Younger Views and the Impending Vote

Many of the bloggers I read regularly have positions they want to espouse. (This is why I read a mix of bloggers!) There are a few out there who are either quite partisan but also level-headed and capable of printing conclusions they draw that don’t agree with their expressed partisanship — and a few whose partisanship doesn’t run too deep, and so can be said to have “changed over time”. These non-echo-chamber reads are the ones I enjoy the most, as, of course, I also enjoy thoughtful writing.

I hope that I, in turn, provide some thought as well, rather than party talking points!

Having two teen-age children (one 18, one 14), the subject of the pending election has come up around the table. My 18-year-old is resolutely in the “ignore the whole process” camp that so many other new voters share. As far as she is concerned, there is nothing on offer worth making the effort of going to a polling station for, not even to “throw the bums out” (her view is that we are dealing with slight differences of degree, not the massive differences partisans detect, much less differences of kind).

The 14-year-old is more interesting. He doesn’t believe much will change after this election. Throughout his school years, whenever there’s been a vote, his classes have always gone into “election mode”, and he has always been (again, as so many of his peers are) an avid Green supporter. Yet he’s said more than once now that “Stephen Harper hasn’t done a bad job” and “he deserves to be returned” — and that if he could vote, he’d vote Conservative to reward the Harper Government.

(He also thinks that our MP, the recently-elected [by-election of March 2008] Joyce Murray, Liberal of Vancouver-Quadra, is a disgrace for her so-called “Questions” during Question Period and her repeated abstentions on votes, and needs to be tossed from office, another reason, in his eyes, for voting Conservative [since the Conservatives failed to take the riding in the spring by 151 votes].)

So what does all this mean? I have, previously, written articles here pointing out the apathy toward voting that I have detected, and noted that despite the media coverage out of Ottawa the sound and fury in the House wasn’t speaking to voters in this part of the world. My children echo that: even my apathetic, intending-not-to-vote daughter doesn’t think the Harper Government has been “bad for Canada”, “corrupt” or any of the other bits and pieces of mud and tar flung at them last year and this. My son thinks the Government has been bullied. Out of the mouths of babes…

Does that mean my son thinks the Conservatives have been “green enough”? No, not at all. But that’s not his issue. Rather, in his case, it is that “good work deserves another term”, coupled with a desire to see the bullies punished. This, by the way, corresponds to a number of adult conversations I have had recently. There is a sense out here on the West Coast that Ottawa has gone too far.

What will it all mean come voting day? I think the regional splits we have come to see since the end of the Mulroney years are going to be even more accentuated this time around. I find it highly likely that “outer Ontario”: the 519, 705, most of the 613, and the 807 area codes, will elect a number of Conservatives — and a few NDP. “Inner Ontario”: the 416 and Ottawa (613) itself, will be mostly Liberal. The election will turn on the 905, seat-rich and likely to split (closer to Toronto itself, more likely to be Liberal; farther away, more likely to go Conservative). Atlantic Canada will probably split, with a slight Liberal bias; Québec could well see many more Conservatives to go with the 418 (Québec City) redoubt, while the 450 around Montréal becomes the battle ground between the Conservatives, the BQ and the Liberals. The Prairies will be a Conservative:NDP saw-off (aside from Alberta, still likely to return an all-blue slate). The North is likely to remain Liberal — or, rather, the Liberal candidates will have superior recognition in their far-flung ridings.

Then there’s BC, which, as with Ontario, is highly regional in nature. Two or three Liberal seats in the Lower Mainland, perhaps one on Vancouver Island (Dr. Keith Martin in Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca is one Liberal MP worthy of re-election). Vancouver Centre will, this time, go NDP; Vancouver-Quadra (I believe) will go Conservative. Vancouver-South and Vancouver-Kingsway will remain Liberal. It is in the next ring: the Burnaby, New Westminster and Richmond seats that the battle will more likely see the Liberals there be displaced, with both the Conservatives and the NDP running strong locally.

What this adds up to is an early set of results that will look favourable to the Liberals, then the steady addition of Conservative seats to the end of the count. Enough for a majority? Possibly: it will turn on the swing in Ontario and Québec more so than in the West. A stronger NDP contingent? This is likely. A Green MP? Not after the ethically-challenged Mr. Blair Wilson goes down in history for his short tenure as an unelected and unseated Green MP, and certainly not in Central Nova. I do believe this election will see fewer BQ returned.

What this adds up to, in the end of the day, is a question: do we get a Conservative majority (in which case the Liberals are probably still the Official Opposition), or do we get a Conservative minority (in which case the NDP might edge past the Liberals to become the Official Opposition)? I make no bones about it: it is this second outcome that would be more pleasing to me. But I do not expect it.

One of the lessons I have tried to give my children, in talking to them about politics, is to try and vote positively. It is not, I tell them, necessary for your candidate or party of choice to win: you make a statement about what you want for this country by choosing the person or party closest overall to where you stand on the issues that matter to you. This, of course, implies that tactical voting of any type is to be eschewed, and I do tell them that: “I won’t”, I say, “vote for a party simply to block someone else”.

My one hope with this election comes after it: win, lose or draw, could we have a little common sense and statesmanship in the House? The attempts to grab headlines with insults, the thin gruel of partisanship über alles, invented or developed “scandal”, etc. merely intensify the conviction of those who do not play a part in our electoral results — the non-voters — that they are correct. So, class of 2008, grow up and act as adults should, eh?

You Could Cut the Apathy with a Machete

Welcome to Vancouver-Quadra, one of four ridings holding a by-election next Monday (March 17). Well, at least there’ll be one if the Government doesn’t fall before the end of this week and we are subject to a Writ of General Election (and no, it’s extremely unlikely that, in the event that a confidence motion actually fails, the Governor-General would turn to the Leader of the Opposition and ask him to form a Government: that would be against all tradition given the number of months since the last election, so expect a campaign and a vote, period). Of course, Kady O’Malley of Macleans suggests the date for the Ways & Means vote will be April 1, in which case Vancouver-Quadra’s muddled masses will trudge to the polls on March 17, only to risk doing so eight weeks or so later.

Does it matter, though? I wrote a few days ago of being careful what you wish for, as in “what if they gave an election and nobody came?” — and again on why it would be wise to assume nothing about the electorate in this season. Since then, I really do have to wonder if what we are facing next Monday is a potential case of an election without interest. Even the candidates have some trouble getting interested, as Bill Tieleman notes (and, yes, I did notice that he failed to provide a link for the most disinterested candidate, Deborah Meredith of the Conservatives).

How disinterested are they? (I have not hung around the advance polling stations, so I don’t know what turnout has been like to date. As I previously noted, I’m still debating whether or not to bother voting myself!) We are now six days from voting day. I have had one literature drop by the Greens, and one by the NDP. Nothing from the Conservatives, other than a phone call to tell me when the advance poll was. Nothing at all from the Liberals. One wonders how many of the dispirited have departed the Liberals’ ranks, as both Steve V of Far and Wide and the author of Apply-Liberally (and their commenters) have noted an erosion of enthusiasm amongst the on-the-ground supporters. But then, one wonders what rate of erosion has affected the other parties, too. All the money in the world evidently can’t organise a literature drop or door knock on behalf of the Government candidate. All the UBC students in session in creation don’t seem to be swelling the ranks of the NDP (the candidate is at that university) or the Greens (the candidate in favour of green grass in all its forms).

Indeed, the conversation in the neighbourhood is resolutely about anything but electoral politics. Even the die hard observers of the scene who provide ground-level observations for the Election Prediction Project haven’t updated the riding’s profile since the 27th of February. Starbucks and the other coffee houses are silent on the subject. So, too, the chatter beside the playing fields. Apparently, no one cares.It’s a reasonable outcome. Unlike the presumptions of, say, a Jason Cherniak, there are judgements made by citizens about what’s going on. In broad strokes, as Steve V noted today, of course. Broad enough that I haven’t heard a call-in program on CKNW turn to federal issues — much less the local by-election — in days. Open phone segments do not attract even one caller who wants to talk Federal politics: Cadman is dead, RESPs don’t matter, let’s talk about things closer to home.

Is it possible that O’Malley identified the wrong danger? Not that the Government, with the never-ending series of confidence motions honoured by the absence of Her Majesty’s Loyal Abstention Party, out for a drink and a puff when the vote is called, night after night, might suddenly trip over its own feet and find that it had played the game once too often, but that, when the call does come, a mare usque ad marem, Vancouver-Quadra’s apathy turns out to be the country’s apathy.

Good heavens, the handlers normally do try to put the candidate in a bubble where everything is scripted and all camera angles are “just so”, but what if there’s no crowd outside the fence? 2,000 empty seats in that high school auditorium? All 30 die-hard political junkies watching the debates — and no one else? What then?

So much for managing expectations, setting up winning conditions, building war chests, pre-selecting candidates and the like in that event. None of it would mean a damn thing. Instead, they could all stay home in Ottawa and carry out their campaign on the Sparks Street Mall — and sleep at home at night. No need to bother anyone else.

Cherniak got one thing right — “politics is not a game” — alas, as Victor Wong of The Phantom Observer notes, there’s not much else he got right in his post today. It is because both Dion’s Liberals and Harper’s Conservatives have made the House into a game, in fact, that a blanket of apathy lays lower on the landscape here than the mounds of snow covering the East, or a good Newfoundland fog.

The damage is apparently already done. I begin to believe that it has gone far, far beyond a leader, or a party. It is systemic. We Canadians are getting close to calling it quits on Ottawa, lock stock and cookie-barrel.

Already we are a highly regionalised country. Already our provincial governments are the locus for most of the things that matter to us: they handle health, education, welfare, infrastructure, etc. Ottawa is just the money transfer agent, and, as I noted a few days back, it costs us 20¢ on the dollar for the privilege of having Ottawa take the money in and redistribute it, even assuming your province is one that sees you break even or come out ahead on that game of Robin Hood. Cutting out the middleman would be a net gain for “seven provinces representing more than 50% of the population” (the general Constitutional change test). Inertia is doing more to hold Confederation together at this point than anything else — and the sound and fury signifying nothing that is Ottawa today is a potent dissolvent of those bonds.

We are coming to a turning point from which there will be no turning back. When Liberal bloggers call out for their party to grow a backbone and do their jobs they’re (I suspect) coming at this as much from a real concern about the corrosive effect on the Canadian body politic of Dion’s inactions as they are from hopes for their own party’s electoral success. When Conservative bloggers want an election, I suspect it’s as much to bring an end to this endlessly vitriolic stand-off as it is because they think their party’s future would be better off post-election. In other words, here are the ones who understand that “politics is how we live together” — a communal ethic — and it is the Jason Cherniaks, the Senator David Smiths and the like, and their confrères on the other side of the aisle, who are the ones playing games.

I’d say again to bring on the general election except that now the results are also dangerous. Still, there is apparently no way forward with this game of chicken being played two swords’ lengths across the House.

Voting all the bahstids out might be just the therapy this country needs.