Election ’18 not as bad as billed
Since I’m writing this before Ontario’s election results are known, I’ll have to talk about what the outcome should have been, versus what it is. But first:
I want to comment on a prevalent media tone of despair, gloom and deep doom, around this election. It’s been the season of the kvetch.
Bob Hepburn, writing here, called it the ugliest Canadian election he’s ever seen. He’s seen many. The Globe and Mail despaired singly and collectively. Margaret Wente asked who deserves to win and answered, like Mel Lastman but without his verve, Nobody. John Ibbitson moaned that the centre no longer holds — on the assumption that the Globe not only knows but is the centre. Gary Mason, writing with the objectivity that comes from living in B.C., said Ontario has lost its way.
This mood culminated in the Globe’s editorial endorsement, which I’d been awaiting for days. What endorsement? Exactly. They’re so depressed they can’t bring themselves to endorse at all. They said voters may vote for good local candidates, if they can find any. It was an editorial hissy fit. (Marcus Gee, bless his right wing heart, insisted, unlike his bosses, that voters do have to choose.)
Let me dissent from this judgment. I don’t think you need to venture far to find a less attractive election. Take, oh, the last federal election. Conservatives contrasted “Harper” to “Justin” to indicate what a “clueless” child he was. NDP leader Thomas Mulcair gleefully joined them, mocking Trudeau as “Justin” in the first debate. Harper’s spokesman — now running Doug Ford’s campaign — said Justin would do well if he simply showed up to debate wearing (short?) pants.
Nothing in this election plumbed those depths. Doug Ford was vacuous but who among us has escaped vacuity? For the second vote in a row, the fact that the sitting premier is a lesbian went unmentioned and even unwinked at. I find that reassuring. Stephen Harper remains the peerless boob among campaigners, unless you go back a few elections before him. Some perspective, please.
I think the voters did pretty well at wading through the options. At the outset, Doug was running at around 50 per cent. In a very short campaign, people evaluated him and brought him down to the mid-30s, from which he seems to have made a slight bounceback. The majority of the remaining majority (of total voters) sorted through their choices and decided the NDP was their best bet, given the two (or three) parties with almost identical platforms. Sagacious.
My own kvetch is that our monumentally crappy first-past-the-post system doesn’t allow this native intelligence of the populous to be reflected in electoral results. Our resident Marxist genius, C.B. Macpherson (RIP) wrote that when the British parliamentary system, which we adopted, underwent voting reform in the 1830s, it horrified the “ruling classes” since they assumed the majority would use it to actually take power. But they soon realized there were ways to subvert real democracy.
This accounts for another major kvetch: low voter turnout. I think it in fact shows voter smarts. They know, or at least sense, that most votes will be discounted right after they’re counted, so why bother? What’s impressive is how many go idealistically through the process anyway, despite the charade.
Oh, and the result that should’ve been? A true majority NDP/Liberal/ Green coalition, reflecting a combo of largely aligned platforms. Such an outcome isn’t utopian and happens elsewhere on Earth, in more evolved, less democratically cretinous systems than ours. Is that kvetchy enough for you?
(I can’t resist linking this to the other kvetch du jour: NAFTA and free trade. When that calamity began, in the 1988 election, which was about only one issue, free trade, a 52 per cent Liberal-NDP majority voted against it, with merely 43 per cent voting Tory, who were in favour. But since it was an FPTP election, we got the deal that had been rejected. We’ve had to wait 30 years, and for Trump’s accession, to perhaps see the democratic will of Canadian voters implemented.)