To the editor,
Well, wasn’t that special?
Thankfully, Canadian elections tend to proceed at a rather rapid pace; this one being 36 days after its call. Fixed dates, like the ones to our south, tend to lead to the beginning of the rhetoric and noise making the day after the previous one has been completed.
So what happened here? Almost nothing. What could be more Canadian than, in effect, getting stuck in the snow, spinning your tires, and going nowhere?
We are left with the same Prime Minister, leading a party with the second-most popular votes overall, and with more members elected than the party which received about one per cent more votes than the victorious one. We also have another minority government. The number of seats held by the four parties which had members elected to Parliament changed only marginally. Still feel those wheels spinning?
The biggest change which happened was in the number of votes garnered by the People’s Party of Canada (PPC). It received five per cent of the total votes cast. There was much discussion leading up to the election that they would see an increase and their impact could influence the outcome.
Out of curiosity, I went to their website and found it fascinating. One of their descriptions is of being a “common sense” alternative to the other campaigns. They describe a number of issues, list their very short versions of facts about each issue, followed by their positions on those issues. They want choice about vaccinations and masks. They are climate change deniers. They want to vastly reduce the number of immigrants and refugees admitted to Canada. They want the country criss-crossed by pipelines. The list goes on and on. Their version of common sense is meant to appeal to who don’t want to think about complicated and nuanced issues. Interesting.
So, here we are; right back stuck in the same snowbank, governed by the same second-place party because of our first-past-the-post system.
There still has to be a better way.
John Finlay
Walkerton
