Perhaps the time has come for Canadians to bite the bullet — acknowledge that not only do we live in a one-party state, but that a significant proportion of the population likes it that way. Let’s make Paul Martin "Prime Minister for Life" and put the money that we would save on elections into health care and food for starving Quebec advertising executives.
Contrary to what Paul Martin would have you believe, the current Liberal government has been in power since 1993. and it has become painfully obvious that this government is the most corrupt in the history of the country. The sheer amount of theft, fraud, forgery, and money laundering goes way beyond a couple of crooked politicians and a small group of rogue public servants. The Liberal Party, and therefore the government, is corrupt. The corruption is not a bunch of isolated acts, but is systemic.
One of the supposed advantages of living in a democracy is that if people are unhappy with the government, they can vote them out of office and bring in a new government. This is fairly easy to do in a parliamentary democracy when the party in power does not have a majority as happens to be the case in Canada. Yet, even though we know that the current government is crooked and corrupt, 61 per cent of Canadians don’t want to have an election. It’s hard to believe that a lot of Canadians are actually buying into the Martin/Brison production of the play, "Waiting for Gomery". an election call will not stop the Gomery Commission. and the Conservatives, the only other political party that could form the next government, are not going to stop it. although Justice Gomery must complete his inquiry to determine exactly who did what when, we already know that the government is corrupt. If we don’t want to hold elections to rid the country of a corrupt government, we really never have to have them at all.
Having an election campaign is a lot of work for politicians, political party activists and the media. But for the ordinary citizen, all that is entailed is having to answer the door to a few pests and a taking a short trip to a polling station on Election Day. Yet that seems to be too much trouble for the majority of those who responded to the pollsters. We have a corrupt government--who cares. If what is happening in Canada was happening to a country, democratic or otherwise, in africa or asia, people would take to the streets to protest. Of course, those people who take to the streets don’t have television sets that get 500 channels.
a common reason that many people don’t want to have an election is that while they don’t like the Liberals, they don’t like any of the other alternatives. The only exception to this is the Bloc Quebecois who, by definition, can never form a government. If Canadians think that there is no difference because "all the parties are the same", then democracy becomes nothing more than an expensive and frivolous exercise.
a dictatorship under Paul Martin would, of course be a benign one. Canada doesn’t spend enough on defense to realistically become a military dictatorship. and Fearful Leader won’t increase military spending because it would annoy his friends at the UN. Besides it would make Bono madder at Paul than he already is. and it would be too american to increase funds to the military. No military dictatorship in this country. and even though the government has its very own police force to do its bidding, we don’t have to fear Canada becoming a police state. The worst thing that would happen is that the RCMP would collect a bunch of information against Canadians and then lose it. The only thing that a Martin dictatorship would do would be to divert money that is intended to benefit the citizens in order to line their own pockets and the pockets of their friends. But hey--they do that already.
as John Ivison so eloquently put it in his National Post column, the Liberals have not only turned Canada into a banana republic, but they’ve stolen the bananas. We should just stop playing games and acknowledge what we really are.
It won’t make that much of a difference.