“When a government starts trying to cancel dissent or avoid dissent is frankly when it’s rapidly losing its moral authority to govern.” Stephen Harper while Leader of the Opposition as quoted in the Globe and Mail Feb 26/12
Contrast the above statement by Stephen Harper with this opinion of the same Stephen Harper's Conservative Party of Canada and its possible connection to irregularities with the 2011 Canadian federal election as written by Andrew Coyne (hardly a "pinko lefty") and reported in the Victoria Times-Colonist Feb 28/12
"In the case of the federal Conservatives, that predisposition to expediency is overlaid with a swaggering, bullying style, yet one that betrays a deep insecurity: the insecurity of a party that, for good reasons and bad, believes the system - the media, the bureaucracy, the judiciary - is stacked against it.
It is a party that believes it has had to fight twice as hard to get where it is, a belief that has only hardened through each of the many compromises it has made on the way. The progression is sadly familiar. Having first compromised its beliefs, a party finds it is easier to compromise its principles; having compromised its principles, it learns to compromise its ethics; and compromises of ethics, as we have seen in other parties, lead sooner or later to compromises with the law."
So why should I believe anything that comes out of his mouth? (BTW, I don't). Why should I believe in a political system that allows a bald-faced liar to become the so-called leader of my country? (I don't do that either). And why should I participate in a system that I don't believe in and that is broken beyond redemption? (So far, I do).
The only reason I can think of is that there is no obvious alternative to politics in place to pin our hopes on. Even so, I see no reason at all to have any hope for the electoral/political system now in place in Canada. It has been hijacked, stolen, abused, misused, broken and corrupted to the point that it is now an almost useless remnant of what was put together by committee 145 years ago.
Actually, there is an alternative, one that has been used by disenfranchised citizens around the world for millennia - Revolution. Revolution can be civil, non-violent, inclusive, empowering, unifying and effective. There is an excellent model to follow in the Occupy Wall Street movement which is bringing people together against oppression worldwide. And there is a specific issue to coalesce around in the hugely detrimental development of the Alberta tarsands and its attendant infrastructure of pipelines and tankers.
So, individual citizens CAN make a difference if they are willing to take some risk. If they are not, they will get whatever the elite let them have and will have no justification for complaint.
Postscript:
"Public faith in the 2011 vote is gone" is the headline of an article in today's Vancouver Sun Feb 29/12.
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