The poll uncovered the other usual prejudices.  The poor are lazy, have lower moral standards, and any increase in benefits would discourage them from doing anything.  Most Canadians believe that if someone truly wants to work that they could find a job.  Of course the majority of the Canadians polled have likely not had to look for a job in the recent past.  Many of them I suspect are in my age bracket; too young to retire, too old to live a carefree life in my car.  Were my job to disappear tomorrow where would I go now.  Even ten years ago I might have had a competitive chance but at 58 (my current age) what employer would want to invest in me?

I still live in a working class neighbourhood (by choice, middle class people tend to bore me to the point of aggravation).  I see the struggles of some of my neighbours juggling more than one job often with unsympathetic employers who demand priority.  Any one of these are likely no more than three or four paycheques away from the streets.  The farther down the ladder one falls the more difficult the re-ascent.

We applaud corporations that cut costs by divesting themselves of full time permanent employees and then blame those same employees for their misfortune.  I suspect that most of this is just self deluding reassurance on our part.  It couldn’t happen to us.  There must be something wrong with those people.  If they had worked hard their employer could not have let them go.  My wife worked for years with a woman who believed she was indispensable to her employer.  She boasted with justification of being the hardest worker.  Both of them always met their production quotas and most times exceeded them.  Today neither of them have their high paying production jobs and neither will ever find another.  Both are crippled by the abuse of the plant and in their late 50s.  My wife is fortunate I have a good paying job with benefits and although it would be nice to have her $40,000 or so income coming in we live an opulent lifestyle compared to most of our friends.  Her friend from the plant is less fortunate and life is now a struggle with little to no option of retirement to rest her injuries.  Is she the architect of her own poverty?

All of us, myself included, are closer to poverty than we want to admit.  Such an admission would terrify most.  Today we are in the midst of a federal election.  Poverty is not even an issue.  Oh, the NDP and Liberals talk about pension reform for seniors ( a more sympathetic poverty group) but their programs will do little to help even that group.  The rest are left to struggle totally for themselves.  A couple of weeks ago I did my lecture on Pierre Trudeau’s Just Society.  In 1969 one in five Canadians lived in poverty.  The Just Society was to change that among other things.  But today the numbers remain virtually unchanged.  If anything they are higher.  Over the past several years food banks have reported ever increasing numbers of clients.   Those who have given up looking for employment fall unnoticed through the cracks.  When will we as a society finely do something to reverse this taint on our communal honour?

So when one of the party leaders arrives in your town over the next few weeks, tell him to pull his head out of his ass and look around at the reality of Canada.  This is fixable and it is time we did.

NDP is often jokingly translated as the No Dissent Party or as meaning No Discernible Prospects.  While the latter is just a mean attack on their flagging fortunes it may be more related to the former than first glance reveals.  No Dissent necessarily means no new ideas and why would anyone vote for a party without ideas?  It is equally a wonder why the party would cling to the same old same old when it faces loss after loss.  No Dissent Party is not just a mean joke at the NDP’s expense but a legitimate description.  Of all the Canadian political parties the NDP is arguably the most dogmatic.  The Liberals and Conservatives stand for little beyond trying to get their man (usually) into the Prime Minister’s residence.  The Bloc has similar dogmatic problems to the NDP but these are sometimes softened by the coalition it needs must bring together around its special policy of getting Quebec the hell out of Canada.  To make a comment, ask a question, or worse actually make an argument at an NDP meeting that is not in lock step with the sanctioned view of the party establishment is to invite an atmosphere comparable to a commissar failing to clap long enough for Stalin or suggesting health care is a good thing at a Republican Party convention.  (I wanted to provide a metaphor from the Left and the Right lest any of my readers fall into the trap the only the Left becomes dogmatic.  It can happen to any political group).

To give you an example:  I attended the 1997 Ontario NDP Leadership convention in Hamilton Ontario as a Riding delegate.  The second evening I spent enjoying the benefits of free Scotch from a number of hospitality suites and conversing with fellow members of the party from across the province.  In one of these conversations the topic of open shops came up.  Only in Canada, Britain and the United States is the automatic check off system exclusively used.  This is called a closed shop because workers have no choice but to join the union if they wish to work at that ‘shop’.  In Europe an open shop system is used where workers choose not only whether or not to join the union but which union they want to join.  Their membership and the benefits of it continue even it they are unemployed.  I have always believed that the closed shop, automatic check off system was a mixed blessing.  Canada adopted it during the second world war in a deal between the union organizations of the time and the government.  While it benefits workers by making if very difficult to break a union or to set worker against worker, it also has a tendency to make unions complacent toward their membership and narrow in their outlook.  European unions are broader organizations and far more politically active and effective than North American unions who cannot see beyond the legalism of the contract.  Anyway such was what seemed a pleasant argument between two men well into their cups.

Little did I know that my conversation in its entirety would be reported to union and party delegates who would duly descend upon their minions within my own Riding group at the convention to set me straight.  Slightly hungover and badly needing more coffee I stumbled onto the convention floor the next morning oblivious to the ambush that awaited me.  Suddenly surrounded I was accused of being a dupe of corporations and anti-union.  I was told I did not know what socialism was (it apparently having been conclusively defined by the NDP without my awareness) and that I was damaging the party by having discussions like that of the night before even in  such a private setting as a hospitality suite of an NDP convention.  I suppose there might have been Liberal or Conservative spies present who might have used my words to undermine the prospects for the party to take power.  Considering the party has No Discernible Prospects I thought this fear a little far fetched.  The whole affair seemed to me to be over dramatic.  Again this was just a casual academic conversation over the pros and cons of two sides of an issues to pass the time fueled by liberal (oops. Oh my God! they were right see how it sneaks in) amounts of alcohol.  The idea of a plan to raise a resolution concerning the matter on the floor of the convention didn’t even exist.  We were killing time so we could continue to drink, nothing more.

My relationships within the Riding Association were permanently affected by this incident and  a couple of more like it.  Times when I just, erroneously, believed that I could question the status quo, explore new ground or freshen those things we had come to believe in for a long time by giving them a thorough examination at a meeting or in conversation with another member without being labeled a heretic and my motives and loyalties coming under suspicion.  The final break for me with the NDP came three years after the events described above when a rather innocent incident concerning a strike was twisted into an assault on me by someone who felt it appropriate to settle an unrelated personal grudge using the mechanisms of the party.

So today I avoid joining political organizations of all sorts.  It saddens me because I love the social interaction of people of like mind but I have yet to see one not fall victim to dogmatism, a set truth from which variance is discouraged.  The world is not a set place.  As I said above that which refuses to grow must die.  It is true for organizations as it is for human beings.

Such is the dilemma of the Canadian people this fall.  Michael Ignatieff vows he will bring down the government at the first opportunity.  An easy vow to make knowing the NDP is in no shape for an election and would be inclined to support the Harper government rather than fly into debt they cannot pay.  Actually Layton and the NDP had been using the same strategy vowing never to support the Conservative government in the knowledge that the Liberals at that time feared an election.  And so the brinkmanship and the nonsense continue.  Caught in the middle of the sandbox, surrounded by surly children each wanting to be King for a day or however long a government lasts these day, is the Canadian people.  Mired in recession, casualty counts from an unpopular war rising and being shafted by the so called friend (U. S.) that dragged us into this mess, Canadians are in no mood for childish behaviour.

The sad thing is that minority governments can be the best government.  Forced as they are to compromise in order to govern, history has supplied us with numerous examples of successful minority governments.  Much of the social safety net we are so proud of today was the result of minority government as were our national anthem and our flag.  Minority government can also be full term government as in the Davis minority in Ontario during the early 1980s and the King federal government of the early 1920s.  Both of those lasted four years.

In this round of minorities the egos of the players get in the way.  Mr. Harper strikes at Mr. Ignatieff’s narcissism and lengthy sojourn to the land of the drive-thru gun shop.  Mr. Ignatieff parries and replies with a thrust at Mr. Harper’s dogmatism.  The King-makers are the 2 court jesters.  Painted harlequins they prance around the two main party leaders, now getting smacked aside, now being embraced and cajoled.  Their patrons laugh and sneer at them at caucus meetings and use them as they wish in the House of Commons.  They stand as the most fitting symbol of the current state of Canadian politics:  parliament would be funny if so many people weren’t getting hurt.

Arguing that we should avoid an election now because we would just get more of the same begs the question whether we should ever again bother with such an ineffective, expensive farce.  More of the same is what we will get for the foreseeable future.  Even if one of the head knobs were to form a majority government, nothing much would change except that the opposition parties would feel even more secure in mugging for the cameras, portraying themselves as the great champion of the Canadian people.  No my friends Canadian politics has changed.  We can hope that Harper’s Hamlet and Ignatieff’s Laertes politically die on each other’s swords but the hope is probably vain as who might follow may be no better.  No my friends we must come to the realization that the only lions left in Rome are in the arena.

Jack Layton is reported to have held a telephone meeting with his caucus which was recorded by a Conservative member.  The article then goes on to deal with the issues surrounding such a deal. 

But nowhere, does it question the ethics of a Canadian political party conducting what amounts to electronic surveillance on one of its opponents.  If I am reading this article correctly and the information is true, then we have a grave situation in Ottawa.  Anybody ever here of ‘Watergate’?  A very similar act brought down the most powerful politician of his time, President Richard Nixon of the United States. 

Here is what needs to happen now if integrity is a word still understood in Ottawa. 

1. The information must be confirmed and the Conservative member publicly identified.  If it is not correct then CTV needs to clarify and apologize. 
2. The Speaker of the House needs to take the matter under advisement to determine what sanction the House needs to apply.
3. The RCMP need to be consulted for possible criminal charges.
4. Stephen Harper needs to immediately apologize to the Canadian people (and actually mean it). 
5. Canadians need to make a statement by contacting their individual MPs from all parties and put them on notice that such behaviour will not be tolerated. 

I lived through the time when governments north and south of the border believed that spying on their own citizens was justifiable and normal procedure.  I will not live through such times again!