Next May 2, 23 million voters will have the “opportunity” to vote in Canada’s 308 ridings for the candidate of their choice. From here on in, every day will bring its dose of “firm promises” to convince us to give one party or another the power to decide for us till the next election. For our part, we will not be voting. Here is why.
We are faced with a set of political parties, some more or less on the right, some more or less on the left, all of them ready to decide on our behalf and to defend the politicians’ powers and privileges and of those of the business class that support their campaigns. To win your vote, anything goes: vote buying, hypocrisy, half-truths, false promises, outright lies. And as we all know very well, this election, like all the others, will not change this situation.
The legitimacy of parliamentary or representative democracy rests entirely on our right to vote. But why do we vote? For who do we vote for really? For political machines to govern over us, for party hacks who specialize in selling us political programs with no guarantees, without the ability to return the damaged goods for a refund, without the ability to break the contract until the next election. In other words, we are asked to give away our power to decide, our power to govern ourselves, for four years, without the right to really see or have a say over that the politicians will do with this power.
Let’s take a look at these politicians shall we, starting with the Conservatives and the Liberals. These two parties have been walking over us…since Confederation! These two cliques have been exchanging power for over 100 years: not surprising then that they consider parliament like their private playground and that they present themselves as the only parties “responsible” enough to hold power.
Beside them, playing second fiddle, we find the NDP, the Bloc, and more recently, the Green Party. These parties, in their own way, each present themselves as the “alternative” to the political dinosaurs and they each seek to channel in terms of votes the anger of the voters. You know, the famous “protest vote.”
But far from proposing a new way of doing things they repeat ad nauseam what they have learned from the other guys. Where does the Bloc come from? From a small group of nationalist MPs led by Lucien Bouchard who broke away from the Liberal and Conservative parties in 1990. How does the NDP govern when they win provincial elections? Like the Liberal party, the same one they have thought about merging with at the federal level. And the Green Party? Its “neither left, nor right” politics leads it to propose everything and its opposite, as long as that allows it to pick up a few thousand extra votes. Nothing new under the sun here…
Being forced to watch this sad circus, we become cynical. In turn, populists and demagogues feed off this cynicism, allowing them to push for the most reactionary views, without even opposing the status quo. In the face of a society moving ever more to the right, many take refuge behind the illusion of “the strategic vote.”
