Unpublished Op-Ed submitted to The Toronto Star
The inanity of a first-past -the-post election system is played out again for the Canadian voters who dutifully play their role every four years. The main political parties (Liverals / Conservatives) parade out their list of promises and their costs like barkers in a carny show. With false smiles they assure voters they will deliver. They lie. The NDP and the Green lie less but can’t get elected.
The real problem is capitalism, the primary economic system in the world. It is based on greed and money and has shed all the risk (healthcare, pensions, good wages etc.) and kept all the profits. In the last fifty years it has successfully siloed profits from society. We are being forced to run society internally without any money. Every promise means that some other needy services will be cut, no matter what the politicians say. No government has demanded that the private sector lives in the real world. There is only one place to get the money to pay down the accumulated deficit and balance the books – raise taxes significantly on corporations and the wealthy. While there would be much wailing and gnashing of teeth over this it is the only was to rebalance society. As long as corporate profits remain sealed off from the rest of the world making a few billionaires even richer nothing will change.
As a result, taxing corporations like Google, Facebook and Netflix is never discussed despite their monstrous profits. It is ludicrous. All successful corporations making massive profits should be taxed heavily. They are constantly crying poor and yet political parties recoil at the thought of taxing them. Governments owe them nothing. Over the last fifty years taxes on corporations have plummeted while the economy has sagged and profits skyrocketed but still corporations beg for more corporate welfare. Justin Trudeau’s apology for interfering in SNC Lavalin said it all. It was about jobs. His message was that corporations can do anything they want, even criminal activity if they are big enough employers, governments will support them to keep the jobs. This corrupt ethic runs our country today. It is a world gone mad. Every corporation has legions of lobbyists in Ottawa to ensure that this cozy relationship with the government does not change. Governments are the lap-dogs of the private sector.
A real government would ban lobbyists, tax corporations heavily, institute a minimum tax for all taxpayers, tax companies based on the pollution they produce with increasing taxes for higher polluters and mandate that companies offer pensions, healthcare and quality jobs at good pay. This is only a start to restore society to balance. There is not one society for the rich and another rone for the poor – there is one society.
Both parties will say anything to get elected and then do the opposite when they are in power as with Doug Ford in Ontario. There is a frightening crisis of confidence in societies all over the world. It appears there is no one to trust.
The other political parties (NDP and Greens) have good ideas for taxing corporations but live in a historical trench. The voting public cannot see past post-war hatreds of socialists and communists to see the modern vision of social democrats reflected in the Scandinavian countries and so they constantly vote either Liberal or Conservative despite the fact that the Scandinavian countries beat capitalist countries on every economic and social indicator. Free market capitalists studiously ignore the Scandinavian countries and their successful societies. Better voting options like proportional representation are flatly rejected because they would vote in more parties and break the logjam of the two party system by making politics mre representative. All votes would count.
There is a special place in hell for those who do not vote. Forty percent of eligible voters fail to cast their ballots each election year even when online voting options are available. This is nothing but inveterate laziness. If voting was a vaccination program it would be mandatory. If it is a critical democratic right then everyone should have to exercise it. Online voting despite its detractors is also the way of the future and must be implemented by a lethargic and out of touch Elections Canada.
We are living in the past, using a voting system that is an elitist throwback from British aristocratic history and hoping for the best while getting the worst. We should not be governing ourselves based on the thoughts (however wise at the time) of a group of men two hundred years ago. To break the grip of patriarchy on society large institutional systems like voting and our economic system need radical change. Capitalism is destroying our world – we need a new economic system – fast. Otherwise, climate change, plastic pollution and the egregious rape of the world’s natural resources will destroy our world whether we like it or not and will be our hated legacy in the future. How could so many people have been so selfish and stupid as to do this.