Nobody is surprised, except me I guess (what kind of a Governor General would give assent? That’s what I want to know), but yes, we’re having an election here in Canada.
The timing is disturbing. After all, we’ve got a Prime Minister no one can relate to: he’s no orator, he won’t– and can’t, I suspect–negotiate, and he’s coming under quite a lot of scrutiny for yet another misappropriation of public funds scandal. When he speaks English, he doesn’t make eye contact, when he speaks French he speaks the Franglaise of a million testy, mushmouthed schoolchildren, huddling and giggling with puerile contempt over the bilingual labels of their breakfast cereals. When it comes to women, he’s cut funding nationwide for daycare, women’s shelters, and even the Status of Women offices. When it comes to growing poverty, he simply doesn’t see it; when it comes to everyone’s concerns about jobs disappearing from the Canadian economy in the millions since he took office, he squeaks out an annoyed “let them eat cake” and makes a big show of handing out long-ago earmarked auto industry bail-out money, months after it was alloted, yet seconds before calling the election, to a Ford plant that will build cars with wasteful, unwanted V-8 engines. When it comes to the environment, it’s an enforced “business as usual, and climate change be damned, no one can prove Sour Gas is deadly, Green Ideas cost Jobs” nonsense. Those tar sands are the reason he’s in office, after all.
Mr. Harper is no Kennedy.
He’s certainly no Obama, and just to drive the point of inadequacy home, God love ‘em (as the Maritimers say when they despise you beyond civility), he’s not even a Bush, in terms of might and connections. He falls short but manages to scrape up to the status of a Palin: shifty eyes, an offputting demeanor, and a questionable red hand in the middle of a conveniently overshadowed spending scandal. Maybe he didn’t get around to banning books from local libraries, one of Palin’s biggest political thrusts–but I think in enough time, he’d have banned reading all together.
I suppose I’ll have to admit that I watched the candidates give their platform speeches once the election was confirmed, so I’ll admit it. I watched Stephan Dion, I watched Jack Layton, I watched Elizabeth May and our country’s right wing version of the Green Party demand a place in the official debate, and I watched Gilles Duceppe. Here is what everyone knows: Gilles isn’t leaving us anytime soon, Lizzie hasn’t got a hope, Jack is certainly being portrayed as the Rock Star (complete with claque–but you can see they’re paid to support him) and Dion is getting the same kind of bad press we’re seeing against Obama and Biden in the US (so you know he’s the real thing, the bona fide threat). In the States, all the journalists have been given the same script, and variations (or deviations, your choice) are simply never heard. On speaking of Palin, they snort and announce, “This woman shoots Moose!” as though that were impressive and politically vital; or they talk (even the women do this, including the women on Public Television) about “that cute ‘Bewitched’ thing she does with her nose”, then yell out, “Adorable!!” How anyone can watch these performances on television and take them as “real” commentary puzzles me, they’re sexist beyond the pale of anything that’s even been acceptable for decades. The stakes here in Canada, for a journalist, simply can’t compare to the salaries and celebrity available in the States, but I have to wonder what it is that would drive all the broadcasters and commentators to recite the same lines even in Canada, despite what we can see with our own eyes. I don’t know how many more times I’ll be told, in the precise array of words, that Dion “is no communicator, not even in his own language”, while Harper mumbles and works hard to answer a limited and approved set of questions he can address quickly and without much ado.
Last year around this time (well, actually, a little later into the autumn) there was talk of an election too, and for me, that meant offers of work with the NDP party. Oooh, that was seductive, but ultimately the offer was impossible to fit into my life, with its 24/7 demands and its distance. Still, I was screened, and interviewed, and head hunted, and called, and not called, and kept “on file”, and now that the election’s on, a position has come up for me as Olivia Chow’s assistant. For five weeks. The timing is just wrong for me, and the group of interviewers who want me know damn well I’m miles away from her riding, and just minutes away from one of the most steadfast NDP strongholds in the country, I could work here just as well, with Peter Kormos, if the job were created. In my opinion, Layton is their big hope but he’s not a natural, he’s not really comfortable around people and he never seems quick on his feet or lacerating in his critique in parliament (remember parliament?). Olivia, on the other hand, could do it. I wish her the best but they’re certainly blowing an opportunity in my area by having Layton front instead of Kormos. They could make a lot of friends out of voters who are watching their livelihoods disappear out here, who’d only need a little bit of support to start things moving in a far more advanced and profitable direction–but I guess they’re not the kind of people you want to know in politics. Besides, how many votes could you win if you created jobs in the country’s currently most economically depressed region?
On the other hand, I take a little bit of heart from the scattered (but officially “unreported”) evidence of voter awareness, it helps me to know that, contrary to what the media and several Americans I know believe, voters really aren’t stupid. This is an ongoing argument I have with my American friends, who shake their heads in disbelief because they fear that the doddering and proudly ignorant McCain will win this election, they fear Americans are easily fooled and will ignore the cynicism of the Republican party to retain the status quo. I’m not so sure, I think Bush won two times in a row despite being the worst leader in the history of humanity (that we know of) because he had his people rig the elections, we’ve already read about how this was done, who did it, and how much it cost to do…but Americans prefer to believe in that “democracy” nonsense, and they actually think people really want to see the Republicans in office again.
The world’s largest financial institutions are bankrupt, people are losing their homes in the millions, and even real estate is losing its value (when does that happen?). Unless you’re part of that elite group of oil merchants and bankers and warmongers and pharmaceutical corporation owners and media moguls who make up the “Us” in the Bush administration, no one in the US has seen any benefit from the past 8 years of business. That group is far too small to keep “winning” elections, but they’re obviously wealthy enough to buy them despite what anyone wants.
Sarah Palin for Vice President
And cynical enough to present us with this as a candidate for high office.
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