Harper is up to something.
While everyone has been expounding how dumb the Conservatives were to make the fiscal update they were going to, particularly the part about cutting election funding. Now I've been watching how Harper works over the past 3 years, and I'm positive he's up to something.
He promises something the electorate will like - cutting funding to politicians, creating an accountability committee, but doing it in such a way that it will ultimately fail, but at the hands of the opposition (load committees with Liberals or make funding cuts that will bankrupt the opposition parties), +1 for Harper, -1 for Opposition. Basically from day one, Harper has been putting forward stuff in such a way that if they succeed he gets one more notch in his agenda, but if they fail, the Opposition is squarely in the cross-hairs. He's a very clever politician, so I know the bastard is up to something, I just don't know what yet.
But on that note, Canada is in the middle of what I think could be a long-term political crisis. The presence of 4 relatively strong parties in the House is causing a world of trouble, especially since up until about a week ago all four parties wanted to run the House like they had a majority... and frankly if word of the weakness of the coalition is true, they still do. The electorate is pretty divided, we're in the 50-50 election crisis the US was in up until the most recent election. The conservatives seem to come out on top in these matches, perhaps they're just more clever, maybe they're more deceitful... either way they seem to win when its close.
All I do know is that we're facing political crisis, environmental crisis, we're at war, we've got a failing economy and the man leading our country is playing politics and our Parliament is at a standstill. I realize it's his right, I realize it's legal and I realize that Harper isn't the only one to blame, but I know he was the catalyst and I know our country needs better than the shitheads we have running our country right now.
So my solutions?
First idea would be to abolish the party system. Each member is elected independently then must decide based on the wishes of their constituents and work together in the House. This would of course mean a total overhaul of our system of government and would eliminate a head representative of the country (Prime Minister). Corruption could also spring up in such a system as you wouldn't have party oversight and accountability to keep an eye on it. So there would be some issues to be resolved.
Second - Abolition of all but two parties. Not very democratic. And has complete potential to not solve this problem at all.
Third - Shrink the size of parties and encourage an increase in issue specific parties like the Green Party, Unity Party, Rainbow Coalition or the First Peoples National Party. This could be done through legislation, funding changes and taxation changes. By doing this we could have bills being presented by experts instead of quilt pattern agendas that cover all topics in an incomplete way. Problems here of course include the fact that all non-expert parties will have difficulty understanding bills, so corruption could be bred, and members will only be able to handle the most prominent issue in their consituency.
Fourth - Overhaul of our democratic system. The world has come a long way since 1867. We could be using the advances in technology to directly vote on bills as citizens, instead of sending representatives to Ottawa and spending millions a year on wages and elections. Fill the HoC with servers and allow bills to introduced by the public, reviewed by certain "regular" users then allow the population to vote online. Bills could be introduced, have one week for discussion, one week to vote, then would be passed if a vote of over say 25% of the population supported the bill.
Now I'm positive none of these changes would come to fruition. They are certainly frought with issues, I'm no expert. In addition, the people who would need to make the changes have too much to lose. MP's make a pretty good wage and most, I would argue, like the power or the responsibility or whatever. They have too much vested interest to change things. And of course, about 40 people read this blog on any regular basis, and maybe 3 of them will have read it up to this point. 4 people are gonna have a real hell of a time overturning an entire political system.
So for now we're going to be stuck in a political quagmire. I can see this thing extending upward of 12 years, until someone makes a major misstep or people forget about the Liberal Sponsorship Scandal. So until then , here's to ineffective governance!
