I did a survey the other day. I still hadn’t received my voter information card for this election, so I went to the Elections Canada website and double-checked that I was registered. (The card ended up coming in the mail that afternoon, so no worries.) After I went through that process, I was prompted to do a survey, so I figured “why not?”
One of the survey questions has stuck with me: What are your priorities for this election?
I’ve found myself thinking about that one a lot in the last few days. There’s a lot of stuff that I’m concerned about… but priorities? How do you choose?
I’m reminded of a job I used to have in IT where one of my co-workers had the habit of flagging every new ticket with “priority.” Eventually I had to explain that if everything is marked as a priority, then effectively nothing is a priority. You have to put some thought into it, and ticking a little box on an internet survey doesn’t really address the nuances.
To start with, I don’t want this election. Nobody I know does. Hell, nobody I can think of does – despite my predictions just two weeks ago, the political landscape has changed wildly and I’m betting even Justin Trudeau and his advisors are now suffering from a major case of buyer’s remorse. The very latest polls from 338Canada.com are now predicting a weak Conservative minority government with the Liberals in second place and the NDP in third with enough seats to possibly overcome the Conservative minority and form a coalition government… but a coalition that would not itself hold a majority.
That is not a recipe for a government which will go the full four years of its mandate, whoever ends up living in Rideau Cottage fifteen days from now. But if there’s one thing that this unnecessary pandemic election is proving, it’s that two weeks is a hell of a long time in an election. Here in Niagara Centre, the Conservative, Liberal and NDP candidates are all polling at around 30%… and the difference between the three candidates is less than the statistical margin of error. It’s a good old-fashioned boat race, too close to call.
All of which makes it critically important that, despite the pandemic, everyone needs to get out and vote. The notion that “my vote won’t matter” is demonstrably false. I anticipate that the Niagara Centre race is going to be determined by a very narrow margin – perhaps only by hundreds or even dozens of votes.
Which I suppose is also why my social media is being flooded by calls for “strategic voting” to keep the Conservatives out of office… although I note that those calls are always for people to vote Liberal instead of NDP and not the other way ‘round. Personally, I find the very notion of “strategic voting” offensive, and I’ll never do it again. If our electoral process is so broken that people have to compromise their principles just to prop up one party or another… well, let’s face it, the First-Past-The-Post system is broken and has been for a long time.
Which segues neatly back into what my top five priorities are, in ascending order of importance: First off, electoral reform. It was an important issue back during the 2015 election, with the Liberals winning largely on the promise of re-vamping First Past The Post into something else. Personally, I thought then and still think now that straight-up proportional representation is the way to go, but realistically I understand that mixed-member proportional would be more palatable to the professional political class in this country – provided you can get them to admit that change is needed in the first place.
Unfortunately, electoral reform isn’t getting much attention this time around. It should, it deserves to, and the voters need to be reminded that the Liberals made a promise then cynically broke it once they’d won the election. Unless the NDP wins – and again, realpolitik – we’re stuck with First-Past-The-Post for the foreseeable future.
Second, economic inequality. To put it bluntly, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting screwed. The pandemic has only exacerbated these problems: People are being priced out of their communities, forced to work low-paying jobs in unsafe pandemic conditions, just barely scraping by and with record levels of household debt. I know so many people who’ve been set brutally back by the pandemic, even with government supports like the CRB and CERB.
(Which brings me to a quick aside: CRB and CERB have been absolutely fascinating to me as a sort of de-facto test-project for a Universal Basic Income in this country. UBI – and my personal support for such a program – is almost certainly going to be the subject of an entire blog post of its own. It’s too complicated a subject to be fairly reduced to a single paragraph.)
What this country needs is a concerted plan to reduce, if not eliminate, income inequality. Health care and housing reform, including universal pharma and dental care; rent controls and reigning in real estate speculators; and a progressive wealth tax combined with closing a lot of tax loopholes would go a long way to reducing the massive transfer of resources from an ever-growing number of poor people to a tiny oligarchy of the fabulously wealthy. And that’s going to be difficult because by and large the political class in this country is drawn from the wealthy and dominated by the interests of the super-rich. Even parties which are explicitly promising such reform – specifically the NDP – are going to find their efforts hamstrung because our entire system is built to protect the interests of the wealthy.
My third priority is the arrival of climate change. I don’t say, as I would have even five years ago, “looming climate change” or “the spectre of climate change” because we are there. Forest fires, extreme weather, mass die-offs of animals… welcome to the climate crisis. There’s no longer any point in saying “we need to reduce X emissions by X date” because we didn’t and it’s too late. Now the discussion has to be on what measures that we can take to ameliorate the damage, how we can rebuild our infrastructure to accommodate climate-driven extreme events, and how we can work towards the new reality of living on this fragile planet during the Anthropocene.
Every political party in the country has an environmental plank on their platform (except for the PPC, which has more of an anti-environmental plank) and not one of those plans goes far enough. This is going to loom over our lives and the lives of our children and theirs, and we need to have concrete action to cope with it now, right now, because the crisis is here.
Fourth, we need to address the crisis of organized hate in this country and the utter failure of every level of authority in dealing with it. This one hits pretty close to home for me because even during my year-long hiatus in writing this blog I was keeping constant tabs on extreme-right hate groups… and those observations show pretty clearly that they’re getting worse in every way.
As I wrote last week, the hate groups have attached themselves to and largely co-opted the anti-vaccination movement for their own ends. Last week my friends over at the Canadian Anti-Hate Network published an excellent piece about the threats aimed at Justin Trudeau by these groups, predicting that their hostile behaviour would only escalate during the election. This prediction was proven correct just days later as a series of “anti-vaccine passport” protests were organized across the country… “protests” which included blockading hospitals, interfering with ambulances, a great deal of racism, misogyny and even threats of violence aimed at health care workers and those of us who are vaccinated and wear masks. Add to that the recent surge in Islamophobic incidents in this country – especially the murder of a Muslim family during a terror attack in London Ontario – and we have no choice but to acknowledge that this is a crisis that is ongoing and escalating.
The major political parties all have planks on their platforms to address the rising tide of far-right hate groups (except of course the PPC, which has always deliberately courted those groups) and again none of the parties are doing enough to address organized hate in this country.
My fifth, final and most important priority is addressing the huge number of injustices that indigenous people face in Canada. That includes implementing the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, stopping the ongoing tragedy of missing and murdered indigenous women, not to mention the unaddressed water, housing and suicide crises on reservations and the continuing – and now largely ignored – discovery of unmarked graves at former residential schools.
That tally is now more than 6500 unmarked graves at 21 schools with 118 former school sites still to be checked as of the date of writing. That count should be at the top of every single news website in the country, with a ticker updating daily. Instead, after the outpouring of attention for the first few hundred victims, the politicians, the media and the general public have gone back to ignoring this crime again.
Somewhere on my social media this weekend – and I can’t seem to find it to link it here – it was pointed out that, if we flew the flag at half-mast for just a single day per unmarked grave, the flag would remain lowered for the next eighteen years. Think about that. And we haven’t yet checked a quarter of former residential schools. It is horribly likely that, if were to give each one of our victims the respect of a day with the flag lowered that the flag of Canada would not be flown at full mast for a century to come.
And maybe we should do that. Canadians are very good at ignoring things that they don’t want to think about and the top of that list is our complicity in and benefit from the deliberate genocide of the indigenous peoples of Canada. But we cannot keep ignoring it: We have such a debt of guilt in this country and it is poisoning us like a festering wound; it manifests itself in the continuing oppression, injustice and bigotry towards indigenous people.
So there they are – my priorities in this election. And I’ve got to say that even as a white cis-male, I don’t feel like my priorities are going to be addressed with anything like the weight they deserve. And if I’m feeling like that from a place of comparative privilege, how must minorities, indigenous people and new Canadians must feel about their concerns? I haven’t even touched on infrastructure, child care, long-term care, gun bans, pipelines, pandemic response, foreign policy, small business support, workers’ rights, women’s reproductive rights or any of the myriad of critical issues that make up Canada’s political landscape at any given moment.
But hey – Jagmeet Singh has a poutine truck, so I guess that’s what the media should be focusing on, right?
