I wasn't going to write this blog.

I promised it back at the beginning of the campaign...and then the campaign happened, and it was even uglier than I expected it to be. I've been saying for years that we are no better than the United States when it comes to Political trends: we're just two or three electoral terms behind them. It's a lonely drum I've been beating: Canada has long had a massive inferiority complex masquerading as a superiority complex about the United States. (You don't think it's an inferiority complex? Watch how the media reports any American celebrity venturing into the Arctic tundra wasteland. Do you like us? How do you like us? Please like us!)

As I have been bloviating on Facebook, the ugliness -- of the political landscape around the world;  of the climate catastrophe that, by some accounts, will see us all dead by 2050; of an economic system that worships the most exploitative and obscenely moneyed individuals and excuses their every fault, while trodding on regular every day people with an increasingly heavy boot; and and most definitely permeating everything about the pandemic...has been tremendously disheartening and enraging. I have allowed it to infect me, and I'm trying to root the infection out by disowning the ugliness wherever I can. 

That's difficult, and it's only going to become more so as the world deteriorates. I'm trying to figure out how to stand up against hatred, bigotry and ignorance without becoming a hateful ignorant bigot myself. The thing is, if I don't stand up for my beliefs, I am accepting, condoning and encouraging monsters. That makes me a monster just as surely.

“Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”  --John Stuart Mill

Many people claim they're not political. They're fooling themselves: everyone interacts with politics hundreds of times each and every day. You can't get out of bed without benefitting or suffering from a whole bunch of political decisions. The engine in your car is profoundly political -- see "Who Killed the Electric Car?" for details. The fact you need a car at all is also profoundly political. Elsewhere in the world, cities are built for people, not cars. You can easily walk to your local grocer and for greater distances there is cheap and ubiquitous public transportation. But here in North America, car companies didn't see any profit in that urban model, and more importantly they were allowed to dictate policy. That's why it takes four times longer to get anywhere by bus -- and why your busmates are largely the dregs of society. 

Oh, and if you have children? Your school's efforts to teach them that people who don't look like them are just as worthy of respect as they are came about because of political will. If you live in a place where announcing you're gay or nonbinary gets you expelled --  that's likewise a political decision. 

And I probably don't need to tell you about the politics men play with women's bodies. I will never understand women who tacitly accept this, because I don't, and I'm a man. Stand up for yourselves, women. You are not incubators. 

The ancient Greeks had a word for people who let politics wash over them without actively engaging: idios, "private". If that word looks awfully close to an English word, yup, that's how the Greeks felt about such people.

I don't. In a way I admire them: their lives look blissfully unencumbered from here.  But I don't understand them, because politics has become more about morality than philosophy, and while you may find the minutiae of politics dull and inscrutable, the words and behaviours of political actors should register, one way or another.  

Consider one of the election slogan of the "People's Party of Canada": "It's okay to be White!"

Now, if you are an idios, you might wonder what's wrong with that statement. Of course it's okay to be White -- who ever said it wasn't? Well, the answer is nobody, but many people don't believe that. This slogan, and its close kin "White Lives Matter", never entered the language until someone had the colossal gall to suggest that maybe police should stop murdering Black people for no reason, bragging about it, and going completely unpunished for it. Hell, despite clear video evidence of cold-blooded murder, there are still many people who think the Derek Chauvin verdict was a miscarriage of justice. Gotta keep those n*ggers down. 

That, too, is politics. Ugly politics, to be sure, but the real McCoy. 

But no, caring about Black people is a threat to White people, by some mechanism I don't understand.  I see White fragility everywhere lately. 'WE'RE BECOMING A MINORITY IN OUR OWN COUNTRY!!!!!" ... to which I respond  so what's so bad about that? Do we treat minorities poorly, or something?

Ahem.

To summarize this introduction. Everything is political, your politics are a clue to your morals, and do we let immoral people win by ignoring them?

_____________________

I'm not sure why Justin Trudeau called this election. I'm not sure he's sure. That's maybe the only thing the NDP and the Conservatives agree on, that there was no need for an election. But we've got one, and so on with the show.

And it is a show. I won't argue you there. I understand why cynics disengage from the process when political promises are usually so much hot air. A really good example of one comes from Trudeau himself: electoral reform.

Now, if you don't give two shits about politics, the topic of electoral ref--see, you're already asleep. Gentle question: is one of the reasons you're politically ambivalent because you don't think your vote matters? I get that. Oh, do I get that. Because in many cases, you're right. Under Canada's archaic electoral system, called "first past the post" (FPTP), the winner of any election is not the party with the most votes but the party with the most seats. Let's take my seat, or riding,  as an example. It's currently Liberal, and considered a "Liberal safe" riding. If the polls hold,  the Liberals will get 44.8% of the votes in my riding: the next closest party, the Conservatives, will get 25.7%.

The practical upshot of this is that unless you vote Liberal in this riding, you are wasting your time. Your vote for any other party will of course be counted -- we're not the United States -- but fat lot of good that will do when so many others around you are voting one way.  The same is of course true for many Conservative safe ridings, among them Kathy's and my father's. Voting anything but Conservative in Parry Sound District or Oxford County is throwing your vote away.

It gets worse because it's not just a local issue. Seats are distributed by population. It's not partisan the way it is to our south: our elections are governed (as all elections everywhere should be) by an apolitical body. But in a way it's very partisan because have you seen how many seats there are in the Greater Toronto Area? I'll tell you how many there are. There are almost enough. Show really well in Toronto and you probably win the country.

Toronto is a city. Liberals show well in urban populations the world over.  So Toronto can go a long ways towards deciding an election all on its own. And trust me, Conservative ridings do not like this one little bit. I wouldn't either, were I them. The entire province of Alberta, but for a couple of urban ridings, votes Conservative without fail. They feel alienated, and as much as I disdain their politics, I can't say I blame them one littler bit for that. 

So I have largely been concentrating on the Liberals (who fancy themselves "Canada's Natural Governing Party" with typical arrogance) and the Conservatives, who have devolved over my lifetime from a party I regularly voted for into something I wouldn't vote for with a gun to my head. The Canadian political landscape regularly flips between the two parties (and in my province, we seem to like to elect the opposite of whatever party is currently ruling nationally).

But there are other parties here. And at least one of them, my political home, polls better than any third party in modern U.S. history (while never well enough to win anything, federally). 

Current polling suggests this election will change nothing: another Liberal minority. (Apolitical friends, feel free to skip the rest of this paragraph; American friends, by all means read on if you wish). Minority governments are different in origin but very similar in effect to, say, a Democratic President and House with a Republican Senate. The only difference is that there's still some faint notion of the common good up here, so parties work together a little more easily. Majority governments are not something I trust even if "my" party has the majority, because they confer far too much power. Picture a Democratic President with a supermajority of Democrats controlling both houses and you'd be about halfway to as much domestic power as a Canadian PM with a majority enjoys. It's practically a dictatorship: the only check such a PM has is the Supreme Court. Incidentally, our leaders are elected by their parties, not by ordinary electors. This doesn't entirely negate a cult of personality -- our current PM's father had a pretty potent one -- but it does tend to blunt it. Oh, and we don't tend to elect celebrities, either. I think that might be because to be a Canadian celebrity you have to make it in the U.S. (inferiority complex, remember) and thus you're a sellout. We're complicated. 

There are four other parties that will garner 3% or more of the vote, besides the Libs and Cons. In projected order of popularity, from most popular to least:

• The New Democratic Party (NDP), led by Jagmeet Singh, the first person of colour to lead a federal party in Canada. Current projection: 19.5%, 34 seats, plus or minus 17.