t seems almost fanciful now, but in the 1993 and 1997 federal elections, candidates for the Reform Party were required to sign a contract committing them to the politics of integrity. If elected, their actions would be governed not by the partisan demands of their party but by the will of their constituents and above all, their own moral conscience.
Keith Martin, the British Columbia MP who came to Ottawa as a Reformer and was later elected as a Liberal, always kept the old document in his briefcase during his years in office as a reminder, he says, of how things ought to be.
"That's frankly why I joined the Reform Party," he says. "We had a very democratic mandate."
Seventeen years after Martin arrived in Parliament, political integrity seems a rather a quaint and quixotic notion, discarded amid the dark thickets of tactical scheming, rule-bending and permanent party warfare that consume federal politics today.
Oh, nostalgia. So bitter and so sweet. Martin compares the disaffection of MPs to battered wife syndrome.
Political integrity, once undermined mostly by sex, money and patronage, is now also being eroded by more disturbing trends: the erosion of democratic rules and customs, and the decline of civil discourse.
"Parliament is a sham," shouted Maclean's magazine from its front page recently.
The House of Commons is fading into irrelevance. Budget details are now leaked to the media before they are tabled in Parliament. Prime ministers float policies and legislation — even decisions about going to war — in speeches to Rotary clubs or interviews on television, rather than in the House.
Voters are routinely mocked. Politicians elected to sit with one party cross the floor with the promise of a cabinet job in another.
MPs are afraid to speak their minds, instead reciting 'talking points' issued by cadres of rabidly partisan, unelected apparatchiks in the service of party leaders.
Laws, such as the fixed-date election law, are flouted by the very people who create them.
Parties — once grassroots organizations that fuelled the democratic process — are now hollow shells, serving only as brand names for leaders and their professional marketing teams at election time.
And young voters are so inured to this that, nonplussed, they consider it all a part of the greater political game. ...Sorry, that was my bitterness slipping in there. I hope reading things like this will convince people that the partisan mudslinging we've got now isn't "just how it is"!
The current election, rather than being a contest of ideas, has become a campaign of fear: in speeches and television attack ads the parties stoke fear of secret coalitions and hidden agendas, fear for the future of health care, fear of economic meltdown, fear of Quebec separatism. The leaders and their advisers seek power by scaring voters, rather than inspiring them.
True that!
2) One of the biggest stories these past few days has been the sudden surge of NDP support in opinion polls. Here is an interesting perspective on the NDP's historical position at the balance of power, which makes the excellent point that the NDP's gains actually don't matter that much to Stephen Harper since they're mostly taking Liberal and Bloc support anyway. Countering that is this reality check on the accuracy of opinion polls. Not only do pollsters mainly call landlines (not hitting youth voters), so many people have caller ID now and won't pick up for a 1-800 number, and those who do usually don't want to spend the twenty minutes. So realistically, the demographic represented the best in polling numbers is seniors. But polls still make good stories in the news media, especially since all the parties released their platforms so early this year.
3) Happier thoughts! Let's read about the youth vote movement, about fighting voter apathy, and about the 120 candidates under 30!
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