Barbelith Underground > Switchboard > Canadian Federal Election, June 28th, 2004

>Any thoughts on the Green Party? Apparently they're the only party other than the Liberals running in all 309 ridings. If it wasn't going to be a close NDP/Liberal race in my riding, I would probably try and help them.

If everyone in your riding dropped that attitude, the close race would likely disappear in favour of a green landslide. But youll be damned if youre the first, right? Fool.

In Conservative news, Stephen Harper has said he will make the CBC pay for itself in areas where free market communications can do the same job. I dont know exactly what that means, but it cant be good for our public broadcaster, which contributes so much to our identity as Canadians--which we would otherwise lose due to geographic and cultural spread. In addition, the balanced and educational CBC keeps us feeling superior to Americans, who dont have a choice beyond the dollar-fed pop culture.

I imagine this is exactly what Harper wants to accomplish, since the thrust of his campaign is to turn Canada into Ameriquita. Now hes apparently considering relaxing bilingual laws, perhaps to encourage Quebec to separate. I fear this is the election Quebec has been waiting for, as a brief coalition between Conservatives and the Bloc Quebequois could resolve the issue pretty much immediately.

To further bash Stephen Harper, the English debate showed us that he doesnt even understand his own partys budget, as he refused to reconsider the bad arithmetic he (mis)quoted. Well, that could have been a brain fart, but it still looks bad.

The Liberal party held the status quo quite well during the Chrétien years. But Paul Martins coup now seems like it was more a symptom than a cause of the partys inevitable rotten core. If we vote for the status quo now, we are voting for corruption, lies, and occultation, no matter how often Martin repeats his promises about ethics commissioners and auditors general. (Just to clarify, the Liberals stole the money by feeding it to corporations that did nothing, but the profits went to party supporters. More details from the CBC.)

The truly sad part of the scandal is that abuses of this kind are almost certainly standard procedure, and any governing party could be caught out by some morally ambiguous scheme. Equally despicable is the Liberal partys habit of cheating on their party membership lists in order to 'vote' for the party officials desired by the current leaders.

I dont know much dirt on the New Democratic Party, but Jack Laytons attack campaign is pissing me off. I liked him when he presented himself as a radical guy with the balls to implement his radical ideas, but I havent heard an idea from him for many weeks: just rhetoric about the failures of others. Ill be glad to see NDP MPs in Ottawa if they bring in proportional representation and legalize cannabis.

My province, BC, alternates rule between the NDP and whatever right or centrist party happens to be alive at the time (currently the Awful Liberals). I think its telling that the NDP always gets brought down by personal scandals (the last one turned out to be an entirely manufactured tale about someone building a deck on the party leaders house) while the right/centrist partys are generally brought down by economic problems. Anyway, I dont know how much the federal and provincial NDPs are similar.

As for the Greens, Im suspicious of how they continue to supress exmember David Icke just because he talks about loony ideas like evil lizard men from space. When I say 'supress', I mean in a similar way to Scientologists or Zionists supress: various tactics to ruin his life anywhere where they hold the power to to so. Im especially suspicious because of the synchronious connection of Green party and lizard men from space.