How you feel about future determines how you’ll vote
Everyone has a year, generally around 16, in which their tastes were set, and from then on that’s their vintage.
If political parties were asked to name their year, Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau would say, nah, I won’t be set in my ways till 2030 because that is the year when we find out if our commitments to cutting greenhouse gases will be met.
Then he will talk some more about electric cars and a charging station in every driveway, bringing women back into the workplace with child care in place, and retrofitting Canadian homes to protect them from fire, flood, heat, huge power bills, and moral desolation …
Fine, we get it. You are a man of the future.
Then you ask Erin O’Toole about his vintage year and he doesn’t miss a beat, it’s 1952. I don’t think he was even alive then but to his mind, men had jobs, women stayed home, and “change” was something you kept in your pocket.
Yeah, what about the polio epidemic in the 1950s, I’d like to say, but I won’t bother. At least the man is honest. He wants something unattainable and that’s always a sorrow.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh will say 2021. Right now is his best year. I don’t know why he says this — he won’t exactly win a majority government — but it’s just the kind of thing this determinedly positive guy would say. It’s hard to be depressed around Singh.
Ask the Green party and they get all morose. Green parties around the world on principle don’t have any favourite years because each year since the Industrial Revolution has brought more wasteful consumption, airplane flights, almond ingestion despite almonds’ vast demand for agricultural water, bigger cars, SUVs and pickup trucks, sprawl instead of density in Canadian cities, failure to understand that sex is work and that brothels really are the best way, and that Palestinian rights must be at the forefront.
Annamie Paul bridles at the last one and the conversation ends abruptly.
If I ask the PeePee Party about their best year, they’ll say it will be the year all immigrants go back where they came from. “Get lost, you f-----g idiot,” they’ll say, as they did to a Torstar reporter this week. And that’s why I wouldn’t ask them.
I have lately been thinking about Yeats’s 1919 poem “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.” It’s one of his most famous poems, strange because it’s so brief and simple.
Basically the guy hates his job.
Those that I fight I do not hate/ Those that I guard I do not love.
The locals don’t care. They’re too busy digging potatoes.
My country is Kiltartan Cross,/ My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,/
No likely end could bring them loss/
Or leave them happier than before.
The guy’s not happy. Life is a
big waste of time.
I balanced all, brought all to mind,/
The years to come seemed waste of breath,/
A waste of breath the years behind.
He sounds like Livia Soprano: “It’s all a big nothing.”
Many Canadians feel this right now. Unlike the airman who’s clearly about to dive straight into the Irish Sea because why not, they have to keep trying for the sake of their families. But it’s hard.
Canada has never had a high voter turnout — there’s a lot of
Irish airman attitude out there — but maybe more people will show up this time. Because they’re mad.
As our Irishman puts it, Nor law, nor duty bade me [vote,]/ Nor public man, nor cheering crowds. He really is cranky, isn’t he. It makes me think he’s going to vote for Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party.
On the other hand, the Green party’s going nowhere politically so the nihilist in him might like that. Chirpy Jagmeet Singh from the Land of Happy? Forget it.
So our airman has two choices, Liberal or Conservative, amid intimations that this world is going to get very tiresome in the coming years. (In his case, there’s this Austrian who got turned down by art college in 1908 and he’s really steamed.)
Do you think the years ahead
will be terrible (the future) or wonderful (the past)?
If terrible, vote Liberal. Liberals always understand your pain. They love the common voter, in your case the depressed angry common voter. Trudeau says he has big plans.
I also think he called an election early because he knows just how bad the new COVID-19 variants are going to be, and he needs a majority to handle it.
But if you think the future can be made to resemble the past, as O’Toole intimates, vote Conservative. No more CERB, no dental, lots of guns, no cheap child care, no green economy jobs (if you could get yourself off the couch anyway), a skinflint budget and you’re on your own.
The Irish airman would like that. Will you?
If I ask the PeePee Party about their best year, they’ll say it will be the year all immigrants go back where they came from