I’ve been having some very enthusiastic conversations with friends and relatives, from Canada and beyond.  They range in ideology from anarchists to socialists to neo-liberals to social conservatives to authoritarians, and regardless of our dynamic views there’s always one thing we can all agree on. The political discourse in this country has stagnated such that it seems that all of the leaders of every party are the bottom of the barrel when it comes to charisma or new effective ideas to deal with 21st century problems. Discussions about leaders generally revert to statements of “I don’t like so-and-so, but he’s at least better than the other ones.” Surprisingly, this even includes hardcore Conservatives who have voted that way for a majority of their adult life. Even these partisans look down upon Harper and his ilk, but vote for them because they view the current Conservative party position to be the closest out of all of the parties to their own. That is, they would vote for them, if they felt the need or were forced to vote in the first place.

Ironically, usually when we discuss I am able to point out how the Conservative Party’s “conservative” image, and the Conservatives’ actions are completely separate entities, in a fashion similar to the Liberal’s “liberal” image during the 90s. The biggest difference is that they seem not to be that familiar with newstories which show the Conservative Party’s blatantly unconservative behaviour:

1. A current affidavit alledging criminal behaviour with regards to election law in Canada. This includes former party members acknowledging this behaviour.
   

   … the Conservative Party of Canada deliberately violated federal elections law by spending about $1.1 million over its national limit on media advertising and deliberately filed misleading statements in its official returns.

2. A major national security failure from leaving classified NATO documents in an unsecure location, the apartment of an ex-girlfriend who just happened to have a history with the Hell’s Angels. I’m not the only one shocked that they claim to take national security seriously be are incredibly irresponsible with classified documents. Even our NATO allies are worried about working with us now.
   

   It has to be acknowledged that the incident itself was injurious to the national interest by tarnishing Canada’s good reputation within NATO circles for safeguarding classified information

3. While this one is not as well sourced, considering all of the secrecy that the Harper gang maintains, I wouldn’t be surprised if their “fiscal conservatism” is more similar to Ontario’s Harris government’s fiscal responsibility.

This is similar to the Republican corruption scandals in the states. In 2004, no matter how much corruption was apparent, they still did fairly well in the elections. This was simply because the Democrats didn’t offer anything inspirational or even really different than what the Republicans offered. In 2006, this changed drastically with the Democrats taking a far more solid stand on their issues and energizing their base greatly. While the last 2 years have been disappointing considering that the house and senate are both Democratic, they have been a lot better than the previous Republican dominated governments. Regardless of how much Obama may not be as “liberal/libertarian/socialist/etc” that people want him to be, he is an inspirational figure and he is having the effect of driving people to try to improve things for everyone.

In Canada, however, we are in a bit of a bind. Layton can be inspirational, but for some reason on a national level he comes across as incredibly wooden and overdriven by the socialist elements within his party. The activist base of the NDP seems reasonably strong, but not really directed towards actions which will increase the vote for the party in any significant manner.

Dion is a smart, reasonable man with some genuinely new ideas for how to solve 21st century problems. However, he (or his current party leadership) doesn’t seem to have the ability to inspire people enough to really turn that into something with productive momentum. He failed Canadians repeatedly during the last session of parliament by not bringing down the government on a plethora of bills which the Liberal party should have stood solidly against. This doesn’t exactly energize the Liberal activist base.

The Greens are a bit of a wild card. They have potential to burst onto the scene, but they need to get at least one seat in parliament so they can be in on the leadership debate. This will make them more legitimate in the eyes of low-information voters and might increase their parliamentary presence dramatically. Failing that, they need to energize the youth base in this country in a manner similar to how Obama did in the States. Young voters commonly end up being high-information voters and can have a strong effect in many ridings, especially ridings where they are taken for granted as not voting at all. Elizabeth May has done some good things, but she needs to figure out how to have a bigger public image than she currently has.

So, where are we stuck? Layton and Harper are busy fighting the political fight from the 20th century, and Dion is busy rejiggering his party but not maintaining a strong public image. He seemed like he was going to be able to break out last year when he started a larger online initiative, but those efforts have gone the wayside and he has clearly lost a strong portion of his online base. May seems mostly to be keeping her head low. However, I cannot even be sure of this since I have not seen any public statement/speech/etc from May for almost a year now. It would be really exciting if they won Guelph, but since no one is trying to energize the public, I would be shocked if that happened.

So, Canadian politics continues as it always has, stagnant. There are a bunch of high-information voters who blog about it, and donate money to their respective parties, but at the end of the day, no one else is energized about Canada, what we can do, and what our potential is.

We need a leader who will stand up, go from province to province, make a speech in every major city, and inspire Canadians to step up to the plate, inspire Canadians to go beyond themselves and help their communities and country, inspire Canadians to believe in more than just their next paycheque.

Inspire Canadians to turn the 21st century into our century of growth and renewal.

It’s our time.

1h