With joyous wisdom, the idiot slaves have chosen their masters. So said my friend Serge, back in Montreal on the day after Canadians elected Brian Mulroney.
Now this. A man who has belonged to all the parties – Liberal, PC, Reform, Alliance and Conservative – in his short, robotic life now rules the Dullest Democracy on Earth®. Yes, he rules. Stephen Harper rules.
Sweet Jesus.
The pundits – a word only used by pundits, and now me, to describe the fatal combination of an utter lack of inquisitiveness combined with a Tourette’s like incapacity to stop asking the same inane questions and answer them with the same stock answers – pore over the corpse of last night’s Exercise of the Franchise and declare that the voters wanted to send a message. They wanted, you see, to punish the Liberals (good idea) but not give the Reform Pa yes, sorry “Conservative” (get it?)party a majority. The blather goes on, and the hoi polloi wait for hours to get their say with Rex to describe the nuanced communication that the New Prometheus of Democratic Ideals, the Canadian Voter® engages in during elections.
What a load of crap. Voters in Canada are given an instrument to express their wishes – the single ballot, first past the post system – that seems to me to lack the subtlety that the flattering classes ascribe to The Voter. By this measure, the 17 year old Ginos down on Dundas Street West in their tricked out fifteen year old Honda Civics are dictating the sequel to Paradise Lost every time they lean on the horn. All this attribution of subtlety to the electoral system has a useful effect, of course; it distracts us from the obvious lack of fairness and, yes, subtlety of the current antiquated system.
The embarrassment of Party 1 receiving 17% of the vote and getting less than ten percent of the representation, andParty 2, which is devoted to the dissolution of the country getting about half that and having about one seat in seven is – well, Canadian. A country of not so much sheep as feedlot cattle, standing in their own shit. Meantime, Party 3 recieves about twice what party 1 gets, and has almost five times the power, and gets to run the show. To avoid instability, Party 1 is expected to form a coalition with Party 3, even though their political positions are diametrically opposite. And if all the parties besides Party 3 – the “losing parties” were permitted to form a coalition, their votes would easily carry any legislation they introduced, while encouraging a co-operative conduct that is supposed to be the point of the exercise. Additionallly, their collective popular vote would actually represent a majority of the population. Instead, in the alleged interests of stability a party with about one third of the popular vote will be paired with one least sympathetic to them, with a collective popular vote barely over 50 percent, the most unstable pairing of parties available.
Yes, its true, that the Conservatives will be shackled by their lack of a majority. I appreciate the value of a good coalition as much as the next man. But this is not a good coalition, and the goal seems to be to create the conditions where an already weak country, next to the strongest country in the world will flounder for another two years with ineffectual government: just what works best for our buddies down south.
