STUMBLING THRU MY THOUGHTS TOWARDS ARRIVING AT MY FINAL VOTE | FEDERAL ELECTION 2021
Since I might not be in my riding on the big voting day of September 20th, and since I’m not a fan of the mail-in voting setup (related thought: can we please stop pretending like we don’t have the technology to be doing democracy more directly online?), that means I only had from September 10th-13th to figure out who I would be voting for if I wanted to hit up the in-person early voting dates. So, after watching the Leaders Debate on the evening of September 9th, I figured this weekend would be a good time to officially work out where my head was at with this HOPEFULLY pivotal election… and what better way to work out where my head is at than by running it thru a blog post that other people might read so I’ll have to overthink things even more than usual?
Now, I’ve already shared my main election opinion on the socials a few times, so I’m not going to delve too much into why I think that NOBODY should vote for the Conservatives OR the Liberals. Instead, I will just re-share the wee tweet thread that I posted on this topic back in August when the election was first announced (click tweets to make pics bigger)…
…and if you’re interested in some further thoughts on this matter, someone jumped into the 95EH Facebook comments agreeing that people SHOULD NOT vote Trudeau/Liberals, but they weren’t quite getting their heads around how the same logic & reasoning applies to not voting for O’Toole/Conservatives, and you can read that exchange for a few more points & examples. But I also think a tweet I once saw says it best: “Liberals and Conservatives ARE NOT different teams, they’re the offensive and defensive lines of the billionaire class”. I also tried presenting this ‘Just say “no” to Conservatives AND Liberals’ idea during the last Federal action too. So, the case has been made before. The proof is still in the pudding.
To be honest, I probably underestimate how many people are fully aware that the Liberals/Conservatives serve the same interests AND THAT IS EXACTLY WHY they keep voting for them, even secretly switching between voting for one or the other depending on their personal grievances that election cycle, but I guess I’m also hopeful that there are a bunch of other people who fall into the camp that mindlessly gets caught up in the sports fandom of long running CBC drama ‘Liberals vs Conservatives’, forgetting that these people were meant to just be going to work for us and they’re not idols for us to use to project out hot take opinions onto each other. Check the tapes. It’s Conservatives OR Liberals holding the federal bag in every scandal and broken promise and unjust inaction throughout this country’s existence.
But, here’s the thing: we don’t have to keep voting for either. We can chuck both parties into the sea, in one go, THIS ELECTION, if enough of us truly want change. It’s as easy as just not voting for them. People do it in every election. Please join us.
Because the reality is that a vote for the Liberals is a vote for the ongoing existence of the Conservatives, and a vote for the Conservatives is a vote for the ongoing existence of the Liberals. The only real difference between the two is that one party aims to push everything further & further right towards unchecked imperialism (which is bad), and the other party pretends to be fighting really hard to stop them while never actually doing anything substantial when in charge (which creates mistrust in better solutions). And the whole thing is a dragged out 2-steps-to-the-right & 1-step-to-the-left slow dance off a cliff for the majority of the planet. In other words, a vote for either Conservatives OR Liberals is a vote for the ongoing continuation of: *gestures at EVERYTHING horrible going on*
If you truly want to stick it to Trudeau, you don’t vote O’Toole. And vice versa.
I’ll just add that the most recent piece of evidence that adds to my NOBODY SHOULD VOTE CONSERVATIVE OR LIBERAL case can be found by watching the Leaders Debate while keeping in mind that all the problems they are debating about—the lack of climate change action, lack of reconciliation, rising costs of everything, etc— all those problems have happened while our federal government was being run by either the Liberals or Conservatives.
So when you watch the debate, or when you think back on what you watched or the clips that got highlighted by the media…
…it’s important to imagine Trudeau and O’Toole in a hot dog suit saying:
“We’re all trying to find the political parties that did this!”
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It’s almost laughable listening to Trudeau and O’Toole talk as if it was some mysterious other party of the past that has done all the sh*tty things that have led us to our current state of one crisis after the other. And now they’re trying to convince us, ONCE AGAIN, that the only thing that can fix a Liberal/Conservative problem is another Liberal/Conservative plan of promises. O’Toole seemed especially keen on getting across that Conservatives had cleaned up their act & would never hit us again if the country would just “🙏 please judge us on what we say, not by what we’ve always done”.
But I see that hot dog suit. And I hope you see it too.
Or do I have to remind you of that time when Trudeau joined protestors at a climate protest that was protesting HIS GOVERNMENT for not acting on the climate crisis? You can smell the mustard from here on the both of them.
There’s just too much of a track record with both of these parties to not know that they just say whatever they think people want to hear to get voted in, and then they do whatever benefits their true masters, the corporations & elites, and then blame the other party & everyone else for why they never could get done what they promised to do — BUT, if we just vote for them again, THEN they’ll totally get it done next time. Pinky promise. And the media sells us this ‘2 puppets controlled by the same person’ Bill Hicks bit like government is some kind of reality talent show about how to win an argument instead of the institution where all of society’s rules are getting set in the favour of the few. And we keep letting it happen, even though we’re not actually in “the few” club. And it’s because people keep not making the connection that these two parties are working for the same bosses, despite all the real-life evidence that you can find wherever you look.
Luckily, we’re not America and we have more than 2 party lines to chose from in our election.
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So, since we’re working out my vote and I live on unceded Ktunaxa territory in British Columbia, the Bloc is not a voting option for me, so they don’t really factor into my voting thought process — I’ll just say that I heard some things that I agreed with Blanchet on during the debate, like some positions on Climate Crisis, but I also heard cringe stuff like comparing the situation for the French to the situation for Indigenous, and, I mean, does it even need to be pointed out how those situations are not at all the same? Also, it’s kind of a bummer to have a federal party get so much say when they’re always going to be most interested in what’s best for just one part of a very large country — a “country” founded on stolen land and the oppressing of people who are different from the status-quo.
Like I keep trying to get across to the anti-vaxx/mask crowd: “You don't get rid of oppression by only standing up for it when you feel it's happening to you / people like you, because a system built on the foundation of oppressing/exploiting doesn't care who it oppresses/exploits next (no matter how willing you are to continue being on the oppressing/exploiting side)”.
Honestly, my biggest fear with this election is that too many people are going to be so caught up in their ego-centric outrage over vaccines/masks being rolled out *as part of a public health plan during a GLOBAL PANDEMIC* so now they’re going to throw their votes towards right-wing parties that have a long history of only caring about some people’s ‘rights & freedoms’ some of the time (read small print for racial/gendered/religious/economic conditions).
Also, if you truly want to stick it to “Big Pharma” you don’t vote for parties that want privatized health care and for-profit old age homes. You vote for parties that want Pharmacare and for you to have your teeth included as a part of your body for Universal Health Care. You vote to TAX BIG CORPORATIONS & THE RICH. You don’t vote against things that would help increase everybody’s personal health (which includes taking action on climate change and income inequality and standing up for the ‘rights & freedoms’ of EVERYBODY who was being oppressed/exploited long before anyone in the status-quo got riled up about vaccines & masks and decided to try and jump to the front of the queue of Oppressed & Silenced people).
Which segues nicely into a party that wasn’t invited to the federal debate, but who, unlike the Bloc, will be on the official ballot over here in my Kootenay-Columbia riding. A party who, like the Conservatives AND the Liberals, will already be crossed off my mental ballot when I go into the booth to cast my vote. Of course, I’m talking about the PPC. Now, I don’t really want to waste much time on what a party like that is dog-whistling about, so I will just share what I wrote about the PPC in the last Federal election when I was comparing Canadian political parties to the more loud politics of the US and UK:
To be fair, “are we the baddies?” is a question that most modern countries would have a very hard time answering truthfully (*cough* unmarked graves *cough* reconciliation *cough* etc)
I understand that people are mad & scared & tired about all kinds of things, especially in the middle of a wildfire pandemic election, but we all need to realize that this is one of the main things that we all have in common right now. Being mad & scared & tired should unify us against the reasons why we are mad & scared & tired. But people keep digging down the wrong rabbit holes and bumping into the wrong bad faith actors that want us to keep playing along with a game that is rigged in the favour of a few at the cost of EVERYONE ELSE. And unless you are making millions a year, then you are in the EVERYONE ELSE group. Which means, there’s A LOT of us. But we’re so divided and distracted. It’s almost as if modern life has been programmed to keep us that way… 🤔.
So they try to get us to blame anyone but those on top who are hoarding all the exploited wealth & resources. Blame the immigrants. Blame the libs. Blame the scientists. Blame the poor. Blame China. Blame your neighbour. Blame yourself. Blame anyone that doesn’t draw attention to all the hoarding & exploiting. Because if they can keep us hating each other & arguing amongst ourselves, they get to keep their world destroying grift running a little bit longer. So they’ve got us out here sharing any piece of handed-down misinformation that we think proves our passed-down bias, true or not, because who’s got time to read all this stuff with the cost of living being so high and with wages stagnant for decades so the daily hours needed to be worked to stay alive somehow never decrease despite all the technological advances that have made us infinitely more efficient at making all kinds of stuff that we don’t even need but can’t stop buying or the “economy” will crash even though continuing to do so is literally turning the only planet we have to live on into the set of some kind of natural disaster human cruelty documentary that’s unfolding in real-time… in 3-d (!!!), so hurry up and get your expensive tickets for the limited less bad seats!
And once they get enough of us living in that mindset, we’re pretty easy to wind-up against each other.
But the PPC don’t hate this system. They’re big fans of the Liberal/Conservative capitalist colonizer mindset, they just want to go back to when they were able to say more of the quiet parts out loud, without consequences. And I don’t have time for that mindset or energy, and I don’t think anyone else should make time for it either, so the next time you want to listen to a pissed off old white person going off on society, please do everyone a favour and go down a George Carlin rabbit hole instead:
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AND THEN THERE WERE TWO
OK, if you’ve been following along/keeping score, that means my mental ballot now only has two parties left to choose from: the Green Party and the NDP. But before I get into the candidates for my riding of Kootenay-Columbia…
… I just want to quickly touch on my impression of Annamie Paul and Jagmeet Singh from the leader debates.
In short, I thought Annamie was the best on the stage that night (with Jagmeet close behind in 2nd, and then a steep drop off to Blanchet, and then somewhere at the bottom would be hot dog meme frenemies Trudeau & O’Toole). But, for me, Annamie was by far the most rational and real and adult person in the room + her ‘can we stop this political posturing and just work together on the things that people need and want because we don’t have time for this all this ego-bs’ approach to politics, an approach she kept vocally trying to get the others to agree to during the debate, was nice to see and I could really relate to her visible frustration with the whole ‘show’ that is televised debate. She displayed the kind of thinking we need in a leader, which is also the kind of thinking that we need to show more in our individual lives. Although, maybe we only get the kind of political honesty that Annamie showed at the debate when a party’s leader still has the freedom of being more honest because they don’t have near as much status-quo acceptance and potential power at stake (aka: a projected chance to win).
Because I get a similar sense of Jagmeet being a genuinely good & honest person who is motivated by the right things, but since the NDP have a better chance of winning more seats, I also felt like there was more of a ‘I gotta appeal to the status quo voters’ consideration from him during that debate, which sometimes had him getting caught up in the debate boy antics of ‘try to shoe horn in a point that doesn’t really fit the topic’ and ‘keep talking overtop of someone else’ stuff that makes debates such a bad format for understanding what any party is actually going to do if elected. For that kind of info, you really gotta go do your own research (reading more than one party platform is a pretty good place to start, talking to people outside of your agreement bubbles is also pretty helpful, but if you don’t really know which party positions you align with, CBC Vote Compass is not perfect, but it’ll give you a decent idea of who your top 2 or 3 might be for further investigating).
However, the leaders debate is decent for giving you a general idea of who the party has chosen to represent them, and I would say that I was pleased with Jagmeet’s performance and think he is a good representative of what the NDP stands for — but I was most impressed with Annamie, as I felt her attitude was most inline with how I feel about the ‘soon come’ party politics that we’re all so over and done with. So if we were voting for a president ‘Merica style, I think Annamie would get my vote & I really hope she wins her Toronto Centre riding so we can have her presence in parliament.
But Annamie and Jagmeet are not running in my riding, so my actual vote will come down between Rana Nelson for the Green Party and Wayne Stetski for the NDP. And because one of the things that appealed to me the most about Annamie Paul’s debate performance was her attitude of ‘we need to work together regardless of who wins September 20th’s popular opinion contest’, and because I personally see enough similarities between the Green’s platform and the NDP’s platform in regards to things that I think are most important (climate action, taxing the rich, electoral reform, reconcilliation, cost of living, etc), because I see a similar value system at their roots, because they are both describing the kind of world that we need to be transitioning to before we lose even more time, I really believe that the most ideal outcome would be that Canada was filled in with as much Green AND/OR Orange as possible. And while we’re thinking of The Good Timeline, it’d be awesome if everyone with similar top priorities could organize around getting behind the rationally agreed upon strongest Green or NDP candidate with the best chance to win in each riding so we can start working towards a trend of sending people to Ottawa that are interested in working together on the same collective goals.
So it is from that mindset that I think it is worth acknowledging that the general consensus for my neck of the woods is that ‘Kootenay-Columbia’ will be a battle mainly between Wayne Stetski of the NDP and Rob Morrison of the Conservatives. On top of that, the Green candidate in our riding, Rana Nelson, is a first time candidate while Wayne Stetski has not only been this area’s MP before (which, tbh, I don’t really give a tonne of weight too, as having experience as a politician is not always a good thing as far as change/progress), but, more importantly, Wayne was one of the handful of candidates selected as Leadnow's Courage to Lead Champions + Wayne is also endorsed by 350 Canada in their Climate Emergency Alliance (and, tbh, I do give a pretty decent amount of weight to those endorsements). I’ll just add that Rob Morrison literally was a cop.
And as much as I would like for my ‘NOBODY VOTE LIBERAL OR CONSERVATIVE’ social media shares to have been convincing enough that this election could entirely come down to all of us choosing between Greens or NDPs (or the PPC I guess for those who think tyranny gets fixed by going further right on the political spectrum), the reality is that this election needs to be about making sure we don’t give the keys back to the same status quo division that has led us to a climate crisis pandemic that will never go away if we don’t stop trying to fix corrupt colonial capitalism by applying more of their corrupt colonial capitalism to it.
So, even though I have never been one for strategic voting (as a long practicing non-Conservative/Liberal voter who grew up in Alberta, I’ve had to tune those kinds of “strategy” pitches out a long time ago), because I am onboard with both the Green and NDP platforms and messaging, ESPECIALLY WHEN COMPARED TO THE ALTERNATIVES, when I look at the projections for the Kootenay-Columbia riding on 338Canada…
…it makes my final decision for who I will be putting my Kootenay-Columbia vote towards in this election a little bit easier to come to. And, in case it wasn’t clear where my train of thought has pulled into the station at, my vote’s going to be going to Wayne Stetski and the NDP this election. Hopefully enough other people have taken a similar trip thru their heads and reached a similar conclusion as me (which could be a different conclusion for your riding, depending on your candidate situation). And hopefully, together, we can get enough parliament seats turning Orange and/or Green this fall so we can get to work on the just societal transition that the tag team of Climate Change + Global Pandemic are trying to force our hand into evolving our political positions on. And maybe we could finally get rid of this ‘first-past-the-post’ system that often has the 35% “majority” set before the votes are even counted out West?
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But first we gotta work together and all say no to the Blue AND Red. It’s the only way.
And it’s gotta be BOTH (I know, you think you only blame/hate the one — but it’s a 2-party act).
We have to show them that even though we don’t get much power with our current ‘you get to have a “say” with how the country is run once every few years’ system, we CAN still organize our collective intentions enough to show that we’re done with the same 2-party status-quo mindset that has led us from residential schools to climate change inaction to whatever you want to call this current combination of clapping & yelling at “essential” underpaid workers during a global pandemic. Check the receipts if you don’t believe me, but it’s been the Conservatives and the Liberals that’ve been holding the bag all the way up to now.
Let’s stop giving them the keys.
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Fool us once, shame on you.
Fool us for infinity… that’s a damn shame on us.
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Because a better life is possible for all of us, but we gotta get at the root of the problem.
And we don’t do that by sending the same protectors of the root problem back to parliament.
And on that note, I’m off to cast my vote in the arena where democracy does battle in a mountain town: the curling rink :) I hope you found/find some time to work out where your head/heart/gut is at too… and I hope you get out and vote for the future you want to live in and not the future they try and tell you could become EVEN WORSE if you don’t keep voting for the same lies & liars.
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BE SAFE, BE KIND. BECAUSE!
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JEREMY / HI54LOFI
(aka the guy that turns the lights on at 95EH.CA)
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AND NOW HERE’S A 95-TRACK PLAYLIST FROM #MOUNTOWNFM THAT PAIRS NICELY WITH THE VIBES OF THIS POLITICAL BLOG POST (JUST BE WARNED THAT EAR MUFFS ARE DEFINITELY NEEDED WITH THIS PLAYLIST — BUT IF YOU ALREADY USE HEADPHONES AS EAR MUFFS IN LIFE THEN YOU ALREADY KNOW ABOUT MUSIC LIKE THIS):
{and don’t forget to vote before September 20th comes and goes if you're also of voting age up here in The North}
