The Election About Nothing That Isn't Going To Happen

Most Canadian elections are about nothing, by which I mean that there's no single issue around which to frame a compelling narrative. Most of our elections hinge on questions such as, "Boy, the Liberals are corrupt motherfuckers, aren't they"? and "HIDDEN AGENDA!" This makes our elections awfully boring. At least in the U.S voters can marvel over how goddamned stupid everyone has become in the last forty years. Here, there's just a ghastly dullness that drives the populace into submission.

Of course, the depraved and soulless ghouls in the Parliamentary Press Bureau aren't much of a help. As Canada enters its seventh year of minority parliaments, they've been ratcheting up election fever about every fifteen seconds. This is because they're almost as wholly ignorant of the important issues the country faces as the fucking voters are. And you have to get up awfully early to be more ignorant than Canadian voters, although it often seems that American voters invented the rooster.

The Conservative government of Stephen Harper always wants an election. His only problem is that the Opposition hasn't been particularly accommodating. So frustrating was this that Harper had to break his own already unconstitutional fixed election date law in the fall of 2008, which resulted in ... another Tory minority.

Well, the Prime Minister is gearing up to table another budget that will essentially burn money that we don't have, so the cocksucker media is speculating about another "imminent election." By my count, this will be the 432nd "imminent election" that the press have declared since Harper was sworn in five years ago.

This time, the "issue" is supposed to be corporate tax cuts that the Conservatives want to pass and the Liberals want to spend on other nonsense that we can't afford. I don't know when this happened, but everyone in Canada seems to have picked up the American retard gene that makes conservatives think that tax cuts aren't spending and leads liberals to believe that new program spending when we're drowning in red ink is somehow wise.

My hero, the great Mike Brock at The Volunteer, has already addressed the stupidity of the corporate tax cuts. But I'd like to raise a point that he hasn't. Corporate tax cuts aren't going to create jobs in the absence of consumer demand, and that demand is notably lacking right now.

With consumers still either saving or paying off existing debt, any money that's thrown at companies in the way of tax cuts is just going to get shoved into their reserve capital. To suggest that said companies are going to use that money to hire people who will produce products that the public won't buy is moronic. Regardless of what the government does, the consumer has entered an austerity age and all the tax cuts in the world aren't going to change that.



I understand that Michael Ignatieff gave a howlingly stupid speech to his caucus the other day that suggested that he "wouldn't accept" the new Harper tax cuts. But we've all been to that dance before. I could list the number of things that Iggy wouldn't accept until he ultimately did but I'm very lazy and tired of repeating myself. The only time that he seriously suggested forcing an election, he dropped sixteen points nationally and disintegrated entirely in Toronto, which is one of the only places that the Liberal Party still exists in a numerically significant way.

Ignatieff's credibility, and that of his party, has been diminished to the point that there already is a coalition government, except that it's one between the Conservatives and the Liberals. And that ain't gonna change anytime soon, if only because there's no real coalition in the Liberal Party itself. Roughly half of today's living Grits would like to see Iggy killed rather than elected prime minister. Although he'll never admit it, I'd bet that a certain Liberal spin doctor is getting ready to vote Tory for the third time since Stephen Harper has been that party's leader.

There is simply no way that Michael Ignatieff risks the public humiliation of forcing an election that he could only win by accident under those circumstances. He's gotten pretty good at yelling, but to no effect. My opinion is that he'll quit or be deposed before he forces an election.

But let's assume for a second that he does force an election. Imagine the outrage of yet another election based on something as goddammed useless as corporate tax cuts. Boneheaded Tea Party Canadians (a contradiction in terms) will support Harper to the max because they know absolutely nothing about economics as the rest of the country punishes the Liberals for forcing an election that nobody wants over money that we don't have.

The simple fact is that it doesn't matter if there's a spring election. More importantly to my allegedly conservative friends, it doesn't matter if Michael Ignatieff wins it, which he won't. But even if he did, there would be absolutely no economic course correction. We'd just be spending shitloads of money that we don't have on different things. If you want that, you might as well vote for the NDP, which is at least honest about it.

As a country, we're well past the point where we need a party that says "Here's what we spend, here's what we take in, and here's what you idiots want. You do the fucking math." But you're never going to see that because the public is apathetic and stupid, and the politicians are increasingly running to be the homecoming king of the blogosphere, which isn't just apathetic and wrong, but stupid and whorish, to boot.

Do you want to turn a meaningless election into a consequential one? Send letters to Michael Ignatieff's office demanding that he defeat the budget. And when the writ is dropped, vote for anyone on the ballot that isn't a Conservative or a Liberal, particularly if you're a "small c" conservative.

I'd prefer that you vote for independents or small parties, but I don't necessarily care if you vote for the Bloc or the NDP. At this point, it doesn't really matter who the government is. What's important is sending a message, particularly to the Conservatives. And that message is "Get serious or die."