Election Update - a brief political piece

Well, you needn't have worried. My anguished cries never happened. Thank heavens the Canadian people booted the liberal party out of power. You know that old saying Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Well, that applies to the liberal party. They were in power for twelve years and with that length of time in office, corruption and hypocrisy took over. They became arrogant and assumed they had 'entitlement' to anything they wanted, including wasting billions of tax dollars with no reprecussions. Whether it was taking one's chauffer on a European vacation costing us regular folk thousands and thousands of dollars, or spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on golf balls, ties and other assorted junk. At the same time, the decimated our armed forces and denied health benefits to veterans. I could write for pages on the atrocities that have happened over time.
For years, there was no one to stop them. Twelve years ago, the conservatives were in office and when they were voted out, the party fell apart. It splintered into two different parties, neither having enough power to defeat the liberal party. While supposedly a democracy, Canada wasn't really.

But finally a few years ago, the two spintered parties merged again and began gaining recognition.

There is a third main party, the New Democatic Party. I think of them as more a party of concious than a party of practicality. They believe strongly in universality for all things and while it's very good in theory, I'm not sure how it would work on a country wide basis. We are already one of the most heavily taxed nations and in order to put many of their ideas into practice, most people balk at the thought of the added taxes it could cost. But they are important and I was glad to see them with more seats - at least in my neck of the woods.

We now have a minority government in place with the conservatives in charge. What this will mean is yet to be seen. They can be voted out if the other minority parties band together to defeat them. I hope this doesn't happen. Elections are costly and we just had one two years ago when the liberal party lost seats and became a minority.

Will they be any better? I think they will have to be for a while until power begins erroding them too. But since they don't have a lot of power now, I don't think it will happen right away. A lot of people are nervous of their right wing ideas but since they don't have a majority and they will need the cooperation of the other parties, I don't think that should be a worry.

Hopefully one of the things that will happen is a friendlier relationship with the US government. Arrogance ruled relations between the two governments - and I mean arrogance on the Canadian side. Whether our leaders liked the American leaders or not, as a Canadian, I was embarrased at some of the things that our people in power did or said.
So, today is a new day. I hope things change for the better in this country.

Back to our regular scheduled program shortly.


'til later