“I grew so rich that I was sent
By a pocket borough into Parliament
I always voted at my party’s call
And I never thought of thinking for myself at all.”
W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan (1878)
Little seems to have changed since Gilbert and Sullivan twitted the English about their corrupt politics during the Reign of Queen Victoria. Canada has been mired in the same corrupted political system for almost 150 years. Sure it has had some band-aids applied over the years but it has never had the thorough housecleaning that it requires.
We now have a Senate that is a permanent joke. We have a Governor General who does what the leader of the party in power says. We have created an imperial court surrounding and protecting that leader. Through the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), we have concentrated the national news media into a tightly controlled and corrupt group of sycophants.
But the voters must share the blame. Sheep to be shorn show more spunk. We accept vicious and untruthful attacks on politicians. We believe scripted and controlled news events that bear so little evidence of truth. Party leaders used to go out to meet the voters and now they travel to avoid them and we allow it. We, ignorant and uncaring, vote for the party without questioning the candidates.
In their sweep of more than half of Quebec seats in parliament, there were NDP candidates who did not even need to be in the electoral district to win. There was one candidate where it was claimed if her constituents had met her, she would not have been able to communicate comfortably in French which is spoken by most voters in the area.
And absentee candidates did not happen just in Quebec. It was claimed in the Toronto Star that one winning NDP candidate in Toronto was absent during the election campaign, running a campaign for another NDP, in another part of the province.
If we ever needed to point out what is wrong with Canadian politics, this recent election certainly makes the case. Centralized political parties appointing candidates are preventing and discouraging the involvement of citizens in the political process. The party hierarchies do no due diligence in terms of the quality of candidates to fill slots in those last throw-away electoral districts. The quality of MPs elected is in the dumper. Nobody cares as they vote for nobodies, thinking they are voting for the party leader. We are willing to pay nerds, nobodies and ne’er-do-wells $157,000 per year with all expenses and a generous pension to sit in our parliament and pick their noses—and nobody cares.
The Canadian news media conglomerates, that are leading us by the nose, are greedy, lazy and uncaring and provide no insight for voters to help them assess local candidates or their leaders. The news media print and broadcast spurious polls for their shock value as news, not their authenticity. Media executives curry favour with those campaigns with the most money to spend and the biggest lies to tell. The Toronto Star editorial board, the supposed last bastion of integrity in the news media, decided to screw the Liberal Party and in the process of their vindictiveness, screwed the Canadian public—giving us a majority Harper government.
There is much wrong with Canadian politics. We need to do some fixing.
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