| The federal election on June 28 showed that politicians thought they would get what they wanted, but Canadian voters instead decided they needed pizza.
Canadians went to the polls to choose their government for the next four years and in turn ordered a mixture with no dominant flavour – a four-slice pizza Parliament.
The marriage of the Reform-Alliance party and the Progressive Conservatives was supposed to deliver us from the Liberal devil by unifying the right. This was an assumption that was never accepted by former P.C. leader Joe Clark as logical. He always maintained that adding one plus one and getting two was not going to work for the new party. Clark was right.
Those who were truly progressive left the Conservative ship for other boxes on the ballots.
Meanwhile, voters were only offered choices of leaderless, visionless and idealess politics. It’s like what a friend of mine told me the day before the vote: "it was like being given a choice between bad, badder and baddest."
There is one significant aspect of the election to remember. June 28 will come to be known as the date of two notorious events for Canadians to commemorate – the shot fired by Gavrilo Princip that killed Ferdinand and started the First World War, and the day Liberal leader Paul Martin lost the hold his "natural ruling party" had on Canada.
If Martin were to paraphrase and bastardize Leonard Cohen’s "Democracy," it might read: "From the homicidal bitchin', that went on in my campaign management team, who will serve and who will eat the pizza I bake in Parliament, democracy is finally coming to Canada."
Instead of Liberal dominance, we now have a volatile cocktail of political parties that will lead to another leadership campaign for one of the three true national parties, as well as a federal election, in the next 12 to 16 months.
In the meantime, we will come to see which of the promises made will be morphed to make deals for Martin to maintain power. It’s sort of like the little black bits on a pizza you are told are mushrooms – what you get won’t be what you thought you’d get.
It would be a breath of fresh air to see the political leaders show true leadership based on their rhetoric to address the problems with democracy in Canada, and have backroom discussions performed in the light of day and on the record. Don’t, however, hold your breath.
What you won’t see in this upcoming parliament will be any real change or improvement to the system. You won’t see any innovation because innovation means leaving the box, and we all know what happens when a pizza falls out of its box.
Innovation means looking at real solutions that no one ever wanted to deal with. During the campaign, we saw none of that as candidates fell back on the safe, tried and true lying that all politicians do by using the health-care issue to scare votes their way. The fact is, the majority of health care is delivered through private entities, including the doctors themselves. There is no reason to think these elected people will do anything differently. Sober thought is needed to help solve the health care situation, and we have seen what happens when Ralph Klein opens his mouth to do just that.
I’ve got a theory about this minority government. None of the federal parties will want to be percieved as the one that causes Parliament to dissolve on a confidence vote, so all will take the easy way of making the pizza – by dealing with contentious issues with either private member’s bills, free votes, or by way of executive powers that lie in the Prime Minister’s Office. It will be much like ordering pizza from one of the plastic pizza chains: bland, boring and sure not to cause voter heartburn.
You will not see the issue of the missile defence system come before Parliament, but issues the Bloc Quebecois came out in support of, such as the Kyoto agreement, gun control, abortion, same-sex marriage, interprovincial trade, along with their stated policy of pulling Quebec out of Canada, are all contentious issues that need to be dealt with.
For Conservative leader Stephen Harper, his slice of pizza may have to be kept under the heating lamp for now. He still has the problem of drawing only a small pool of MPs from Quebec, and he has also lost some very credible, seasoned MPs, especially in John Reynolds from B.C.
What does this pizza Parliament mean for you?
It is time for the young, vibrant, smart thinkers we have in this city to get into the game, and actually change the rules. With the Green party, along with Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe, being the only real, sober thinkers in the campaign, this is an opening of a window of change. A minority government such as the one elected in Canada on June 28 says Canadians are not happy with the current options offered. That is the void young Canadians can fill in the political process and drive the future of Canada, instead of sitting in the back seat whining.
That is exactly the reason I got started in politics, both as a volunteer and with a career in the world of communications, media and government relations, 32 years ago, after meeting Joe Clark.
Now you know why I have maintained that Joe Clark was right all along. |
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