A Blah Campaign

When I consider the number of things to be thankful for on this thanksgiving weekend, the ending of the provincial election campaign comes near the top of the list. It has been several weeks of the usual empty promises, which we all know or hope will never be kept. Our local politicians set out planks of jobs to be created, wages improved and immediate healthcare, all things that they have little or no control to implement.

While the Premier crows about the number of jobs created in the past four years, a little thought into how many more people came into the workforce would indicate that normal economic growth supplied most of those jobs. Perhaps his guarantees to the Auto Pact held some jobs to build cars in Canada – the same cars that Canadians pay more for than our American cousins – created some of his jobs, but it was market forces that really created those jobs. Positions created in the Public Service may account for some of the premier’s numbers, but those service-sector jobs only eat up our taxes.

Locally, our MPP was unable to keep jobs at the Laundry (market forces) but accepted kudos for ONR jobs (market forces). The other candidates claim they could do more, but in the face of the collapse of the US economy, one wonders just what those new jobs will be. Forget US tourism and selling our trees to the American homebuilders. Moving government workers around creates a false economy for real estate people and moving vans, but little else. Besides, the next government will likely move them all back! All this does is swallow more of our taxes.

The redistribution of those taxes is an issue, but neither our local MPP nor our local politicians can come to an equitable solution. Much of the problem lies at the Federal level where the system of sharing the wealth between the have and have-not provinces remains unresolved. Cities like Toronto, whose size exceeds some provinces, need a new way to pay for the services required by its citizens. Perhaps we should have been discussing ways to fix these fiscal imbalances instead of the red herring that Tory dragged in front of the electorate.

One should not fault John Tory for his stance on faith-based schools. We should fault the other political parties, and ourselves, for being drawn into the completely stupid idea in the first place. That Tory finally realized the issue was going to cost him the election and did a back-flip that scored a clean 10, should tell us something of the man and his convictions. We scoff at the politics of the Taliban and the Christian Right in the United States and jump right into the same religious mess ourselves. At least we were distracted from the real issues in education that we should be thinking about.

Not only was the Green Party a joke in our riding, but unfortunately it is still a bit of a laugh provincially and nationally. Not that the environment is not a serious issue, but after listening to the economic platform of that party, anyone knows we could never survive as a country under their ideas. Yet, the other parties seem content to give lip service to environmental issues, offering to take baby-steps instead of firm immediate action. Perhaps the environmental issues will be solved through the education of the next generations for it seems in the meantime all our politicians can do is plant a few trees. Coal-fired power plants, auto emissions, water pollution, garbage – those must be issues for some higher level of government.

The one issue that struggled for attention was the new system of electing our politicians. The whole campaign for the vote on the second ballot has been misunderstood, intentionally distorted and generally given little consideration. When the mayor of Sudbury says he knows nothing about it, his knowledge spoke volumes. On the other hand, our mayor came out flatly against the idea. He likes the idea of being able to select our own candidates. That may explain why he has some problems with our current MPP who was parachuted in by the Liberals in the last election. One wonders how many people were influenced by the disgruntled comments of a New Zealand politician and her inability to garner consensus on a pet project. A week from now we will be grumbling about how we are being governed by a party that got less than 50% of the popular vote.

Following such a blah campaign, I think I will have to split my vote this year. I may just put a very small X beside each of the Liberal, Conservative and NDP candidates’ name. I can then say that I have tried Mixed Member Proportional voting!