Here we go round the mulberry bush. . .

[velvetpage]

For the second time in twelve months, Canadians will have a general election. The exact date is uncertain as yet, but the political pundits who report on such things for newspapers are predicting the end of June.



The signs are clear for all to see. The Liberal government is embroiled in a scandal that has cost billions. Quebec is likely to go entirely Bloc Quebecois as a result. Dalton McGuinty, Ontario's Liberal premier, is distancing himself from Ottawa - or rather, continuing to do so. He has found an issue to blether about in the media, something that he can manufacture worry and outrage over and something that will show him up as a good guy for Ontario in the face of the mean federal government. It's working, too. He's even got Stephen Harper, Conservative Leader, on his side: the mock in parliament yesterday was that Harper understands why Martin would be distancing himself from certain Liberals right now, but surely the Premier of Ontario isn't asking for sponsorship money!

Closer to home (for me) is the riding nomination news. My current MP is Tony Valeri, a Liberal cabinet minister who won the nomination primarily because his supporters stayed in line to vote longer than the competition's. The Tories are courting Brad Clark, a former provincial Conservative cabinet minister. He's a good choice. I have never heard anything bad about him personally, and I was involving the the campaign that saw him voted out of office. The line we were told to use (that I was using anyway) was that Brad Clark was a good guy who happened to be on the wrong side of politics.

Now, in Hamilton, there are really two choices: Liberal, or NDP. (The NDP is the far-left socialist party.) I don't like the NDP; they don't seem to have a good grasp of a balance sheet, and I'm paying too much taxes now. I can't afford them. The Liberals are worse; they pay lip service to balanced budgets, but they get those balanced budgets by cutting services while the size of government continues to grow. NOT ACCEPTABLE. The Conservatives would aim for a balanced budget, but they'd do it by cutting both the size of government (good thing) and services that are needed (bad thing.) Classic example: any pretense of a socialized daycare system will be gone very quickly upon the election of a Conservative government. Can't handle that.

So I'm stuck with a bunch of bad choices. This narrows it down to three, really: suck it up and vote Conservative, on the grounds that any change is a good change at this point and they have the best chance of actually forming a government; suck it up and vote NDP strategically because there's a good chance they could win in this riding and that would rob the Liberals of a key seat; or place a protest vote with the Green Party, who have a snowball's chance in Stelco's furnace of actually winning a seat around here.

Last spring, I went with the protest vote. This spring, I just don't know yet. We'll see.

Comments

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Cool! I'll add when I get home tonight.

This is an unlocked post, though, so you may want to delete the comment to prevent everyone and their brother from seeing it. It's in my inbox, so I'll be able to find it.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Now I wanna read it! Whatever it was.

[shavastak.livejournal.com]

I agree with Pyat, you have piqued my curiosity. Darn you!

[wggthegnoll.livejournal.com]

I'll ask about this on Friday, unless it's something you'd rather not share.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

It's about someone's instant message name, so that I can add them without having the whole world know. It's nothing serious.

[wggthegnoll.livejournal.com]

As a socialist I don't like what either the liberals or conservatives have been doing (or want to do). But the real thing that scares me about a conservative government is their stance on things like gay marriage, abortion, and (what I feel is a) strong religious bias.

I know provincial and federal politics are not the same and you can't always compare them, but if you're considering voting Conservative think back at what Harris did to our province in his 8 years of leadership. Now imagine that being done on a country-wide scale. I'm not sure about you, but to me that would be nightmarish.

Also, if the conservatives had been in power back when Bush asked for help with the Iraq war we might have been part of the "coalition of the willing". That would have been unacceptable.

[shavastak.livejournal.com]

Tell me, are Canadian conservatives as bad (religious-bias-wise) as American conservatives?

I guess to be fair, most conservatives in America are reasonable about their religion; it's just that the Republican party has been hijacked by the nutcases.

By the way, wggthegnoll, I like the icon.

[wggthegnoll.livejournal.com]

I'd say their not as bad, though the whole gay-marriage issue has made them show their true colours. Now don't get me wrong, there are Christians that aren't against gay-marriage and non-Christians that are, but on average gay-marriage is a big no-no with many people due to religious beliefs - homosexuality being a sin, etc.

Not being a Christian I feel it's very inappropriate for any political party to use Christian beliefs (or any other religion) as a basis for forming or changing laws, especially those that protect our rights of freedom. Though the Conservative party doesn't stress this as much as the current US Republican party, it has been stated by many of their politicians that they do make choices based on their religious beliefs.

I've discussed this at length with velvetpage so she should be quite familiar with my thoughts on this.

Oh and thanks about the icon, I'm considering something similar to get as a tat.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I never did get a satisfactory answer from you on one part of this debate. I understand that you want politicians to represent what their constituents want; that makes sense to me and I can agree to it. But what do you want them to do when their constituents are pretty much evenly split on an issue? How do they decide how to vote?

My thought is that someone who has a faith and lives by it can use that faith to form their political views, in the absence of a clear directive from their contituents - and only then.

[wggthegnoll.livejournal.com]

If their constituents are split on an issue then yes, they have to make the decision for themselves (and I also agree that they should only make their own decision when this is the case).

Concerning religion, I believe it is possible to form full political and moral stances not based on religion. The gay marriage debate shouldn't be a debate on whether or not it's against the Christian definition of marriage (or sin!), rather it should be a debate about whether or not government-recognised marriage is a basic human right or not. That debate shouldn't have anything to do with religion, rather it's about what's best for our society.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

The problem is that we've got two competing definitions of marriage - the legal union for taxation and childrearing purposes, and the religious union in the sight of God. There's no reason why the second has to change just because the first does, but many churches simply don't recognize that.

We've had the debate about the role of religion in forming political/moral stances, but we got sidetracked in the middle of it. I think you and I are operating with competing definitions: I define a worldview - any worldview, including an atheistic one - as a religious viewpoint, and you don't. If you have a faith and it doesn't inform how you view the world, then I would argue you're not practising that faith, whatever it may be.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

My short answer is "nowhere near," but I'd better qualify it.

In general, Canadian Christians see it as part of their faith to support socialist programs such as education and medicare. I have never heard even the hardest-line right-wing Christian Canadian say that public medicare should be scrapped entirely, though I've heard many suggest different levels of privatization. Also, the Conservative party is the most common political rallying point for right-leaning Christians, but I know just as many Christians who vote further left because of the "socialism as love-thy-neighbour" angle.

That said, the gay-marriage debate has split the country down somewhat religious lines; you've got the Catholics and the right-wing evangelicals saying it's a sin, and the middle-of-the-line people saying "give them the same benefits as married couples but call it something else," and the liberal Christians who see no point in splitting hairs like that. Then of course there's the non-Christians asking why decisions are being made on religious lines at all.

So - no, the Conservative party is nowhere near as far to the right as the Republicans; I'd put their position similar to the more-right-leaning Democrats on most issues. You don't have any parties socialist enough to match most of our political spectrum.

[anidada.livejournal.com]

Re: public medicare (though not necessarily referencing faith)... Preston Manning and Mike Harris (via the Fraser Institute) released a report (http://www.fraserinstitute.ca/shared/readmore.asp?sNav=nr&id=653) saying the gov't should get out of healthcare (http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1113388364461&call_pageid=968332188492&col=968705899037&DPL=IvsNDS%2f7ChAX&tacodalogin=yes). I think there's cause for concern with regard to the current federal and provincial parties simply because the elected members and the people who consistently elect them are by and large the same ones who produced Manning and Harris.

And let's not even talk about a certain former conservative PM (http://andrewcoyne.com/2005/04/talking-of-envelopes-full-of-cash.php). (Links courtesy of rentagurkha's other blog (http://www.la-mancha.net/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/797).)

I respect the difficulty in choosing someone trustworthy to vote for (let alone choosing someone based on their party) -- but (no pun intended) there isn't enough money in the world to make me vote conservative. :(

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

What the report actually says is that the FEDERAL government should get out of healthcare and leave it to the provinces - which was where it started to begin with. Frankly, I think they should be going the other way - make health care a federal program rather than a provincial one.

I agree, though, it's worrisome.

I haven't decided by any means, but it's one of the options I'm open to if I decide I could live with what I see of their actual platform (as opposed to a political bombshell by two has-beens) over the next two months.

[anidada.livejournal.com]

Fair enough.

Just a note for completion's sake: La-Mancha.net (http://www.la-mancha.net/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/803) has further analysis of the report, now.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

The link's not working, Ani.

[anidada.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm with you on the above. The conservatives that wrecked this province and the conservatives currently seeking federal power are of a piece -- and an exceptionally unsavoury piece, at that. Also not terribly keen on the possibility of a conservative/BQ coalition (paradoxical, that).

I have hopes that the NDP in its current incarnation would have a better grasp of governance than its predecessors. And I believe they're less corrupt than any other party out there, anyway, which does count for something.

I could be wrong, but I haven't seen any evidence that taxes for folks in our income bracket (that is to say, working class) would increase under an NDP government. Frankly, I've seen far more of that sort of thing from the provincial conservative/liberal governments than is reasonable, to say nothing of the feds. The NDP, after all, generally holds to the line that taxes are for the rich and for corporations (usually, these are the folks who get big tax breaks from the liberals and conservatives), and that's fine by me. :)

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

From an economic standpoint, taxing the corporations brings with it other problems. Pretty much the only thing Harris got right, IMO, was reducing the amount it cost to employ people in Ontario. Under Rae, employers were paying just about the same amount FOR the employee in taxes as they paid TO the employee in salary. The result was high unemployment - companies couldn't afford to hire as many people. There has been a decrease in unemployment rates since Harris, and since the Liberals haven't added much yet, the trend hasn't reversed itself. That's a good thing, and something the federal Conservatives would likely do a good job of.

The one and only area where I'm really worried about Conservative policy is the national daycare program. We need it, badly, and they'd cut it. Everything else - well, they're not going to touch gay marriage or abortion, they're more likely to put money INTO health care than take it out, and if they cut back some of the big-government initiatives of the Liberal term in Ottawa, that's all to the good.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

There is a religious bias, certainly, but it's tempered by the generally socialist leanings of Canadians in general. I'm not too worried about that. Even abortion and gay marriage - I think the Conservatives would leave them both alone, as the Liberals have done for abortion, because it's a lightning-rod for criticism and they don't want to piss people off the way Mulroney did. Don't forget that we've been in a legal vacuum over abortion for - what, a bit more than two decades? - through a large part of which the conservatives had the country's largest ever majority. They did nothing about it then, I see no reason why they would worry about it now. Officially, the conservative stance on gay marriage is, "Leave well enough alone." If the liberals manage to pass it before leaving office, as seems likely, that won't be a problem, either.

The thing is, the really big social-spending programs are all provincial - health, welfare, education. Other than changing the cash flow situation - and the Liberals have done tons of that, to the detriment of the provinces - there aren't a lot of things they can cut back on that will directly affect us at the bottom. I'd be prepared to give it a try for a term and see what happens - while giving the Liberals a chance to get their collective asses in gear.

[wggthegnoll.livejournal.com]

Think again, today cabinet voted for Martin's legislation legalizing same-sex marriage across the country and it was something like 160 to 120, with the majority of Conservatives voting against the legislation. With conservatives in power they won't overturn the court's decision, true, but they won't help people who wish to be married in provinces like Alberta either.

Anyway, I could never vote Conservative since I'm very much against their platform. It's kind of a surprise to me that you would consider it, but I respect your choice. I'm just glad I have friends that vote and actually care what's happening politically in our country.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Doesn't the new legislation make it legal across the country?

I never said they'd vote for it - only that if the matter were not resolved when they took power, that they'd leave it unresolved rather than trying to take things backwards.

I would not vote Conservative provincially ever again. (Yes, to my shame I've done it before.) However, federally is another matter entirely. I'm not ruling them out, at any rate. I want to see what their platform is before I make a decision.

[r-caton.livejournal.com]

We have a choice this May 5th as to whether we want "a touch of the night" with Michael Howard or more of the same (ie lies, lies, and not even an attempt to justify them because when you are the good guy and invariably correct why should you need to?) with Teflon Tony B'liar.

When you get to choose we will already be turning on the spit.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

A change is usually a good thing. I don't doubt you personally will go with Howard, but it will be interesting to see how the rest of the UK goes.

[r-caton.livejournal.com]

The Lords will be done.
I don't frankly have any faith in the UK population even turning out to vote....
And New Labour recently revealed a talent for rigging elections with fraudulent postal votes.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

They made their bed with Bush two years ago. One should not be surprised that they're learning more than expected.

[r-caton.livejournal.com]

Oh, they were bent to start with. Most New Labour politicians have had politics and manipulation as their main interest since their (subsidised, usually) student days...
The MP for Slough Fiona McTaggart was at Kings as a student before and after as well as while I was there....