Friday

Final Thoughts

Well it's been a couple of weeks, and I can finally make a quick note here. It went pretty sour. The manipulation and deceit sadly worked for them. So now we have to live with a Conservative majority government. The Liberal party has been decimated as well - so that change of leadership will at least be coming about. Dr. Ignatief has already resigned. The executive appears to be continuing to mess up the party's path forward, and we may well see Rae decide to take a pass on the mess too.

Jack Layton and the NDP scored a huge burst in seats, with an unexpected gain in popularity. The main gains were at the expense of the now nearly defunct BQ. Their leader, M Duceppe is out of his seat, and leadership role as well.

Happily the Greens got a seat in the house, sadly though, it was their leader, so we won't be seeing a change in that position for more than 4 years. Ms. May has worked a long time to get there, but I think they should be much further along than they are, mostly due to some poor riding choices in previous elections. They should have won a seat a couple of elections back, and be working on 3 or 4 by now.

Where does that bring us? Well over the next four years we can expect some catastrophic impacts on our freedoms, our position on the world stage and our progressiveness. We can expect:

Elimination of Gun Control - Our police will lose the ability to track who has a gun in their house, and the extra checking associated with gun ownership will be eroded. Apparently while we can license a car or register a dinnerware pattern, registering your gun makes hunting impossible, and oh so terribly unpleasant.

Anti-abortion legislation - say good-bye to a woman's right to choose. A predominantly male government will be able to push through legislation that pushes us back to the 70's.

A Big Prison agenda - now, this is not big prisons versus little prisons. This is a corporatization of prisons that has been on the agenda for a while. Remove rehab programs, and ignore the fact that 3/4 of all inmates are illiterate, and well over half suffer from mental illness. I would be all for a simple enhancement to the conditions in which we incarcerate prisoners to make it easier for the guards and management of the inmates, but this will be capacity increases at the expense of rehab, and in support of an incarcerate without judicial flexibility, which will directly result in an increase in crime rates, as we take minor offenders and train them to be hard-core offenders. Great.

Religion meet Government. The core evangelical sky-god worshippers who run the Conservative party will begin to re-route funding away from secular NGO's and into the hands of their evangelical pals. We will see increased corruption, reduced tolerance for diverse thought, and a further polarization of our society.

Our position in the UN, and on Green treaties. We missed out on broader participation on the security council, and are near pariahs at international meetings on the environment. We can expect that to continue.

I could go on, but isn't that bad enough? Oh, and open government? access to information? Those things were bad enough in the minority parliament, just wait to see what we've called upon ourselves now.

If there is one thing we need to do over the next four years, it's focus on revisions to our electoral system. We have an authoritarian regime lining up their ducks based on approval of 24% of the voting eligible population at best. We need an instant run-off style voting system that preserves our existing parliamentary system, but ensures that broad consensus about which government we DON'T want is as well captured as the one we DO want.


So you won't see election news here until 2015... but in the meantime, I'll try to share occasional thoughts and events relevant to the predictions above, and hopes for progress on the latter point regarding the electoral system.

Keep strong Canada, these will be trying times for democracy and freedom.

No comments: