What You Get For Three Dollars

Wednesday, September 9, 2009 - What You Get For Three Dollars

I always get suspicious when I hear a single phrase repeated excessively in the media. Lately, the suspect phrase is "nobody wants an election".

Our creepy Conservative Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, has been intoning this phrase since the possibility of overturning his government appeared on the horizon. But the opposition Liberals also used it to avoid a confrontation they did not feel ready to win. In fact, the Liberals wasted their big opportunity, with typical cowardice, and Harper probably thinks he can win if the cards are flopped now. But the assertions of politicians don't concern me. They are not reliable.

What concerns me is the chorus of agreement that echoed through the media. It is now accepted as universal wisdom that an election is a terrible ordeal that the Canadian public should resent enduring. This bizarre notion is almost invariably accompanied by the assertion that elections are "expensive".

Now, of course, every politician in power would naturally prefer to not be accountable to the people. Stephen Harper, in particular, would love to be declared Prime Minister For Life. In his heart of hearts, he envies and admires the gerontocratic gangsters of the Communist Party in China. Nothing else is to be expected from the kind of creatures who worm their way into our Parliament. But it is extremely frightening to me, if it comes to be believed by the Canadian people that elections are an agonizing, traumatic ordeal that should be avoided at all costs. It's profoundly irresponsible of the media to propagandize this view.

Exactly what is the reasoning behind this claim that nobody wants (with the unspoken implication that nobody should want) to hold an election? What exactly is the unpleasant thing that people are supposed to fear? The opportunity to hold their politicians accountable? Nobody is obliged to go to the polls, if they don't want to. The holding of an election does not impinge on anyone's private life in any annoying way, places no unwanted obligation, nor does it require any greater effort than taking a paid hour off of work to mark a few x's on a piece of paper. Why is every journalist convinced that we dread this? Is it because they believe that we, the people, are so stupid that we can't bear to be forced to think about public policies and make decisions? Poor, poor, stupid us...We should be protected from having to make decisions, because we're so dumb, it would hurt our poor little heads to have to mark a ballot.... Decisions are best left to those natural geniuses, professional politicians and the media.

The media harp on the lamest of supporting arguments for this theory: the idea that elections are "expensive". In the last few months, I've noticed that almost every time that "nobody wants an election" is trotted out, it is accompanied by some allusion to the expense of holding elections.

I calculate that every Canadian is called upon to spend three dollars per annum to defray the cost of holding federal elections. Three dollars a year! This does not strike me as being an outrageous price to pay to live in freedom, when one considers that some of us have risked, and sometimes sacrificed, their lives to secure it. The cost of a single federal election is insignificant compared to any of the Conservative government's pork-barrel give-aways, not to mention the billions of dollars of budget surplus that they pissed away just before a recession. Yet journalists insist that we must bitterly resent spending three dollars apiece for democracy. I, on the other hand, rashly propose that we spend a little more.

There's no reason why we shouldn't have federal elections every year. Our parliamentary system could easily accommodate the change. The ability to overturn a government by a vote of no confidence would remain the same. The limit of five years for an unchallenged administration would simply be reduced to one year, and elections would become a routine event, with the normal ones held on a regular and convenient date. Polling stations would become more familiar and permanent, but the procedure would remain the same.

What would change would be that elections would cease to be an idiotic circus of infantile name-calling and button-pushing. The "crisis" atmosphere generated by the media would not be as convincing. We would have to focus more on what matters: what should public policy be and are those in power doing their jobs properly? Frequent elections would pose no threat to those members of parliament who are honest and competent. It is the brainless party hacks, the corrupt, and the incompetent ninnies who would fear losing their seats. A party in majority power, no longer ensured a carte blanche to do whatever it wants for years, would have to face the possibility of seeing its majority evaporate over short periods of time. Minority governments would have to prove their credibility day to day. Opposition parties, with a shake-up from the people always in the immediate future, would not have to engage in arcane calculations of exactly when it is most advantageous to challenge the government. The built-in advantage of incumbents would be weakened. No party could afford to stuff parliament with brainless toadies and yes-men. The arrogant, anti-democratic "leadership" cult of someone like Stephen Harper would be much more difficult to maintain. Power would tend to shift back to the floor of Parliament, reversing its sinister, dangerous and profoundly un-Canadian shift to the Prime Minister's office.

A parliamentary government should be an executive board that we, the shareholders of the nation, employ to carry out public policy — policy that we determine, not them. They should be subject to annual review, and we should have the power to fire them whenever we want. That's what democracy is for. We should not settle on a half-baked, half-assed, half-democracy when we can have the real thing.

At the moment, under the current system, we will probably end up stuck with the Conservatives for another three or four years. Harper is adept at manipulating the fear of elections in the opposition, and the contempt for them among the media. He called a snap election when he needed one. When the recession (a product of crackpot economic theories that Harper professes) started to hit us hard, the opposition had an opportunity to turn him out, but they dithered and panicked. Now that opportunity is probably passed. This is a tragedy for Canada, because Harper's government is profoundly anti-democratic, contemptuous of the people, fiscally incompetent, and morally corrupt. If people grasped that holding frequent elections is their best defense against bad politicians and bad parties, we wouldn't be in this mess.

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