You have to be in Quebec to vote for the Bloc, because they only have candidates there :P
I was actually thinking of making this thread myself. Anyway, I don't terribly mind the Conservative Party or its predecessors in principle, but Stephen Harper is a nutjob who shouldn't get a majority government. He's abused his power to an almost unprecedented extent. He's brazenly lying and misleading us about how our democracy works (or at least is supposed to work). Finally, he's promoting a divisive, cynical brand of politics similar to what the Americans have.
The other parties already make every effort to shed light on Harper's power abuses. What happened to the Harper who said he'd promote accountability? Why is he putting DEFEATED CANDIDATES into the Senate, and using it to (effectively) veto bills passed by the House of Commons? Sure, the U.S. President gets to do that, too, but this is not the U.S. The Senate is just a waste of tax dollars and should be scrapped in light of what's happened.
I think that Harper is really counting on people who either never had a mandatory "civics" class or simply forgot, because his outright lying and manipulation throughout his campaign are astounding. "The party with the most votes forms the government." "The coalition is not democratic." These have never been necessarily true, and since the coalition in WW1 ran AS a coalition, there's no true precedent to use as comparison. In any case, Parliament as a whole should be calling the shots. Even more incredulous is his claim that the triumph of a possible entity that represents over 60% of the population is somehow not indicative of a democratic process. Not that I'd necessarily support a coalition government, but why should Harper get a majority government if it doesn't even represent the majority of the electorate?
Harper is trying to stereotype the other parties and Parliament as a whole as entities that don't represent Canadians. (He shows favouritism toward Conservative ridings, though, which might mean that he's merely deluding himself.) The problem is, there's a difference between cynicism and blind mistrust. What we are essentially being told is that the representatives who we elected to represent us don't represent us. But if Parliament is broken, it's not because it disagrees with the Conservatives. More amazing is that he's implicitly using this to try to downplay the validity of the contempt of Parliament motion that defeated his government. If only the sheep who are trained to say "YES" at his rallies would realize this...
Notice how a lot of these aspects mirror aspects of American politics? Harper seems to think that the negativity that he's brewing for his benefit is justified because American politicians do it. But McCain's and Obama's idea of "clean politics" doesn't have to be our idea of clean politics. Just because Obama used buzzwords like HOPE and YES WE CAN, that doesn't mean that our politicians should do the same. Just because Americans talk about the "Bush Administration" or the "Obama Administration", that doesn't mean that calling Canada's government the "Harper government" is OK (he actually did try to have that name put on government stationery and such). We're better than that. We should be better than that. (I haven't even talked about greenhouse gas INTENSITY and other lols.)
I'm not entirely sure of who I'll vote for. Not that it matters much; my home riding is decisively Liberal, and my school-area riding is a race between a prominent NDP and a Liberal. That's why I'm posting this so that other people see how important this election is. Harper's party was defeated by a motion convicting him of contempt of Parliament. As I understand it, this has never happened anywhere in the Commonwealth. We shouldn't be rewarding this behaviour any more than we rewarded Paul Martin for the sponsorship scandal.
(Someone had to make this post :P )
