Oil wealth can turn anyone rotten.
History will see this sort of shit for the infantile decadence it is.
Shame about our contemporaries…
History might. It’s a real shame we humans don’t seem to learn the lessons.
We need to get rid of these clowns… fast.
conservatives eh?
More or less doing exactly what those of us who voted and fought against them every election said they would do.
And yet many people still pick their vote based on the color of a candidate’s tie or some other brainfoam. I despair for our species, and more specifically I despair for our country.
I just passed my citizenship exam. Hopefully I will be sworn in as a newly minted Canadian in time for the next election!
Sadly I think Australia is following its Commonwealth cousin in the same downward spiral…
I’m not entirely sure that was the case: the effin’ Tories won a majority with slightly under 40% of the popular vote. Roughly 53% of the vote went to the NDP, Liberals and Greens, with the rest going to the BQ. Our bloody first-past-the-post riding system needs reform badly. There was no way in Hell to form a Centre-Left coalition, yet that was where the majority of the voters were to be found.
Hell, we’ve seen this in Québec elections often enough, starting with Lesage’s loss (with a plurality of the vote) in 1966.
Yeah, we’re all about conserving, um… privilege for the few. Not much else, come to think of it…
Oh wait - our utterly moronic fantasies, that too.
What Canada seems to have been only 30 years ago, and what Canada is now, seem to me to be two completely different beasts.
remember your post about the guy tracking all the actions of this government?
(http://24percentmajority.blogspot.ca)
this week his opening line is:
“I’ve got to be honest, dear reader. I’m just burnt out on this stuff. I’m not paying much attention. I think Steve won…”
this is the present attitude of Canadians - there’s no revolutionary spirit, no fight in them. granted, they’re all self-interested, and it’s hard enough for the middle class - I mean how many times can you scream at the radio or newspaper and see no result? as they say, anger is impotence, so there’s a ton of shaking of the head and carrying on, in the face of a ton of bullshit.
(shakes head and goes to next post)
Welcome to the country.
This is how most first world people are, no? Well enough employed, busy, terrified of losing our comforts and toys. Too distracted and worn down to focus on the issues that matter.
We have a similar problem here in the US, though our affliction is far more advanced. I think we are stage III at least. Act two of this episode of This American Life hits the nail on the head. More and more people in the US are calling for third-party candidates. But when you divide by more than two, a minority will eventually win the election. People who value freedom of thought will tend to fracture into smaller parties, where as people who prefer to be told what to do will be sucked along by the more “conservative” parties. That’s why the religious conservatives end up in the GOP, they want God to tell them what to do, and in the absence of that, their pastor and their politician. They are very good at obeying and they get their talking points emailed to them on a daily basis. Sadly the Dems answer to the problem was to be more like the GOP. Sorry Canada, the infection was probably spread through close contact.
corey robin claims that conservatives are at heart counterrevolutionaries. They admire the zeal of those who would liberate the people from the old order, but they oppose egalitarianism and aim to restore the old relations of power…
Militant nostalgists, perhaps?
Of course another way to look at it, is that it isn’t Canada that is in decline, but only the soft-left-centrist liberal milieu, which is declining in Canada, and is out of touch with regular Canadians.
The Harper government is only doing what their voters elected them to do.
October 19, 2015 October 19, 2015 October 19, 2015 October 19, 2015 October 19, 2015 October 19, 2015 October 19, 2015 October 19, 2015 October 19, 2015 October 19, 2015 October 19, 2015 October 19, 2015 October 19, 2015 October 19, 2015 October 19, 2015 October 19, 2015 October 19, 2015 October 19, 2015 October 19, 2015 October 19, 2015 October 19, 2015 October 19, 2015 October 19, 2015 October 19, 2015 October 19, 2015 October 19, 2015, etc.
Then the clean up will start.
No. 60% (closer to 70% in the latest polls) voted AGAINST Harper, in my book, this sure is not a sign of “liberal decline” (you tories… you just pretend to know about numbers). And messing up the electoral laws like you’re trying to do now won’t work either. Strategic voting will push you out and for a long time to.
That would be horseshit. The Liberals wiped out the Conservatives in 1993 with a bit over 40% of the vote, with the NDP receiving a little under 7% (the NDP’s worst showing ever) - total vote to the Centre-Left of about 47%, which is about 6% less than they got in this last election.
How screwed up first-past-the-post can be is shown by the fact Reform and the PCs got about 35% of the popular vote between them in that election, but the Bloc Québecois became the official opposition with 13.5% of the vote (a significant chunk of Québec, obviously), less even than the PCs who got 16% of the vote, and less than Reform, who got a little under 19%. That translated into 54, 2 and 51 seats respectively.
Edit: Reform at 52 seats in 1993 - my bad.
