Will we have to side with better of two evils?

A14

Hanne Armstrong

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Sooner or later there's going to be another federal election, and in the interests of not letting myself become disenfranchised by not voting, I've been doing some hard thinking about my options. Time now to evaluate the players, I figure, not when they're campaigning and throwing around empty promises and dung as far as the eye can see.

I start with the Greens and the NDP, and, like them or not, I eliminate them both because neither is likely to win an election any time soon, despite the fact that they've both been picking up protest votes recently, courtesy of dissatisfaction with the two major players. Not being a separatist, I also eliminate the Bloq. Which leaves the Conservatives and the Liberals.

And I've come up with lists of what I like and don't like about each of the big two. Here we go, starting with the Conservatives.

What I like about them is...well...let's see...oh, they form a minority government as opposed to a majority government, so they have to watch their step a little at least.

What I don't like about the Conservatives. Okay, right from the get-go, Harper stopped the daily press scrum in Ottawa, replacing it with the presidential-style speaking from behind a lectern. This eliminates the need for him to have to think on his feet as microphones wave in his face, and it lets him dole out information of his own choosing in amounts of his own choosing. He claims it's more organized, more decorous than the daily scrum, but my gut tells me it's his fist grabbing onto and holding control.

Pretty much simultaneous with that, Harper started muzzling his own people. Basically, the only Conservatives allowed to speak with the press are himself or those he's vetted. There's that fist again.

Speaking of the press, through funding cuts Harper has done his bit towards castrating the CBC, which is one of if not the only mainline news network in the country that dares to object to the way he does things. Hmm, cause and effect? You've got to think so.

That brings us nicely to the arts and sciences, which have taken huge funding hits under Harper. Does he feel personally threatened by people with interests in things beyond his ken, or is he following the line that says if you weaken or eliminate a country's intellectuals you can easily control the rest of the country?

Let's move on to the environment. Gee, let's see, Harper has done, well, essentially nothing in this area, an area in which Canada used to be a world leader. Military, then. Yup, seems he loves the military. He's kept and increased troops in Afghanistan, and now there are rumblings that his promise to get us out of there in 2011 is going to be broken. That's okay, it's only costing us, according to a CBC report, about $1.3 million per day to be there; we can afford that, right? Do the math: $1.3 mil/day starting in 2002 = nearly $4 billion so far? Not counting the over 130 soldiers and civilians who have died over there, of course. But we can afford them too, right?

What about his credibility? Let's see, he got elected basically in reaction to the Sponsorship Scandal, by promising transparency and honesty in government. Meanwhile Conservative ridings are getting the lion's share of the current stimulus money, and his readiness to smear opponents in the manner of a schoolyard bully make him anything but honest and transparent. Plus, why is his name appearing on government cheques?

And there's something else that I call the American factor. Call me a raving paranoid lunatic, but on my bad days I could believe that Harper is a US infiltration attempt to make us their 51st state. From his control of information to his oily PR tactics to his policies on just about everything, it feels to me like Harper has a how-to manual printed in DC.

Enough of him. Let's move to the Liberals. Okay. Things I like about them. Hmm, they kept us out of the black hole that became Iraq. They said we'd only be in Afghanistan for two years. They endorsed the Kyoto Accord.

What I don't like is that they got us into Afghanistan, if only in a small way.

And then there's the Sponsorship Scandal: politicians and opportunists with their hands in the till until the country stank with it. It and the resultant Gomery Inquiry has cost us somewhere between 100 and 200 million dollars, though it did have a certain entertainment value and united the country in indignation.

And lately the Liberals have apparently become incapable of finding a viable leader. Stephane Dion had an environmental platform he was passionate about, but he was close to being the world's worst speaker. Michael Ignatieff appears to have no issues or platform, is about as politically inept as you can get and isn't sure what Canada is all about. His presence is a measure of the Liberals' pathetic desperation to find a leader, as is their trotting out of Justin Trudeau at every opportunity. Ignatieff's a dud, and Trudeau is only his father's son, nothing more.

Where, I ask myself, does that leave me? Either the Liberals or Conservatives will win, and I don't think the country can afford any more protest votes going to other parties.

So, I conclude, give me the back-room politics of the old school rather than the slick manipulation of the present. I'd rather vote for a bunch of disorganized people who I think have good national intentions, than I would for people who let one man dictate to them. I'd rather vote for the party that signed onto Kyoto, that said we'd be out of Afghanistan, than the one that seems hardly to recognize environmental concerns and keeps us in the Vietnam-like non-war started at the behest of the US to root out Bin Laden (not, as some would have us believe, to improve life for the Afghans).

Give me the Liberals, because I very much get the feeling that a vote for the Conservatives is a vote for Stephen Harper, while a vote for the Liberals is just that, a vote for the Liberals. I want no part of electing an autocrat, thank-you very much, especially one with Harper's policies and track record. I look back at Europe in the 1930s and shudder.

So, there it is. I've thought it through. For now.