rabble.ca Canadian federal election blog

Can we save ourselves from our party leaders?

This is part of a longer story at http://nowtoronto.com/news/story.cfm?content=164884

by Alice Klein

Welcome to our new progressive reality – the leaderless election.

With another Harper government looming like listeriosis over a meat counter, it’s beyond heartbreaking that we have no Barack Obama-type to inspire or offer hope of any kind. But there are some upsides to our political conundrum if we are smarter this election than we have ever been.

Progressives of one stripe or another are the majority here. Democracy could be our sweet spot, but only if we find a way to land ourselves there. Canada’s fertility of political expression, when fed to our first-past-the-post electoral system, is now seriously prone to cancel itself at the polls, leaving the reins of government in the hands of dangerous Conservatives.
Suddenly, Obama’s mantra of bi-partisanship and cooperation takes on, for me, an unexpected Canadian twist.

If we, the electorate, play follow the partisan leader, we will split the vote and elect Harper. It is time for a change. Can we do it? Yes we can (I hope).
But first we need to clear our minds of two outmoded lefty ideas and one big Liberal assumption.

Fellow lefties, please, let’s get with Einstein and finally acknowledge that everything is relative. There is no way to exercise your vote for absolute good. We need to stop criticizing the idea of choosing lesser evils.
In life, we need to make smart choices in limited circumstances that give us the best possible outcomes. So, too, at election time. True, there are times when a symbolic statement is the best one can do. This is not one of those times.

Here’s the second, bigger point the left needs to face. Neo-conservatism has changed the world. Now that its shock-doctrine politics have been shaped into a global fine art, there is indeed a meaningful difference between Conservatives and Liberals. The old tweedle-dee, tweedledum idea that they are just the same belongs in that proverbial “dustbin of history.”
Of course, you shouldn’t have to say that to anyone who’s spent recent years in Ontario. We had a good dose of shock prep administered by Mike Harris, and it wasn’t pretty. If you are not sure about whether it’s worth choosing the lesser of two evils, ask anyone in the social service world. They will assure you that the weak-kneed and often wrong-minded Dalton McGuinty is night and day to Mike Harris. It’s that simple.
Ontario ain’t nirvana, but we have a health tax instead of deficits and spending cuts made on the backs of the sick and the poor.
But Tony Clement, Jim Flaherty and John Baird are not only still with us. They have moved up. It’s up to us to move them out. The only way we can do that is to cooperate across party lines so we don’t split the votes that can defeat them and all their scary friends.

In the 39 ridings where the Conservatives won the last election by a margin of 10 per cent or less, a small vote shift between parties would have elected 24 extra Liberals, four more Bloc members and at least 10 extra NDPers.
Informed co-operation would also elect two Greens (Blair Wilson in BC and Elizabeth May in Nova Scotia).

If the Conservatives stay at the 38 per cent popular support and there is no cross-party movement to cooperate among all the parties’ grassroots, the final cross-country tally would likely put the Conservatives just three seats short of a majority.
We are at a historic moment of dan-ger/opportunity, and it is sexy – in a certain way.
On October 14, either the grassroots will win-win-win by informing ourselves deeply about our own riding before we vote, or the leaders will take us all down.

*Look for a longer version of this article in this week’s NOW magazine.