Does voting result in real change?

It’s more obvious to many citizens that after government personalities and political labels change that not much else really does change. This then questions the purpose of voting in new political personalities when there isn’t going to be any real change in policy/practice on any new government’s agenda.

A couple of examples of such political 180-degree reversals on important issues should explain this more fully.

In Nova Scotia, each of the three major parties when they were the government in power took a diametrically opposite position to that held when they were in the role of opposition over the years in the legislature on the issue of the manipulation of billions of dollars of federal equalization payments. Each party, when they attained the power to govern, only distributed a minuscule amount of that received to the many economically disadvantaged municipalities of this province.

Federally, the Trudeau Liberal government (like the Harper Conservative government that preceded it) recently rejected calls for a public inquiry into the abuse and torture of hundreds of Afghans detained by the Canadian Armed Forces.

I believe this action by the Trudeau Liberal government is an attempt to cover up some new evidence published in the Montreal newspaper La Presse earlier this month of a letter by a group of unidentified military police officers who directly participated in the abuse, which took place between 2010-2011. These military police officers have accused high-ranking military police officers of ordering the abuse of Afghan detainees, which they allege constitutes war crimes.

People can recall Liberal MP Ralph Goodale’s criticism when Harper prorogued parliament in order to shut down the parliamentary committee’s investigation of the detainee issue. Goodale’s inference to a cover up was included in this comment, “what the Conservatives knew, and when they knew it, about torture in Afghanistan.”

When political parties in our so-called parliamentary form of government attain power and continue with the same policies on major issues they opposed when not the governing party, it only illustrates that the importance some attach to the act of voting is a delusion. Charles W. Sampson Sydney Forks