from breadwithcircus.com
Last Tuyesday, Canadians gave Stephen Harper’s Conservatives a second minority government. After all of the bluster, 40 days of noise and millions of dollars spent, the election’s result was that the Conservatives took twenty seats or so from the Liberals.
This was certainly a boost for Stephen Harper, but in reality, the outcome was essentially meaningless as they still don’t have enough seats to control the house of commons.
The election proved to be all for nothing. Canadians missed a historic opportunity. Stephane Dion’s career as leader of the Liberals is essentially over, and never again will we have such a visionary candidate for Prime Minister. Dion gave Canadians a campaign of ideas and an actual plan to fight climate change. Due to a combination of apathy, greed and ignorance, Canadians tuned out and voted for the guy who spent the most money on attack-ads.
Record-low turnout, combined with greedy, “I don’t want to pay an extra penny-per-ton of emissions” attitudes, as well as a general ignorance about the importance of action in this crucial period of our history gave Canadians the same dysfunctional Parliament that Steven Harper dissolved just a month and a half ago. Canadians defeated leader Elizabeth May and every other Green Party candidate across the country. Canadians re-elected national
embarrassments like Maxime Bernier and “environment minister” John Baird. Perhaps the only success story of the election is that Gilles Duceppe and the Bloc Quebecois, as promised, managed to win enough seats in Quebec to stop the Conservatives from winning a majority.
Canadians had a chance to do something great. We failed. There are some serious karmic repercussions to come for this. We had a chance to remake Canada as a sustainable, environmentally friendly model for the rest of the world. We would have cleaned up our house and gotten rich for it, but instead, our lack of wisdom maintained a broken status quo. We could have been leaders, but instead we were lemmings. There are hard days ahead, and now, I have no doubt, Canadians deserve to feel the pain that the changing climate will soon deliver.