MINISTRY OF TRUTH: In the dark underbelly, a reason to vote
By Adrian Barnes
Let's be honest: it's spring, it's sunny, it's the Kootenays, and the great outdoors beckons. Life beckons. There are a lot more attractive things to do with our time than drag ourselves to the voting station and choose between a list of...politicians. But if anything can sway you into the shadows of the voting booth is should be this: negative campaigning. What?
This sounds counterintuitive: negative campaigning is typically understood to be one of the main reasons why people DON'T vote: they get turned off by the whole sordid process and stay home. True enough...but there's a theory as to why negative campaigning happens that is worth thinking about.
Studies have shown that negative campaigns disgust ALL voters: left, centre, and right-leaning. But (and it's a big but...) studies also show that conservative voters tend to hold their noses and vote anyway, out of a sense of patriotism, tradition, and duty, while more left-leaning voters just tend to shake their fists at the sky and stay home, protesting through inaction and the gnashing of teeth.
We see this all the time in US politics, of course, where the Republicans are engaged in an almost continuous poisoning of the waters through Fox News in particular--no wonder former Harper aides are involved in the start up of Canada's three-letter-name equivalent, Sun News.
What this means, of course, is that negative campaigning directly benefits conservative candidates, which may be why we saw Stephen Harper start this campaign by raising the spectre of coalitions and why we see this campaign end with cloudy and unsubstantiated allegations against the leader of the NDP, Jack Layton. Guess which 'news organization' released the recent, unfounded allegations against Jack Layton? Sun Media.
Do you understand what this means? Someone out there is panicking and wants you to stay home on election day. Will you let them get away with this?
Think about what that means for a moment. There's a reason why this column is named after Orwell's 1984: this is ominous, frightening stuff.
Another big but, though:
In the final days of this election, something strange is happening: turnout at advanced polls has been the highest in Canadian history. Jack Layton is surging in the polls. There's an energy in the air that doesn't want us to keep going down the path we've been sleepwalking.
I'm not saying vote NDP. I'm just saying don't vote Conservative. Or, rather, vote, but don't vote Conservative. Or better yet, vote for whichever candidate has the best chance of unseating the Conservatives in your riding.
At this point, voting has nothing to do with conservatism or liberalism. It has to do with unseating a dangerously radical and undemocratic cohort from power. This isn't a left/right issue: it's a safety issue.
There are dozens of reasons not to vote Conservative, many of them outlined here, but one keeps springing to my mind again and again: Bev Oda. The Conservative "International Co-operation Minister" inserted a simple 'not' into a signed legal document. This 'not' ended a tradition of funding for the Christian organization Kairos. As an editorial in the Globe and Mail this morning opines, if you or I falsified a document like that, we'd be fired. What did Stephen Harper do when Bev Oda got caught? He stood by her. Would you have?
Screw rules, screw the truth, screw the people: the values of the Harper Conservatives are not the values of the vast majority of Canadians. They remain in power A) through pandering to the religious (even though their values are far from Christian) and B) by disgusting many of the rest of us to the point where we simply don't vote.
There's no way these people deserve to govern our country any longer. You need to do something about it Monday.