speculation is adding more than $27 to the price of a barrel of oil. Many people say that estimate is low. 100’s of billions of dollars are leaving Canada in order that a handful of people can “play” the market for insane profits. The World Bank says food inflation, which is also caused in part by speculation and the US Federal Reserve printing money (QE 1,2,), will cause starvation for millions of people. The world is crazy. Some economists are warning about hyperinflation and a possible collapse of the US dollar. How desperate must things get before politicians work together? What will it take to make MPs stop working for their parties and start working for us?
We need to change the system. We know that adversarial environments are toxic to creativity, innovation, and change-making in general. A company couldn’t survive in today’s competitive fast changing environment with such an ineffective form of government. It’s not the people that are not working, it is the system. A house divided against its self cannot stand.
Our system of government is hundreds of years old. 200 hundred years ago, everything moved so slowly even parliament could keep up. We can’t afford to be that inefficient today. We need a strong government who can act boldly and provide innovative leadership in the global community. That can’t happen when the people we elect are fighting with each other. It is neither effective nor fun to watch.