I promised myself that I wouldn’t get sucked into the long campaign leading up to Canada’s election. The lead up to the polls is usually half the time that was allotted for this one which happens next month. You would think that the longer time line would provide more opportunity for the parties to explain their positions and voters to get enough information to vote wisely. Of course it doesn’t work that way. As it happens in the U.S. the U.K. and elsewhere these campaigns focus on the leaders of the parties. The leaders become the primary spokes-persons for the party and voters get the information and analysis from the media. This is a great flaw in our system it seems to me. We are being asked to elect a government…and regardless of the party, governments are made up of teams of people who are appointed by the successful leader to head the various ministries of government. These ministers become the “cabinet” of the government and together direct the business of government. In Canada their decisions on major issues are submitted to the parliament for approval and the party with the majority of votes gets to approve what they want. In fact it’s much more complicated than that and hundreds of decisions are made by cabinet ministers and enacted without ever seeing the parliament. In any modern government there are simply too many policy and management decisions to be made. Some governments rely heavily on the bureaucracy of the public service for advice, guidance and minor operational changes and adjustments. Generally, conservative governments keep a tighter rein on the public service and this tends to slow things down. More liberal governments rely more on the experience and expertise of the bureaucrats and concentrate on larger policy issues. Our problem as voters is that we know little about the teams of the various parties leading up to any election…who might be Finance Minister or Defence Minister…or Attorney General. These are extremely important people in government. All of the ministers are. Not knowing who the prospective ministers might be is a big problem for me. Politicians will argue that trying to identify them all before hand would be impossible because some of them may not get elected. I can live with that. Tell us who they might be…let us peak at their qualifications…It might help us decide to elect them. But trusting a bunch of so called “leaders” to do the right thing, is getting less and less rational. Especially since we have a growing body of evidence that the “right thing” has so often been the wrong thing. The core of the problem is that successful parties assume that they have carte blanche to make hundreds of decisions over the next four years or so because the voters have approved their “platform”…their general policy direction. In fact parties work very hard to keep their message simple in order to get elected. They believe that voters don’t want to be confused by complicated details about government. They’re probably right, up to a point…but in the past three decades party politics has come to rely more on polarizing attack advertising and less on any clear information on the future direction of the government. In Canada the past ten years has seen the growing rhetoric that anyone not supporting the conservative position is a left wing crypto commie…and the other parties see the conservatives as right wing fanatics. And while the polarization has hardened positions to the point that party loyalists on all sides support the party no matter what… none of the parties have a monopoly on left or right wing thinking. The world has become too technically complex to take such rigid positions. As long as we continue this bullshit, systematic, muddy-water, politics we’ll continue to elect people who prove time and time again that they’re in over their heads…and voters will be be pushed further and further from any understanding of what’s going on.
And now I promise not to get sucked into this mess again…until later.
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