So wow, what a night hmm?
Been trying to piece together a few thoughts on what the last few weeks meant. My last political post on here was how disappointed I was with the Trudeau blackface scandal that I ended up removing my lawn sign. In the end we put it back up. The issues facing our country are too large for any one person’s bad decisions in the past to throw away our future.
For me and my wife, our biggest issue was climate change. Which party took it seriously and put forward a credible plan to address it. For us it was the Liberals. While the NDP and Greens were ambitious in their thinking, the details of their plans were lacking and we’d end up wasting four years doing nothing but trying to implement a flawed plan. Not to mention, but they were never ever going to form government. Sorry, but thats just the math.
If I had to pick a ballot question for this election, it was who was the least hypocritical choice to lead this country? And yes I realize that is a pretty horrible question, but alas can you prove me wrong? Scheer wanted to use the Trudeau blackface scandal as a bad faith argument to let his own party escape their own racism and homophobia. When he realized that wasn’t going to work, he abandoned it in his talking points immediately. We then later learned that he had be hiding a few secrets of his own from us. Canadians responded with introducing his pot to the Liberals’s kettle.
Singh was a nice guy. Someone what I’d picture a few Canadians would like to spend some time to get to know better. Problem was they gave him ample opportunity to sit down with them and chat for years prior to this election. You can’t show up at the 11th hour and expect the country to hand over the PMO to you, just because you have some impressive social media content.
May was May. I doubted she’d make that big of a splash other than disrupting some of the progressive vote across the country. I doubt she will stay around much longer in the Federal scene.
My biggest complaint this election however is the media. For years we’ve heard them bemoan the demise of traditional media. Yet here we are in an election, prime time opportunity for them to show us what they can do and they utterly, utterly failed all of us. Conservative or progressive, no one benefitted from being informed, because we weren’t. We were just told of the latest gaffe, or the latest scandal on the campaign trail. Rarely did I read or hear anything about real policy and where the parties stood on a variety of topics. I mean to learn a comparison of the parties various climate change platforms, we had to go to Chatelaine? I mean no fault to the good people at Chatelaine, but c’mon Globe and Mail, Toronto Star or National Post. This should’ve been your bag. Why didn’t a paper devote a weekend edition to one particular issue? One week on the economy, one on climate change, one on indigenous issues, one on social issues etc? Present what the parties were going to do for each. If a party wasn’t ready to tell us, well too bad, you’re no comment. Media isn’t a mouthpiece for political parties. They are supposed to be a vital lynchpin in the creation of an informed democracy. This election, and for the years prior they have pathetically failed us all.
One caveat on the above paragraph, I did discover a number of interesting alternative media that I found did do a bit of a deep dive into various issues affecting our country. Canadaland was pretty good, although not perfect, National Observer was a very good place sit down and read the issues, and I really enjoyed The Big Story podcast. Just my observations on that .
This election divided us pretty badly. I may talk on that in a later post because I’m running out of space here, and I doubt you want me to continue. We’re in unknown territory as a country here. We’re going to have to put aside a lot of presumptions we had in the past about left and right politics and legitimately reach out to others to make this work. I hope that the Liberals, the NDP, the Bloc and the Greens can come together to pass meaningful legislation that the majority of this country want to see pass.
We’ll have to see what the future holds for us. Until then, remember: we’re all in this together.
Joel MacLeod.ca 