Conservatives Again?!

Today is a sad, sad day for Canada. Stephen Harper won yesterday's election with 37.6% of the vote (Liberals 26.2%, NPD 18.2%, Green 6.8%), renewing the Tory minority. My first thoughts (apart from a loud "dammit!") are that the NPD succeeded in splitting the liberal vote, causing the Liberals' worst performance since 1984. In other words, the widespread calls to "vote strategically" didn't work. I'm not surprised...

Why would anyone vote strategically knowing that their single vote has no incidence in an election? Every person wants to have the personal satisfaction of voting for their true choice...and even if the ultimate objective of all opposition voters was to beat the Tories, the mere notion that your Green neighbor might not cooperate with the strategy because he feels his single vote is meaningless would give you an incentive to do the same. It was a predictable collective action problem, in the parlance of our times.

In my opinion, if the opposition was so worried about a Conservative win, the candidates that ranked third and fourth places in last week's polls should have defected in favor of the strongest opposition candidate in their respective constituency. But, alas, that doesn't make democratic sense given that each of the opposition parties represented a very distinct set of legitimate ideals and projects. The tragedy of the Canadian political system then, is the lack of proportional representation. (for a much better explanation, read this perspective)

Anyway, I'm sad about Harper because I disagree with his worldview. These are my major problems with him:

- Harper has aligned Canada's foreign policy with the Bush administration.
- Harper signed a deal to let US troops into Canada in case of an "emergency".
- Harper has provided millions of dollars in subsidies for companies investing in the Alberta tar sands...an impending ecological disaster.
- Harper supports tax cuts to big corporations.
- Harper has silenced intellectuals speaking against him and blocked scientific panels discussing the effects of climate change.
- And last but definitely not least, Harper is against reducing greenhouse gas emissions and described the Kyoto protocol as “a socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations”.

In other words, Stephen Harper ranks high in my list of top 20 enemies of the world.

As the Georgia Straight put it, "there are many reasons not to vote Conservative, beyond the cost of the Afghanistan war and the idiocy of integrating Canada more deeply into the U.S. economy. They include: the Conservative leader’s misleading use of crime statistics to make Canada appear less safe than it is; his big lie that he wouldn’t tax income trusts; his other big lie in refusing to acknowledge that a Liberal carbon tax is offset with big income-tax cuts; Harper presiding over declines in Canadian productivity; Harper’s abandonment of agreements with the provinces that would have created more daycare spaces; the Conservative government’s decision to appeal a B.C. Supreme Court ruling in favour of Vancouver’s supervised-injection site; Harper’s elimination of the Court Challenges Program and the killing of the Kelowna Accord; Harper’s stacking of a stem-cell advisory panel with opponents of embryonic stem-cell research; Harper’s $45-million cuts to the arts; and Harper’s refusal to support the United Nations goal of having developed countries donate 0.7 percent of their national incomes to international development."

Oh, and did I mention that Harper has close ties with Evangelist groups? (appointed a minister to a scientific advisory group!?)

Brrrrrr! (that's me, shivering)