Unpublished Op-Ed submitted to the Toronto Star
The selective promises of the traditional Liberals and Conservatives are a grand, gaudy democratic fraud constructed to convince unsuspecting voters that they live in a democracy.
Both campaigns are premised on a well-worn series of entitlements and enticements to voters, none of which addresses the real hidden issues at play in every election – the capitalist economic system and corporate control of government. The rest is just window dressing.
Capitalism is a no-holds-barred, profit-based greed system that is destroying our world in a glut of wealth, excess, war, waste and wantonness. We are like lemmings being led off a cliff. We won’t know until its too late. Climate change, the bee die-off, industrial pollution, the decimation of fish stocks, wildlife and bird species, the plastic crisis and every other major problem in our society can be traced directly back to these two critical issues. All federal and provincial leaders in Canada and around the world are fiddling while Rome burns.
It has occurred this way for the past century or more under the elitist first-past-the-post British two-party electoral system that happily ignores the 40% of non-voters. Liberals and Conservatives depend on the voters sticking their heads in the sand and suspending their disbelief to vote for one or the other party. Its adversarial politics at its worst.
Liberals and Conservatives are the primary archenemies in this fictional electoral battle with the NDP, Greens and the UPC parties filling out the ranks. Corporations stay in the background and run the country. Liberal and Conservative leaders are a known quantity – they have both governed before like dutiful corporate children with little success for the common citizen. The poverty-wealth gap is presently staggering, deficits grow inexorably, prostitution and human trafficking is endemic, boom and bust capitalism goes through it’s regular cycles, massive corporate tax cuts over the past fifty years have done nothing to stimulate the economy other than to make these corporations even richer, there is never enough money for infrastructure and social services, indigenous peoples remain trapped in a modern-day gulag despite kind words etc. The songbook is the same one again and again and it has failed repeatedly. We don’t just need a new songbook but a new choirmaster and choir.
Jagmeet Singh, a refreshing, intelligent, personable, religious and issues driven NDP candidate cannot break 20% when he should be the PM-in-waiting with a majority government. He has no ghosts in his closet and has never governed. Elizabeth May is in a similar although more focussed role as the leader of the Greens but she is much like the Bloc and is a one issue candidate. This is a clear argument for proportional representation which Justin Trudeau summarily rejected after realizing it would bring real democratic government into being with multiple parties ruling. As Jagmeet Singh has said coalitions are not a bad thing. They force governments to cooperate.
Obvious things that would really help Canadians like putting corporations at arm’s length legally, closing tax haven loopholes (how do they get there in the first place?), substantially increasing taxes on the wealthy and corporations to rebalance society financially rather than the token increases suggested, mandatory cuts to the interest rates on credit cards to 5% from the current 19.99%, passing mandatory legislation that make the private sector fully legally and financially responsible for the entire life-scyle of the products they produce and any damage they create from cradle-to-grave, reinstituting worker’s benefits and pensions and last but not least the legalization of prostitution to free women from the enslavement of male human traffickers would be a start in attacking a capitalist economic nightmare that has been waging war and ravaging our world for several centuries.
We have been removing massive amounts of money from the economy for two hundred years and living in a figment of our imagination. In reality, it has been a large, savage and rapacious destruction of our inhabitable world for the benefit of the 0.01% with little recourse. It is time to pay the piper. All of our excessive excess has caught up with us and we now must all pay the bill in full – particularly the wealthy. The 99.9% who have endured less than ideal conditions throughout that period must also endure more pain. There is no free lunch when it comes to climate change so yes there are going to be major costs for everyone. We have squandered our legacy. If you are angry about this you have no one to blame but capitalism and the private sector.
So the political parties in the current election are going through the motions waiting for the economic universe to implode. We need a real plan, led by real leaders in real time not a group of posturing, permanently smiling clown characters spouting platitudes.