Canadians are going to the polls, again, on May 2nd. There is almost nothing to distinguish this time from any of the previous five, but there is one significant difference: This time my son is old enough to vote (and he intends to do so). I’ve told him that he should find out what party offers the best value to him, from his point of view. If I had to guess what that would be, I’d say tax breaks for low income earners and education assistance first, then environment and health care. Luckily, I know he doesn’t read my blog, so I’m not worried about colouring his viewpoint. 🙂
In any case, I find myself once again trying to figure out how to vote. When I look at the various political parties I see effectively zero difference from where they were a couple of years ago, so I expect the same outcome as last time: a Conservative minority. After all, expecting anything else would be crazy.
Here’s what I see (and I completely respect that these views are not shared by everyone):
- Conservatives — boorish, obnoxious, bullies who favor short term economic benefits
- Liberals — party policy could be defined as “don’t piss anyone off”; unable to find a compelling leader
- NDP — want to change things; have no idea how to do that without tanking the country
- Greens — heart in the right place; would need a majority to be interesting, which won’t happen until after the environment becomes unfixable
- … and the fringe parties that simply don’t matter.
As most of you know, I usually vote Green, but I have discovered something in their current, stated platform that I cannot abide [emphasis mine]:
We will promote complimentary health care – through support of chiropractic, naturopathic, homeopathic, and other non-western practices.
Everyone is free to make up there own minds about complimentary health care issues, but I will not vote for a party that promotes homeopathic medicine. Seldom am I given such a clear means to reduce the complexity of a decision space.
So, in the absence of that, I guess I’m leaning towards the NDP this year. Jack seems to have carried himself well in the debates. There is some alignment with my philosophical views. As I said last election:
The NDP are also close, if they could just figure out that sometimes “Environment first” is going to have to trump “People first”, so that our kids get to have a world worth living in too.
I guess we’ll see. I am very interested in your thoughts about the election. Feel free to comment.