More Canada for Everyone, Now!

(This editorial appears in the December 2005 issue of Mascaret.)

I meant to say one thing: vote. Your vote means cash for the party you support. Now I?m saying two things: I?m the Green Party candidate for Moncton-Riverview-Dieppe in the January 23 election.

The rock bottom cash value of your vote is $1.75 in federal funding, per year, if you vote for a party running a full slate, and it gets 2% of the national vote. If you vote for a party running an incomplete slate (or even just one riding), they must get 5% of the overall vote to qualify.

That said, in June 2005, the Canadian Action Party, the Christian Heritage Party, the Communist Party of Canada, the Green Party, the Marijuana Party, the Marxist-Leninist Party of Canada, and the Progressive Canadian Party, all filed to have the 2%/5% cutoff abolished. Their counsel, Professor Peter Rosenthal, said ?it is unconstitutional to withold those funds from these parties merely because they received fewer votes. The payment is per vote anyway; why can?t a party that receives a small number of votes get a small amount of money??

So if you support a small party, but are demoralized about voting, vote! Make sure that when the case is resolved, your party gets more money. Give a token of future support.

I wrote that much, then started thinking, who?ll I vote for? Then I thought about how broken our government is, and got angry at our uninspiring leaders. I?m not speaking against the Moncton-Riverview-Dieppe candidates; we?re all facing a big picture problem. Our democracy is broken.

In 1993, the Tories got 16% of the vote - and 2 seats. The Reform Party got 19% of the vote and 52 seats. For the Liberals: 41% of the vote, and an ?overwhelming majority? of 177 seats.

Now that the right is more or less back together, we?re seeing similar math: 30-40% Liberal, 30-35% Conservative, 15-20% NDP, then the Bloc, Greens, Independents, and so forth. All we did in 1993 was shove the problem ahead half a generation or so, during which time, Canadian politics stagnated.

(Though, the stagnation?s older: what Tory wouldn?t trade Stephen Harper for last generation?s Brian Mulroney; respectively Layton for last generation?s Broadbent or Martin for last generation?s Trudeau?)

Winner-take-all keeps getting weirder, voter turnout lower, and candidates less forceful. It feels like only two types of Canadians will engage such a bad system: those who can manipulate it and those who want to fix it.

I?m the latter. I?m not from New Brunswick, but have off-and-on spent around a third of my life here, with my closest family. I was born in British Columbia, and have also lived in Ottawa, Silicon Valley and Oregon. I came back to Canada because I like Canada more. I?ve crossed it coast to coast repeatedly by rail and plane, and once even in a Volkswagen minibus.

I?ve also seen unbelievable waste while working in the heart of Canadian government, at HRDC. And I?ve seen incredible stretching of tiny budgets at Status of Women Canada; a near-heroic department crippled by our government?s transparent indifference to women?s equality.

Then, after many years? warning, my health finally collapsed. With a fat folder of doctor reports, I learned how the government works from the outside. I waited years for appointments which the government would cancel without notice, and was assessed by consultants who had no health qualifications. Though I had dozens of sheets from elite medical specialists detailing my disabilities, and a fistful of prescriptions, the system I encountered is so cruel and inhumane that it requires the sickest Canadians to fight until we drop. My elected representatives either couldn?t help or made it worse.

Canada is rich. We can afford good health care, a clean environment, peacekeepers, and to feed and shelter all our citizens. But I?ve seen firsthand how we get stupidly lousy value for our money. During the Y2K upgrades, staff were given complete old computer systems. (While the computers might have been buggy, the monitors and keyboards were not.) All the programmers in one department were given expensive new computers ?in case? they had to work from home on snow days. A friend brought home six sets of high-end speakers because they were being thrown in the trash. I literally tripped over a $15,000 server that sat in the hallway for months while staff bickered about whether it was precisely what was ordered - but nobody wanted to turn it on to check.

Every March, every department blows whatever?s left of its budget on anything they can think of: new phones, new chairs, new brochures. It?s all standard in Ottawa; I could give a hundred similar examples happening while my prescription debts piled up. (Catastrophic drug coverage? Hah!) Nor is it new; during the Mulroney era, another friend?s father, a high-ranking civil servant, used to spend every morning on the phone to family in Asia and every afternoon at the gym.

The more I reflected as I wrote this editorial, the more I realized I wanted to vote for someone who believed in good government because they knew bad government literally destroys lives and that has got to stop. So I decided instead of just sitting here editorializing, that I would run for Parliament myself, as the Moncton-Riverview-Dieppe Green Party candidate. I want a better Canada. Whomever we send to Ottawa had better understand what they?re up against; I learned it by force.

Vote on January 23. Especially if you think your candidate won?t win. If we are really headed for another minority, the dollars your vote brings might make the difference next time. But maybe if we quit playing with strategic voting, and cast our ballots for the government we truly want, we?ll be pleasantly surprised. If we can?t do worse, why not go for better?