Unpublished letter submitted to the Toronto Star
Re: Jane Philpott on losing re-election and being ‘disappointed’ at the message voters sent Trudeau on the SNC-Lavalin affair, October 25, 2019
Canadians have once again decided to elect the status
quo. Responding to the fear of a Conservative government that would be even
more right-wing than the Liberals, the electorate opted for Justin Trudeau’s
scandal plagued party in the time-honoured tradition of the two-party, elitist,
British first-past-the-post system of electoral politics. With 40% of the
people in Canada not voting, this means that a scathing 20% of Canadians elected
this majority government – and no one seems to care. No government has shown any
interest in surveying non-voters to find out why they don’t vote and to change
it. Jagmeet Singh, who should clearly have been the PM in waiting based on his
leadership style and his party’s policies was left out in the cold again and
has been abandoned by his traditional labour allies and even immigrants. His
party needs to be torn down and rebuilt as a real left alternative or merged
with the Liberals to eradicate the Conservative right if they ever hope to be
more than also-rans.
So hard-working, blue-collar Canadians voted willingly
for their own oppression – more corporate criminality, corruption, welfare and control
of government, more token tax cuts for the wealthy and business all of which
increases the burden on everyday people. It’s like living in Alice in Wonderland. The declining
fortunes for the middle class and those below them (the other 99%) who over the
past thirty years have willingly given away their pensions, healthcare, job
security and wages to exist in a globalized contracted-out wasteland of short-term
money-for-work at minimum wage and not much else while massively profitable
corporations cry poor. We have voted for more platitudes about indigenous
reconciliation and climate change but little action. We passively accept having
a Third-World dollar that is a 25% direct tax on every Canadian so a few rich businesses
can be more competitive and we allow credit card companies to extraordinarily
over-charge for interest rates. Cutting interest rates on credit cards and allowng
the dollar to return to parity with the U.S. would immediately save Canadians thousands
of dollars instead of hundreds. We have endorsed no oversight of the private
sector by government. Their only concern is Mcjobs. They can do what they
please when they please otherwise. It is
inexplicable that we have all let this happen while doing nothing to change
governmental practice or electoral politics for the better. We have elected
government for the private sector, not for the Canadian public. We are slaves in the gulag.
Canadians are left with a tenuous minority propped up
by the NDP and a divided country with the resurgence of the Bloc. They cannot
seem to free themselves from their attachment to the corrupt two-party system
of Liberals and Conservatives no matter have bad it is. We have been socialized
to hate socialists and socially democratic parties by the greedy capitalists despite
the fact that the democratic socialists have excellent ideas much like the Scandinavian
countries who are some of the most successful and progressive societies in the
world.
All so that Canadians can go on living in their twisted
little dream of living in a capitalist democracy.
