We need a drink.
That’s what we’ve been telling ourselves since that fateful day last May 2nd when the country meandered into the right wing fold not by majority, no, but mostly by accident.
As is our Canadian way, when we decide to vote for a majority in federal government the political landscape will be the same for the next half decade. The four way tango that had made up political life in this fair country for the last generation or so may be definitively changed. Our so-called natural governing party having fallen to the depredations of an inclement global zeitgeist. With the myopia of a public more turned on by you tube videos of people falling and hurting themselves, or when it suits our fair weather political minds, we alternatively examine with a self satisfied smile the frothy mixture of hyperbole, vitriol, ignorance, and passion in the nation to our south. The natural governing party governs no longer (sure, that‘s not really news to anyone but bear with us, we probably have a point), nor even merit’s the comfy confines of Stornoway. While we don’t know if the Liberal party will rear it’s head once again, we certainly hope it doesn’t in the incarnation it has in the last several years. We can’t take anymore of our uninspired leaders, with uninspired sound bites, in their uninspired suits (why do government officials always look like they’re wearing really expensive well tailored potato sacks?) in their uninspired hair cuts droning on about, well, whatever it is they drone on about, by the time the droning hit’s the second sentence we’ve already switched to watching youtube videos of people falling down and hurting themselves.
We really need a drink.
We have been forced into the lock step of a western led Boot Scootin’ Boogie, and, as we all know from the middle nineties world wide embrace of new country music and absurdly big stetson hats and all things cowboy, there is nothing more universally demeaning than grown adults in a line dance anywhere east of the west.
As our (we weren’t sure if we should, at this late date, include the first person singular noun “I” after making so much use of the Royal We) grandma used to say, back when she was dating a capable little lad name Lenny, “what is to be done?” Of course she was referring to how to get him out of the house after he secretly spent the night, but the question still applies. The easiest thing to do, and what Canadians tend to do, is to ignore our complicity in the democratic system, which is more or less a democratic tradition in North America, and to distract ourselves by looking askance to our south, our noses up, and to pat ourselves on the back for not being Them! Well, have we got news for us. With voter rates dropping (we here in Ontario have broken our previous record for low electoral participation! A round of who-gives-a-shit for everyone!), the acceleration of the destruction of our manufacturing sector due to a reckless gambling in the financial sector of the world, and this Canadian generation’s general fear of doing things that are bold, with a federal government that is turning away from the collectivist spirit that has created our country, and with a new and clear polarization in our electorate, we are heading the way of the Glorious Republic.
We could really use that drink now.
To answer our (my?) dear grandma’s question: A number of things can be done. After griping and pissing and moaning, and twisting, and panting like impotent jerks, something can actually be done. Now that the provincial shoulder shrug has been accomplished we can actually press this government, the Liberals are in a worse position than a Baluchi in a beer tent and McGuinty knows it. With his just shy of majority, and his just shy of actually accomplishing anything really useful in the long term for this province, there is room to effectively press his government. A genuine interest and engagement is what’s called for here, and people, we’re talking about letters. Not electronic letters, no, the one’s made out of paper. Have you seen Mr. Smith Goes to Washington? No? Well you should. It’s damn good and damn uplifting, and those fat cats in Washington, or, you Ottawa, should watch it too. It’s stirring. And Jimmy Stewart is great in it. But in that movie the people write letters. If people in the Great Depression can scrape together paper and ink surely you can put down your expensive coffee and stop BBM’ing for a second and write a letter. Yes, that’s right, against all the high falutin’ New Media Enthusiasm that has swept the world, what with the Arab Spring, and Steve Jobs being heralded the techno messiah and everyone living out loud and what have you, we, Neo-Luddites, want you to start writing letters. Sure, sure, that requires a lot more time and attention than a face book update, it’s true, and to that we say: fuck you. It’s about time you took yourself more seriously. Really! You don’t look half bad when you’re covered in a kindly attention to politics. Why, we want you to spruce yourself up, we want you to Rise! And Shine! And Write A Goddam Letter! Because, Canada, you have a lot going for you, you have a lot to live for! We believe in you! We think you can really do something amazing! And one way to do that is to maybe, just maybe, write a letter.
Do you remember how it used to feel to receive a letter in the mail? There it was, that paper envelope, with looping script, and there gasp there was your name! The most beautiful sounding word in the English language, your very own name! It’s like a teensy weensy little Christmas every time you got a letter. You know what happens now? Now you forget to check your e-mail for one week, two weeks, two and a half weeks go by and finally you log into your mail box and there are thirty, well, what are they? They must be letters. They don’t seem like letters of course. They all look the same, drab, small, half of them not even addressed specifically to you. Some you check, some you delete, some you avoid until there it is, day after day, accusing you, begging you to be read, to be considered, to be poured over, until you just can’t take it anymore and you stop logging on to your e-mail account for one week, two, two and a half weeks. It’s a dastardly pattern and we want to help you out of it. We want your local politician to remember to pure unalloyed joy of opening a personal letter addressed to him or her! We want both of you to share in that experience. It’s simple, it’s mildly amusing, and it is genuinely important. So don’t be an asshole. Write a letter.
Of course we can’t help but mention New media, like this fair blog that you are currently probably ignoring, as another example of the way Canadians can engage and try to move the public debate. With the wobbly weakness of the provincial Liberals they’ll be looking for ways to create public consensus and due to the fact that they’re beholden to the huggable NDP there’s a division and a weakness that the public can easily exploit. So blogging, while ridiculous we admit (we here at bar politics are nothing if not ridiculous. You should see what we’re wearing today. You say never do the double plaid? We say ALWAYS do the double plaid. You say never wear white after Labor Day? We say fine. But we won’t wear underwear either!) is an option that is increasingly useful (we encourage you to send us your own blogs, we read voraciously you see, and we’re interested in seeing what other motivated Canadians have to say about politics). As well the doddering Toronto City Hall is now vulnerable to the same kind of activist approach. The Gravy Train (which for the longest time we thought was a TTC poutinery stationed on one of the cars. We were looking for weeks, just imagine our embarrassment…)(incidentally one of barpolitics new demands is to include a publicly funded poutinery in one of the subway cars. We’d call it, you guessed it, The Gravy Train) Commandant has made enough public mistakes that the public is realizing how absurd it was to elect him in the first place. Again, like McGuinty, Ford will be looking for consensus, and compromise, and there is room to push the municipal and provincial governments in a direction more inclined with the general public good, and to get these government on side against the iron fisted bludgeon that comprises HarperGov TM.
How did we find ourselves at the dull point of the spear? The Liberals, that’s how. Yeah, it’s true everyone has been saying sad little mourning things about the Liberals, but no one has really held them accountable in the way we’re about to right now: Which is to say really, really, really accountable. Considering that the Liberals, while strutting around and patting themselves on the back for being oh so wonderful, considered themselves the Natural Governing Party, and then managed to drift into destroying the liberal collectivist consensus that had characterized Canadian political identity since approximately, well let’s see, oh right, the last hundred years or so; and besides being shunted out of government in early Confederation the Liberal party and their ethos have characterized the center of Canadian identity more or less since the beginning of Confederation.
On the other hand, let’s remember that since the 19th century, the Liberals have been the party that imagined the Canada most of us associate with our core values; the party that began progressive politics, increased immigration, opposed imperialism, created Saskatchewan and Alberta, and gave us our first francophone prime minister. The Liberals have been the party of Canadian sovereignty, the creators of a Canadian navy, the mother’s allowance, the Canada Pension Plan, and universal health care. The Liberals gave us the just society programs, official bilingualism with the Official Languages Act, they gave us the only nation state in the world that believes in unity through the commonality of difference, our multicultural understanding of ourselves, as endowed through their creation of the Constitution and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. No one can deny how important the Liberal party has been in defining the progressive nature of our fair country.
The Liberals have given us the giants of Confederation, MacKenzie, Laurier, King, Pearson and Trudeau. The Liberals have been essential in characterizing our noblest and best visionaries.
So what the fuck happened?
The failure to attract Quebec voters back into the federal party, Meech Lake, Charlottetown, the decline in a leadership capable of actually doing something universally Canadian. Chretien became the prime minister that paid the bills but couldn’t figure out a way to buy into a consensus of Canadians outside of Ontario. The long and ridiculous neglect of the west, the disregard for Quebec, the arrogance and cronyism characterized best by the Sponsorship Scandal, the abandonment of the center left by the Baby Boomers, damn their eyes, and the slide of the immigrant vote towards the right, the Wheat Board, the National Energy Plan, federal Transfer Payments, the failure to mediate between Quebec and Alberta, the failure to create a vision around which the country could rally.
And after the Triumvirate of Who Gives A Shit, the triple yawn of Martin, Dion, and Ignatieff, we can only thank Chretien, whose biggest accomplishment was to balance the budget, the only thing is that he never told us why he did it (we suspect it was to ensure our social safety net for the next generation, but we’ll never really know, because he’s dead right?).
So how about that drink?
Alright. So what do we need? We need a vision. And hopefully something greater than just the romance and sentimentalism of a huggable mustachio. We need something to inspire us. We need a distraction from the distractions, something that will make us remember our old collectivist spirit, and what has always characterized Canadians at our best, our ability to turn away from division, and turn towards compromise, our ability to recognize that there is more that unites us than divides us, that whether you come from Yellowknife, or Antigonish, it is the Canadian way to support each other, to defend each other, to shelter each other, and all of this is done with respect to regional differences, cultural differences, language differences, social differences.
So, on that note, (a more positive one than we first suspected) we here at bar politics, in spite of the absurdity of the last decade, can’t help but feel hope for our future. We leave you this autumn to remember that although HarperGov defines you as just a taxpayer, 60% of Canadians didn’t actually vote for his myopic party! You’re not just a tax payer, you’re cooler than that, you’re not just a voter once every three to five years, you’re smarter than that, and you don’t have to accept poor political leadership, you‘re better than that. Remember that there is a way to speak up and there is reason to speak up because, against all odds, we remain Canadians.
We leave you now, we humbly beg you to listen to us and to join is in jerking the collective chains of those who would be our political leaders. So let us drink and be merry for tomorrow we will act collectively.
Cheers.
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