rabble.ca Canadian federal election blog

Morning After Points

by Dru Oja Jay, the Dominion

CKUT’s Wednesday Morning After invited me to come and talk about the elections bright and early this morning. Voici mes talking points, albeit in more articulate form, not that I got to all of them:

• Proportional representation is on a lot of people’s minds, but it’s not going to happen. If it can’t be passed at a provincial level (so far, BC, PEI and Ontario have voted no) then it won’t happen nationally, as neither the Libs or Cons will be likely to support it (this is an interesting footnote, though).
• If that’s true, the Green Party has to do some thinking at this point. A spot in the debates, more media coverage than ever, no seats.
• No matter who people vote for, indications are that we’re not going to see anything even beginning to address colonial policies in Canada.
• The new, stringent requirements are causing havoc and confusion at the polls, as voters are turned away. The skew toward people with permanent addresses and bills in their name on voting day is undemocratic, and unjustifiable. There’s no significant case of voting fraud to respond to; the only reason to do it is to disenfranchise people—disproportionately, those more marginalized. If voting is democracy (subject to debate!), Elections Canada should have only one mandate: to make voting easier and more accessible, while preventing fraud and manipulation. So far, they’re doing the opposite of what they should be doing.
• In many ridings (Saskatoon-Rosetown-Biggar, for example), increasingly stringent voting regulations could have had an impact. We’ll never know, though.
• Since the 1980s, most Canadians’ wages have been stagnant or shrinking relative to the cost of goods. That was with almost constant economic growth. If we’re hitting a major recession, then the question is: who is going to take the cut? The uber-rich or the middle to working class? In the US, Barack Obama is talking about increasing taxes on the richest people. It’s a mild measure, to be sure, but no one is even talking like that in Canada, aside from the NDP’s mild proposal to reverse Harper’s corporate tax cuts. (More on this by Nik Barry-Shaw.)
• Parties that promise something other than the same old right wing economic policies always implement them anyway, so in a very skewed way, you can see why people might pick the Cons.
• A Liberal-NDP-Bloc coalition may be the only way Dion can stay in his current job. Politics aside, I would receive news of a coalition between Mr. Clarity Bill and Gilles Duceppe with something like glee.
• In all of a sudden talking about the economy, leaving out all but one allusion to the Green Shift, and then saying he would support Harper, Dion shed his dignity, which was the main thing he had going for him.
• Did I hear Harper talk about “working families”?
• Dion’s main mistake was to forget the main tenet of Liberal politics: pitch popular policies during the election, ram through unpopular policies once you’ve got a four year term to play with. Rinse, repeat.