If voting changed anything they’d make it illegal

Where are the grand visions? Where are the political figures that can see past the next set of polling numbers, past their personal objectives and past the next the next election?

Where are the true political leaders?

Not in Ottawa that’s for sure. In fact, if they exist at all, which I sincerely hope they do, they are nowhere near the political arena.

There are those, myself included, who firmly believe that Canada’s political system is completely dysfunctional and incapable of effectively accomplishing anything beyond petty pandering and self preservation. The exception that proves this rule is the complete efficiency with which anyone who exhibits any signs of altruistic intentions is brushed aside or, circumstances permitting, quickly and quietly thrown under a proverbial bus.

Canada’s political system breeds pariahs. They’re like flies feasting on a dead pig carcass.

The only thing that really matters to our political elite is obtaining power and retaining it at all costs, vision be damned.

The system has bred today’s crop of politicians and nurtured them with success. They are all clones of one another, regardless of party affiliation. Their philosophy differs little from one to the other and that philosophy goes something like this, “The future, beyond the next election cycle, is someone else’s problem not mine. The unemployed don’t matter (unless they’re in a vote rich urban center and might support my party), I have my own job to protect.”

How pathetic is that?

That my friends what passes for leadership in Canada today.

Take the past week or so as an example.

Canada’s deficit projections rose from 30+ billion to 50 billion and who knows what the final figure will be. 20% of that deficit is being handed over to General Motors, which plans to retain 4000 jobs in the Country, with no guarantees and no real hope of ever recovering those funds. Meanwhile forestry workers, fishery workers and hundreds of thousands of nameless, faceless individuals across every sector of the economy are being tossed out of work without even a nod of recognition from Ottawa. Less workers qualify for Employment insurance today than ever in the past and while the feds (under a former Liberal government) raped the EI fund of $50 billion dollars to pay down debt, the current (Conservative government) is refusing to put less than $2 billion back on that debt in an effort to increase eligibility during the economic disaster.

So, with all of that happening what did politicians focus all of their energies on last week? What did they spend practically every second of the day talking about? They went around and around about a federal minister left some questionably sensitive documents at a T.V. station in Ottawa.

During question period in the House of Commons that topic alone commanded everyone’s attention with demands for resignations, shouts of support for the minister and everything in between and all for political effect. Meanwhile only one solitary question, posed by a junior opposition member, addressed the multi-billion dollar taxpayer gift to GM and what it might mean for Canadian taxpayers.

Attacking your opposition has the potential for political advantage. Questioning the use of billions of tax dollars in Canada’s most vote rich province most assuredly doesn’t.

If Canada's politcal leaders can't even deal with the day to day business of running a government and protecting tax payer dollars what hope do we have for the grand visions of the past? What happened to the kind of vision that build the railway and opened up the Country? Where are the leaders who thoguht outside the box and introduced the EI program and universal health care? They don't congregate on Parliament Hill that's for sure, so don't hold your breath for an east/west power grid or a concerted effort to enact custodial management of fish stocks off Canada's shores. It's never going to happen in today's political environment.

In a recent Halifax Chronicle Herald editorial fellow Newfoundlander Greg Lock wrote that the low voter participation rates so often bemoaned by politicians aren’t, as is often reported, the result of voter apathy but rather of voter disgust. I tend to agree.

Politics has always been a dirty business but at least there used to be some glimmer of hope that, every once in a while, someone would step forward with the vision to truly lead and inspire. With every passing decade that faint possibility continues to diminish. In fact I have no doubt that in the current political state we find ourselves, any political figure with the audacity to be seen as a risk to the status quo would be crushed before getting out of the starting gate.

No matter what anyone might say, politics is not the voice of the people put into action. It’s the dreams of the people corrupted by self serving individuals.

There’s an old quote that speaks to the sad state of our political system and those who wallow in it.

“If voting changed anything they’d make it illegal”.

Truer words were never spoken and I wish I knew who said them. Unfortunately the author chose to remain anonymous. That’s too bad, with that kind of insight, he or she might have made a great political leader. On reflection, perhaps they chose to remain anonymous for a very good reason, self preservation.