Voter's Final Word Is Wise, Cautious

I love how we canadians suddenly possess 'collective wisdom'. What a surprise! Here I thought that one single vote for a party was to elect either a local candidate or a party, yet how was I to know I was part of a gigantic throbbing collective mass of intelligence that stretched its fingers into the minds of canadians (or came out of theirs). It must be part of that 'collective subconscious' that had me realize how people were going to vote in Ottawa, Toronto, Winnipeg and Quebec; people whose lives I know nothing about and whose decisions weren't even known by most of the pollsters.

To be short, what rubbish. I don't even know how most of my neighbours will vote let alone the rest of the country. I may have vague ideas that because the voting system is so twisted and westerners so long disenfranchised (like everyone else) that at least half of them in any riding will vote conservative even if Kubla Khan ran the party.

In short, this is more patronizing media muck to try to make an obsolete and completely and unjustifiably unfair voting system into some kind of mass that can only be defended by such literary rubbish as 'our collective wisdom'.

As for the 'fairvote.ca' position outlined elsewhere here, it comes as no surprise that now that the conservatives have the key to Parliament that the 'democratic deficit' will once more take a back seat.

Marcarc: that is because you are a "self-interested individualist" rather than really involved in the broader society. There are many people in your situation.

If you bothered talking to people and really listening you would understand what was happening and how others felt.

No one would argue that there are problems in the system but the electorate always tries to make the best of a bad situation. There is something to be said for "collective wisdom." I may not have known how my neighbours voted but I had a very good idea of "how they felt."

Marcarc: Here my final wise word and it is all about caution :
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Time To Restructure Our Government The Crunch is Just A head

While we are rethinking our political system, maybe we should rethink our public service.

One example of a bureaucracy gone a muck was mentioned by Gills Duceppe, during one of his election speeches, he mentioned that we have over 10, 000 public servants working in the federal health department, wow. He also added that the money to employee this bureaucracy, could be better spent by the provinces on health care since it was the provinces who administer the provincial health care system. Good point Gills.

Lets think about that , 10, 000 highly paid unionized bureaucrats who over time will be receiving “government” pensions and whose position will more likely be filled, doubling up on the cost and placing a further strain on Provincial Health care dollars. Could the Federal Government and Provincial Governments be heading in the same direction as the auto industry, finding themselves bogged down in pensions and wages while a program is starved because hands on staff be hired , because it lacks funds.

Will all levels of “government” find themselves in the position General Motors and the rest of the auto industry have found themselves, is the bureaucracy crushing our public infrastructure, because tax dollars required to operate are being laid out in wages to civil servants in Ottawa, will we Canadians soon find ourselves bogged down in pension debt and wages? Come on Canada it is time to retool the bureaucratic structure in Ottawa and our provincial “governments” .

With an aging population and having such a low birth rate , and the “governments” being the largest employer, will we be able to maintain those hundred of thousands of government employee pensions , along with covering the wages of the employees that will be hired to replace those who retired? Who is planning for this conundrum ?

This is something to chew on, instead of your finger nails. .



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Good government is not a party government

I"ve been called a lot of things before, but never a 'self interested individualist'. That my post would be interpreted as a slight against canadians is cause for concern, it certainly wasn't meant to be. The reality is that 'strategic voting' is another way of saying 'your individual vote means bubkus'. In my riding the liberal guy has won by more than 10,000 votes in every election for the last three elections. There is no way to be 'strategic' in such a case. In NO campaign did an individual vote make ANY difference.

That canadians aren't happy about this is an understatement, they muddle through the best way they know how. I wasn't insinuating there WAS no 'collective beliefs' in Canada (though there are many), my comment was aimed at the idea that our VOTING SYSTEM reflected that. Far from it. A self interested individualist, good one:)

It may be true that in your specific case you may have had someone who was perceived as representing the interests of his/her constituents. That was also the case in my riding but that does not mean most voters were happy voting Liberal, including traditional Liberal voters, because they wanted change but not the kind of change they were being offered. Even traditional Conservative voters were not totally comfortable with voting for a Harper led government. Many, including myself, throught long and hard before making a decision. In a way that was just as strategic as registering a protest vote as I did.

It sounded to me that you may not have interacted with others before drawing your conclusions. Many who see them as self-interested individualists see no benefit in seeking out the opinions of others and react negatively when things do not go the way they want them to go. Please forgive me if I made an incorrect assumption based on your reaction to the Travers column.

You are confusing two things, the desire in a constituency to have a specific individual represent you, and the desire for a specific party to represent the nation. It is the voting system that guarantees you can't have both. In the states you can select a different President than your local representative. You can select one party to govern nationally and a different party (or representative) to represent you locally. In proportional representation you at least know that your vote will mean something and that the party or person you vote for will have fair representation corresponding to their vote (depending on the variety of PR). So again, you'd cast a vote for an individual separately from a party to govern.

In Canada we have neither of those things. The idea of 'strategic voting' is being defined as deciding whether to vote for a party you dislike based on the fear of the other party. That's not 'strategic voting', that's just deciding who to vote for. In Iraq under Hussein they had that sham election where 98% voted for Saddam. Iraqi's at least had the choice not to vote, but that certainly isn't 'strategic'.

So I guess we should define our terms. I certainly don't mean strategic voting to be simply deciding who to vote for. That's just called 'voting'. If not then unless you assume that there is a great mass who walk zombie like and just mark a ballot without a thought then YOUR vote is 'strategic' because you thought about it, while there's is just 'voting' because they didn't. It takes quite a bit of hubris to think that little of other canadians so I'm assuming you don't mean that.

I don't think I'm being arrogant, since it isn't a mark of superiority, in stating that of course I talked to dozens of other people. As well as volunteering with Fairvote, belonging to umpteen forum groups and over a dozen local organizations, as well as writing several op-ed pieces (and recieving the emailed feedback from them), and most importantly, being completely without social graces that has me respecting typical social mores-namely not inquiring who people are voting for, I cannot even hazard a guess as to how many people I"ve actually interacted with.

In my riding the only constant I saw was people telling other people to 'vote liberal because we don't want those conservatives', or 'vote conservative because we want to get rid of those liberals'. Most I know voted simply from that gut reaction, there was virtually no analysis of the issues-partly because none was ever presented in the press. In all the stories and articles I found NONE that actually referenced how any of the parties had voted during the minority government. Now, you would assume that when judging how someone will do in the future a good gauge would be what they've done in the past, but apart from vague financial claims about the deficit there was none, and even those were far less frequent from the liberals than last election (or else from the press from last election)

My personal voting decision changed more than a dozen times over the run of the campaign, and it would have changed far more (or less, depending) had I thought that my vote would actually make a difference. As I said, I knew at the outset it did not.

As I've also said, things went pretty much 'the way I wanted them to go', at least realistically. The only realistic options we had was a liberal majority, tory majority, liberal minority, and tory minority. Out of those this is easily my best choice, particularly with a liberal senate. We are already hearing about elected senators, a topic a hundred years overdue. So I'm pretty pleased 'right now'.

As far as the label 'self interested individualist', it sounds a bit like simply calling somebody a selfish, narrow minded son of a bitch. Perhaps I'm reading that wrong, I don't know. I personally don't know anybody who would call themselves that, though I can think of a few I'd like to call that. Of course in a sense we are ALL interested in ourselves and are all individuals. As for 'seeking out the opinions of others', I think everybody does that, otherwise they wouldn't know anything. It just depends where you go for your information.

Again, my reaction was based on the idea that our voting system somehow represents the 'collective will' of the people. Just go to fairvote.ca and you'll see just how wrong that is. For example, in Alberta only 65% of the people voted tory, yet they hold every seat. So are we to assume that even though almost half of Albertans reject what is called a 'western oriented party' that what sits in Ottawa is an accurate reflection of our collective will? Far from it.