Election Special

It’s not just that Harper and the Tories are so smug in the wake of their majority win.  It’s that they’re churning out the propaganda with such vigour.  I feel like we’re heading into territory I’ve not experienced since I’ve been old enough to vote:  the Americanization of our federal politics.

As a Canadian, I try to avoid writing about American politics.  But in this case to do so speaks to my point about what’s happening in our own nation, so bear with me.  One aspect of American politics that has always maddened and horrified me is the far (or perhaps not so far) right and ur-Republican m.o. of always being in disagreement with the Democrats no matter what–good of the nation be damned.  There is a power hunger in the right that trumps any bi-partisan effort that could actually better the lives of actual Americans.  Rather than working with their counterparts across the aisle to do the right thing, they prefer to keep up a deafening chant of misinformation, misdirection and pure mischief.

If George W. Bush had managed to have Bin Laden killed, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, the pundits on Fox News, and all of their friends would have been crapping their pants with happiness and there wouldn’t have been a word of negativity.  But it happened under Obama’s watch, so suddenly it’s problematic that Bin Laden was given a respectful burial (hell, it’s the least you can do after assassinating someone).  And apparently Obama’s announcement was riddled with too many personal pronouns.  Seriously?   And this gem:  George W. should get credit despite his being out of office for over three years now.  Right.  Totally.  Amazingly, Obama has to watch his step so that it doesn’t look like he’s trying to politicize this issue for his own gain because somehow it would be in bad taste.  Can  you imagine the Bush administration not taking credit for this?  Yeah, me neither.

How does all this negative nay-saying help the nation or add to the dialogue in a meaningful way?  You’re right.  It doesn’t.  But frankly, those are fairly innocuous examples.  The real problem is when you get right wing blowhards repeating the phrase “death panel” over and over again, when an affordable and sustainable health care bill is the goal.  Worse than a dip in approval ratings for the Obama administration, you have the very people who should be happy about some sort of universal health care legislation, fighting against it–to their own detriment.

I’ve often sat back, if not smug, at least relieved that I don’t live in the US and that I’m not having to wage war against right wing whackos who would work this damn hard to ensure that so many Americans don’t have health care.  The same people who, as Dan Savage so aptly puts it, “only want to shrink government enough so they can cram it into your vagina,” removing our reproductive rights along with LGBT rights and the rights of anyone who isn’t an old, straight (or at least closeted), rich, white man.

But here I am presented with a majority Tory government.  A government that, as a minority, was found in contempt of parliament.  And the biggest snow job they’ve perpetrated is to convince Canadians that being in contempt of parliament–the first government in any parliamentary democracy in history to do so–isn’t a big deal.  Further, they’ve also convinced many Canadians that the no-confidence vote by the Libs, NDP and the Bloc can be likened to them picking up their toys and saying they’re going home like petulant children, rather than the MPs doing exactly what they’re supposed to do when the Speaker of the House finds a government in contempt.

So we’ve got a government breaking the rules of governance, opposition parties doing their duty and a majority of the voting public seeing the election as a nuisance that they didn’t want.  And blaming the opposition parties for it.  Dear God, Harper has us all right where he wants us.

What’s noteworthy is that the Tories were not always this slick.  It seems like something the Harper government has ushered in along with a striking decrease in transparency.  One wonders what they’ll fail to disclose next.

In the face of this,  throughout the election, the Liberals did exactly what the Democrats always do–the wrong thing.  They tried to answer misinformation with facts.  Facts don’t work.  The Republicans, like all right of centre parties, are very good at one thing and that’s repeating the party line so often that it starts to sound like truth.  They were the creators of “truthiness,” not Stephen Colbert–he just gave it a name.  Left of centre parties, like the Liberals (well sorta) and the Democrats, are notoriously bad at this.

This would seem to leave us in a pretty bleak situation, but I have hope for two reasons.  If there’s one way in which the Liberals are different from the Democrats it’s that they don’t have an inferiority complex.  The Liberals have known power before and they will fight to get it back.  Ignatieff, perhaps the party’s biggest liability in this past election, has stepped down as leader of the party and I look forward to who will step in (please Justin Trudeau, please).

I also expect that this heart wrenching defeat of the left (NDP wins aside) will galvanize the Liberals and the voters who want to see them back in power.  I, for one, certainly plan to be more involved.