None of the parties, even the Greens, had any difficulty communicating their basic messages and proposals. None of the four major established parties is in any danger, even without the public funding, of not being able to field candidates in every riding unless they choose otherwise (ie. the Bloc, which has the least funding, also happens to run fewer candidates.) What we are in most jeopardy of losing are negative ads (assuming a party doesn’t decide to go negative instead of positive if it only has enough money to pick one), excessive barrages of ads, and fancy frills and perks for the people involved in election campaigns and who keep the party machinery running. The conventions and other gatherings are not exactly austere.

If those who favour public funding think it’s important to “democracy” to keep the playing field level, why aren’t they asking for the same lump sum to be assigned to every party? If the concern is that parties be able to “communicate effectively”, then a party which is important enough to qualify as a viable national party but not to obtain a large vote share is always going to be at a disadvantage with the per-vote funding system. What I’m reading is a collective tantrum from the people whose noble intentions don’t extend any further than the welfare of either the LPC or NDP. I am in no doubt whatsoever that there are at least 10,000 well-heeled supporters of either party who obtain enough “goodwill” through their party connections to be able to cough up $1,000 each. $10,000,000 dollars; funding problem solved.

Anyone who needs to hear a party’s advertising and other national messages more than twice during an election in order to understand the essential points and make a voting decision, raise your hand. I’m curious to see how many of you there are.

>2) The longer we wait,

The more we spend now on “problems” which turn out not to need fixing or to be particularly important or down other blind unproductive avenues, the less we have to spend when we have enough information in hand to actually identify critical threats where some fiscal intervention would have a measurable and beneficial impact. The more of peoples’ money we force them to spend – with or without a balance of intakes and expenditures – on the wrong things or things that are not important to them, the more tight-fisted they will be with what they have left and the slower the economic recovery.

If the Conservatives are supposed to come up with a stimulus plan in the next few days to soothe the opposition, I make no doubt the bright minds in the opposition parties and among their supporters can do the same, starting from right now.

Brad: if the goal is to prevent deflation, there is a case for governments to act swiftly since the problem is magnified the longer it goes unchecked. This is why you’ve seen the rest of the world’s major economies inject massive amounts of money into the system.

It is all the assure people that prices won’t be allowed to fall. If we fail to convince people of that, things will spiral out of control and we will have a Depression for realsies.

Darrell,
I’ll drew it myself with blood from a stone and I can take care of myself, but thank-you!

Harper Blinked…

Guess Machiavelli Harper & Co. pulled back from the brink after all. He thought he had an ace up his sleeve: having cancelled the cancellation, he now could make the opposition –the Liberals in particular –look self-serving and hypocritical if they backed off; by claiming that they were only interested in saving their subsidies. When it appeared that the opposition parties were going through with a non-confidence vote regardless, he backed off –buying time by postponing a vote until December 8th –but not before he showed himself for what he is: a cunning, conniving partisan who puts political scheming before the common good, in spite of his protestations to the contrary.

I predict that something like this will happen: The opposition parties, tired of playing political poker with the Harper & co. will pull the plug anyhow, as they should. They will likely have Dion move up his resignation date and then appoint Michael Ignatieff as temporary leader of the coalition, until an election can be held –after the Liberal convention and the resolution of the current economic crisis. After all, though not ideal, Ignatieff is all ready the Deputy Opposition Leader.

Regardless, we cannot afford to play politics as usual during these trying times. We need a concerted, non-political effort to face the tsunami of economic tidal wave about to engulf us.

Brian [Nov 28, 2008 18:41],
My thoughts exactly. Well said. It would be far more interesting (not to mention adult) for Mr. Wells to “Join the discussion” and respond to some of the excellent counters to his post rather than wasting his time composing churlish comebacks to “the rat”.

“Digging deeper reveals the abysmal voter turnout – 59.1% making it the lowest in Canadian election history. Many Canadians just didn’t bother.”

Maybe that has more to do with the fact that no one engages with parties at the grassroots level because they are already funded by our tax dollars. Voter turnout has only declined since we did that. Maybe if the Liberals had actually had to raise money from their base and engage with them, their vote would not have declined so precipitously and voter turnout would be higher. Because we are largely talking about the preciptitous decline of Liberal voter turnout, not Conservative, NDP, or Green turnout.

Of course, it’s much easier to blame everything on Stephen Harper and a voting system that was the same voting system back when turnout was much higher.