It was mentioned the other day that it is impossible to selectively elect a minority government. Before you think you are voting for a minority, you need to check your mathematics and your logic. I would suggest to you that if most people across Canada voted for a second-tier party to keep one of the two main parties from winning, we could be back at the polls within 90 days. And that would certainly cost us.
Take the current suggestion that the Bloc Québécois could win the most seats in Quebec. If that happened, the result might be a conservative minority government that could hold on to power on an issue by issue basis, with Bloc support, for almost a year.
But what if the Bloc won so many seats in Quebec that the result was a conservative majority? The Bloc would be ignored and useless in an antagonistic house of commons for the next four years.
The problem is that you can only control your own vote. Everyone else’s vote is their own business.
Canada’s problem is not how it votes but the lack of leadership. We are so bereft of leadership in this country that an untried and unknown lawyer from Brampton, Ontario has caused a small flurry of hope because he spoke up at a leaders’ debate. He did not say anything important nor did he suggest any path to enlightenment. I can pin down about three seats that are likely to be won by his new democratic party. Anything else is guesswork.
At the same time, I know that the disappointment with Justin Trudeau is palpable across Canada, He might mean well but he has let us down. He is not a leader. He is more like his mother than his father. He is but an actor. He enjoys the role but he does not lead.
But for all our complaints, Trudeau could do a job better than he has. He can certainly do it better than the woefully inadequate Andrew Scheer. Anyone who seriously watched Scheer as speaker of the house of commons during the final four years of the Harper conservative government would be appalled at the thought of that man as prime minister of Canada.
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Copyright 2019 © Peter Lowry
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