Eleven Weeks Plus A Day: Afterword

The federal election is finally over with for this country, so is the longest stretch of campaigning I have experienced in my lifetime. I’d like to say that it was an easy process for me, but I’ve taken the affair of casting a ballot a lot more seriously than I have in past elections. Social media has evolved such that information overload is everywhere and it becomes hard trying to decide which matters are the most critical to give weight to. It was shameful to see how much trivial crap was dumped into the mix to distract and obfuscate stuff of more importance. I’ve not taken a proactive stance on supporting a favourite. It has been a question of rising against, and not tolerating anything else more corruptive and insidious that has been already going on within the federal government over these past 10 years. The senate scandals, the slashing of services, the disrespect to our veterans, threats to our privacy and civil liberties, the attacks against Unions and organized labour, moves that cripple our Healthcare system, the unprofessional, tactless, and indelicate way aboriginal and other minority issues have been addressed; their being caught in the act of illegal activities in trying to rig the last few elections, are part of just a small sample of it. Our scientists have been basically given gag orders regarding any findings related to climate change under the Harper regime. We, as a public, have been deprived of critical decision making information from Statistics Canada. Harper cut the staff there and lied about the reasons for abandoning the long-form census. My opinion is that when you are in a position of power and become an opponent to data-gathering, objective analysis, and silencing progressive scientific reasoning and inquiry, you are then an enemy and a menace to everyone.

There was something very telling about Harper in some of his words of his final speech at the end of the election night, and the inevitable discord and chaos he could have led this country into with the mentality he had if he was in for four more years.  It is not an exact quote, but his words were in the tune of “. . . We wanted to handle the [government] money as well as Canadians do for themselves.” Those are scary words coming from a Conservative Albertan; I’ll show you why in a minute. He wants to portray that we are stable because there was budget surplus, but with savings shrinking and debt climbing on a personal level for the average Canadian, and climbing steadily during his watch for the past 10 years, that portrayal of economic stability is a total myth.

I don’t like it when people are criticizing governments for going into debt, and yet don’t shine that light on themselves for their own personal financial situation. Citizens and corporations carrying obscene amounts of debt are much of the reason why governments are in debt. Whether it is on a personal or corporate level, people go grovelling to the government, no matter what political stripes: for start-ups, or to bail them out when such ventures fail. It is a simple fact that we, in general as Canadians, have become just greedier, more covetous, and more fiscally irresponsible in the past few years on a personal level. Either that, or we have genuinely come to more dire straits with wages not keeping up with inflation, and then have to rely on incurring debt to bail us out of emergencies. There is validity in both reasons in varying degrees. We have been declining and losing our ethic and ability for saving money since the eighties. With a hint, or even the myth of prosperity, and with a promise or reality of a better income, people don’t save; people instead get more overconfident and reckless about personal spending, relying more on, and abusing buy-now-pay-later strategies. Alberta is supposedly the richest province in Canada; people are making good money there, and yet it is Albertans who hold the highest average household debt out of all the other provinces in comparison: almost double that of the national average from the graph of the 2014 numbers below.

Thus, it pisses me off when Conservatives, especially Albertan ones (like Harper is) are trying to sell the rest of us in this country as to what the economic plan should be. If Harper really wanted to show up at a rally for the interest of being some moral authority and demonstrating fiscal responsibility, he should have went back to his home province, and used his cheesy ‘cha-ching’ sound effects to show what happens every time an Albertan whips out a credit card. Therefore, I really don’t want a prime minister who says he wants to model government spending on that of what the average Canadian does now, because on a whole, the average Canadian is getting progressively worse at managing money . . . especially in Alberta*, where they seem to really suck at avoiding household debt! If he is that out of touch with that fact about what's going on with the average Canadian, a supposed economist no less, it is best that he is gone.

Even though trickle-down economics has been shown to be a complete myth, the Harper mandate endorsed it. Only a bigger wedge gets driven between the rich and the poor. CEO salaries are going up, while more working people are relying on soup kitchens and food banks. On a global level, the news just a few days ago announced officially that the richest 1% of the world’s population now owns more wealth than its remaining 99%, yet we have a Prime Minister that seems to want to support and perpetuate this trend by doing things like sealing the tax files of the wealthiest people in this country. The answer of is simple in regards to the question of “Do I want to see four more years of Harper leadership?” The simple answer is “NO”!

As to the question of who I want representing me for our riding, it was made it easy to eliminate at least one option too. The choices were between four people: the NDP candidate is a lawyer and a community activist, the Liberal has credentials including an award-winning distinguished career in mental health services, the Green Party representative is an actual scientist, who is a consultant for green building projects, and then there is the Conservative runner . . . a friggin’ sportscaster. Can you guess which one I didn’t vote for when considering the serious business of helping to run a country?

My duty is to vote and be wary of what happens after. I earn the benefits if it goes well, and the right to complain and fight for my rights and freedoms to do so if it doesn’t. All I can do is my best to deal with and adapt to the aftermath later. It’s still better than being apathetic and opting not to vote. To not be an active part of democracy is to surrender and be a willing pawn to the whim of a dictatorship. I vow never to let that happen.

I’m glad and proud to say that we as Canadians have collectively gained the sense to drive Harper out of power and bring an end to his tyranny. Harper is out, and Trudeau is in; and now Mulcair and the rest of the NDP have been shorted many seats in the commons. Instead of going on a rant and trying to drum up a witch hunt, or whine about the how the NDP will be more of a loyal opposition than the Conservatives** ever would, I will just say congratulations to the young mister Trudeau, I really do wish him the all best, and hope he and his team at least learned from his father’s, and other predecessors’, mistakes and use those lessons for better governance of the nation. Let's just do what we need to do to reconcile things, so we can move on and have the thing we wanted most when we voted . . . change.

*- I worked and lived in Alberta briefly, long enough to observe that there was definitely a more pronounced gearing towards affluence, and a keeping-up-to-the-Joneses attitude was more visibly and prevalent than what I witnessed at home. Sadly, that same attitude is contagious, and is appearing more and more here in Saskatchewan. So people there generally charge for stuff before earning and then spending. Now oil prices have fallen drastically and layoffs are happening, and now people there who were relying on the one trick pony of the oil-patch are feeling the hurt for their ridiculous over-spending. They really can’t blame their past/current provincial government for it, just themselves and their own greed on a consumer level, although the hard core Conservatives there will try to twist this into some story of villainy due to the action of either the federal Liberals, or provincial NDP governing them now. If Saskatchewan doesn’t smarten up, we’ll feel it too, if we aren’t already.

**- I intentionally dropped the word from their formal title, the “Progressive” Conservatives, because they never really did anything progressive for these last 10 years.