Only by posting again will the WTWT reboot ever get off the ground. Guys, let's post our responses and thoughts in the comments section of this article rather than over e-mail, for posterity's sake.
So we've had an election recently, which I'm sure everyone who reads this blog is fuming over. My first thought was (other than "ding, dong, the Bloc is dead!") what happened, Canada? Why did we give a scheming, autocratic, neoptism-prone tyrant, who's proven time and time and time again over the last five years that he cannot be trusted, a majority?
A friend and reader of WTWT said simply "because Canadians are stupid". I replied that it's equally possible they're ignorant, or apathetic, or right-winged idealists. Her response was "no, they're stupid".
To support my assertion that Canadians voted Harper back in with purpose and not out of imbecility, I started doing research Unfortunately, trawling the blogs and reading the news has given me very little insight over why 40% of voters supported Harper. The electoral map doesn't say too much either - electoral maps over-represent rural areas for obvious reasons, and so it's difficult to tell why some areas went blue and some orange without zooming in.
My hypotheses so far:
1. Canadians are apathetic and went for the sitting government. This seems false - apathetic people don't vote, and when they do vote they either select at random or vote for the Rhinoceros Party. This did not happen, unless lots of people had their hands slip.
2. Canadians are ignorant of Harper's deceptions. On the surface this is false - they probably know Harper hatches political schemes on a daily basis. The trouble is they think this is politics as usual. I'm worried that because the Conservatives came in after a decade of Liberal scandals (none of which, arguably, are as bad as the scandals of recent years) the Conservatives now have a free pass to do whatever they want, since people now expect corruption no matter who takes office.
3. The Liberal Party has no direction. A colleague of mine at work lambasted the Liberal party for their poorly run campaign this time around. He's a political afficianado, but even looking at the Liberal platform, and Ignatieff's performance in the debates, it's obvious the Liberals had no vision of Canada other than to replace the Harper government. On the other hand, the Conservatives had a fairly strong message going in: sound economic policy to dampen the effects of recession, a backing out of the government from social safety nets to destroy the "culture of entitlement", a strong legal and military arm, and job creation through tax reduction and incentives. The Liberal platform had no overarching ideal. What does the Liberal party stand for, other than standing up against Harper?
4. Canadians LIKE libertarian ideals. I mean, 30% of people did vote NDP, while 40% of people voted Conservative. Assuming we have no centrist party, this simply means more people prefer right-winged governments than left. It also might make sense that the Conservative have broader-than-expected appeal. I can easily describe why, in richer East Asian ridings (Richmond, for example), people voted conservative. Immigrants from China nowadays are largely middle/upper-class people (both from Hong Kong and the mainland). Their experience with government in general is that it is wholly corrupt and filled with entitlement and patronage at all levels, a simple money sink you deal with only out of legal necessity. It's little wonder that when they come here they gravitate toward parties that say they'll reduce government intrusion into their lives. They're also not big on gay marriage, and since Asians have cultures fairly compatible with North American culture, they don't care too much about minority "special needs". Could other unusual Conservative Party wins be explained similarly?
By the way, I imagine now that Harper has a majority his so-con base from the Canadian Alliance will demand that he bring gay marriage and abortion back on the table. I'm fairly sure he personally won't want to (since he's making a killing by being a socially moderate libertarian). We'll see how that plays out.
What are your thoughts? Discuss below.
So we've had an election recently, which I'm sure everyone who reads this blog is fuming over. My first thought was (other than "ding, dong, the Bloc is dead!") what happened, Canada? Why did we give a scheming, autocratic, neoptism-prone tyrant, who's proven time and time and time again over the last five years that he cannot be trusted, a majority?
A friend and reader of WTWT said simply "because Canadians are stupid". I replied that it's equally possible they're ignorant, or apathetic, or right-winged idealists. Her response was "no, they're stupid".
To support my assertion that Canadians voted Harper back in with purpose and not out of imbecility, I started doing research Unfortunately, trawling the blogs and reading the news has given me very little insight over why 40% of voters supported Harper. The electoral map doesn't say too much either - electoral maps over-represent rural areas for obvious reasons, and so it's difficult to tell why some areas went blue and some orange without zooming in.
My hypotheses so far:
1. Canadians are apathetic and went for the sitting government. This seems false - apathetic people don't vote, and when they do vote they either select at random or vote for the Rhinoceros Party. This did not happen, unless lots of people had their hands slip.
2. Canadians are ignorant of Harper's deceptions. On the surface this is false - they probably know Harper hatches political schemes on a daily basis. The trouble is they think this is politics as usual. I'm worried that because the Conservatives came in after a decade of Liberal scandals (none of which, arguably, are as bad as the scandals of recent years) the Conservatives now have a free pass to do whatever they want, since people now expect corruption no matter who takes office.
3. The Liberal Party has no direction. A colleague of mine at work lambasted the Liberal party for their poorly run campaign this time around. He's a political afficianado, but even looking at the Liberal platform, and Ignatieff's performance in the debates, it's obvious the Liberals had no vision of Canada other than to replace the Harper government. On the other hand, the Conservatives had a fairly strong message going in: sound economic policy to dampen the effects of recession, a backing out of the government from social safety nets to destroy the "culture of entitlement", a strong legal and military arm, and job creation through tax reduction and incentives. The Liberal platform had no overarching ideal. What does the Liberal party stand for, other than standing up against Harper?
4. Canadians LIKE libertarian ideals. I mean, 30% of people did vote NDP, while 40% of people voted Conservative. Assuming we have no centrist party, this simply means more people prefer right-winged governments than left. It also might make sense that the Conservative have broader-than-expected appeal. I can easily describe why, in richer East Asian ridings (Richmond, for example), people voted conservative. Immigrants from China nowadays are largely middle/upper-class people (both from Hong Kong and the mainland). Their experience with government in general is that it is wholly corrupt and filled with entitlement and patronage at all levels, a simple money sink you deal with only out of legal necessity. It's little wonder that when they come here they gravitate toward parties that say they'll reduce government intrusion into their lives. They're also not big on gay marriage, and since Asians have cultures fairly compatible with North American culture, they don't care too much about minority "special needs". Could other unusual Conservative Party wins be explained similarly?
By the way, I imagine now that Harper has a majority his so-con base from the Canadian Alliance will demand that he bring gay marriage and abortion back on the table. I'm fairly sure he personally won't want to (since he's making a killing by being a socially moderate libertarian). We'll see how that plays out.
What are your thoughts? Discuss below.
Posts
2 comments:
Jacob says:
I don't think Canadian voters are stupid, but perhaps forgetful.
Every party has a platform that is generally well detailed in their literature. Maybe the Liberals didn't publicize their platform well or make a big deal of it, but that doesn't mean they didn't have one or lacked direction.
The Conservatives, in their previous election campaigns, made ambitious promises - very good promises, which I supported. If they had followed through with them, I might have been tempted to support the Conservative party, even though I disagree with them on many points. One of these promises was to improve access to information, accountability, and government transparency. Another was to reform the senate.
[Begin rant]
Unfortunately, not only did they fail to meet these promises, they backpedaled so far on them that they are by far the worst abusers on both fronts of any Canadian government in recent history. The Harper Government routinely censors its own bureaucrats, researchers, and advisors whenever their reports fail to support the government's opinions. They've made it official policy to exploit a loophole in the Access to Information act by storing sensitive documents in PM's office, and thoroughly redacting any information they do release. And I don't have to say much about the senate.
They spend excessive amounts of public money on self-promotion and advertising campaigns such as "Canada's Economic Action Plan", and "Victims matter". And when it comes to cutting the budget, they decide the money should come from subsidies to opposition parties.
There's a lot of other things I could discuss here but it's not really the point of this reply.
[end rant]
I don't think that Canadians don't care about these issues, but many of them were reported long before the election and while they might have stirred some muddy water at the time, the public seems to have forgotten about them. It really should have been the media's responsibility to compile that kind of information around election time.
Instead, the common message seemed to be that "Conservatives are strong on the economy". There doesn't seem to be any evidence in support of this statement, and a lot against it, but that doesn't seem to matter. That message was everywhere.
Apparently, superliminal messaging works. HEY YOU, JOIN THE NAVY!
Charles says:
I suppose the question is why the public is so quick to forget all the Conservative government's past transgression. I can "forgive" the public for forgetting that many of Harper's actions have gone directly against his earlier promises, but there were a large number of scandals that had good media attention in the last five years. Surely they remember those - Parliament was prorogued just a year and a half ago, and that was a BIG thing!
Perhaps the Conservatives simply never did anything criminal that could easily be explained as such in less than 50 words (ex. Metro, 24) or 2 minutes (TV news). If the average Canadian doesn't understand why the long-form census is important, or how a coalition is or isn't "un-democratic", they won't really care. Even more so if they think the patronage and vote-pandering by the government is just politics as usual (a cynical notion Harper derided in 2004 but has made his standard operating policy now).
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