Democratic Alternatives to Privatization?

--First Published in The Imprint, October 10th 2008--

Let us stop fooling ourselves and get right to the point, the democratic process in Canada is a Joke. In America it is a farce of that joke and in Mexico, a satire of the farce of the joke. North America has a severe democratic deficit, and back-room, anti-democratic partnerships like the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) are only serving to make it worse. I’ll get back to that in a bit.
While breaking his own ‘Set Date’ election law, Stephan Harper is sending Canadians to vote on October 14th. Here the citizenry will enjoy their one opportunity to participate in the government by stuffing their ballot in a box. It is not necessarily the vote that they want to cast, instead, in our backwards system, they may be voting against the party they don’t want to see in power.
With our archaic First Past The Post electoral system, majority governments may form with a minority of the votes, and huge blocks of voters will be underrepresented in the house of commons, that is, if they are represented at all.
Increasingly, what this mean is that people are forced to vote against a party they do not support instead of voting for a party that does adequately represent them. This is in an effort to block the lesser desired party from forming the government. Alternatively, vote trading web sites are appearing where you vote for a candidate in your riding that has a chance of beating the ‘more evil’ candidate, and in exchange (honours system please) someone in a riding where your preferred party’s candidate has the best chance will vote for your party (when they may not have otherwise).
This process, however, is flawed in a myriad of ways (too many to list) and does not solve the problem of not being able to vote with your heart due to an inherently undemocratic process. If you do end up voting with your heart, your vote could turn out to be quite meaningless if your candidate does not win. Ontario had the chance to switch to a method of proportional representation in the last provincial election, but stupidity (ignorance, fear of change) prevailed.
Personally, I recognize the meaninglessness of my vote. It is more of a symbolic gesture that nets the party that currently has the sanest policies $1.35. From my first vote at the age of 18, I knew that it meant nothing for I was supporting a candidate that would not win. Their policies were too sane, they supported too much equality and equity.
As my understanding of the natural world evolved, so did my voting patterns, and now I support the one party that has sustainability as a base premise which encompasses the party’s platform - sustainable development, sustainable growth, sustainable economy, sustainable society and sustainable energy policies. Sustainability is not just centered on the environment; it is the realization that we must treat all our systems with precaution and respect. That there are undeniable ecological limits outside the ream of technological advances that direct the human life allowing layer of earth (the biosphere) we inhabit. Everything is connected, we are all a part of Atleo’s Tsawalk.
The clean coal bipartisan orgy in the American election campaign and the tar sands development love-in surrounding the Canadian popularity contest are both under discussed and of a prehistoric academic understanding of climate change. Europe has had clean coal technologies for a while and since they have only reduced the smog pollution without actually reducing the burning of coal, they are experiencing the full effects of climate instability, the smog was actually reflecting solar radiation away from the earth, acting as a cooling blanket. We can’t just clean it up, we have to stop using it. Also, ripping the tops of mountains to dig coal and spreading mercury contamination is not clean. It’s the process as much as the product that is unsustainable.
What is happening in Canada is even worse. Under the anti-democratic harmonization agreement known as the SPP that the Liberal party entered and the Tories now fully support, we are to increase our tar sands development. That’s right, the ‘energy security’ working group of the SPP thinks that the single largest point source emitter of Green House Gasses, a development the size of Florida which already uses as much fresh clean water per day as the city of Calgary, needs to increase production by a factor of 5 by 2012.
It is not bad enough that the water withdrawal and poisoning means that the Athabasca river barely makes it to the Peace Delta, or that downstream First Nations communities can’t drink or eat from the river for fear of expanding the cancer epidemic that is plaguing them, or that any water bird unfortunate enough to land in an open air effluent pond (which is placed precariously close to the river) die immediately, such as the 600 ducks that landed in the toxic sludge last spring (and constantly re-occurring).
What is really horrible is that under the SPP, with the complicity of the Conservative government, and the Liberal, ande Bloc opposition, that this unsustainable attack on the earth and ongoing murder of First Nations will increase in scope. This will offset and dramatically dwarf any advances made in carbon sequestration, or the ‘greener’ energies of wind, solar, and geo-thermal.
The SPP, being not at all part of the ‘democratic’ process in North America serves as a negative multiplier of the democratic deficit. And not the math type of negative multiplier that would make the already negative situation a positive, it makes it much, much worse.
Freedom is not the choice between the lesser of two pre-selected evils. Freedom is being able choose between multiple evolving options to empower those who most closely mirrors your ideological position.
To protest the futility in our voting system, some have decided to publicly eat their ballots (quite illegal), some have ass-stinked the ballot before putting it in the box, while others, whether inspired by Saramago or not, have simply cast blank ballots Though these acts will not balance the democratic deficit, they do help to illuminate it.
When you go to vote in the upcoming election, please do so with a thought about sustainability, and knowledge of the recent histories’ of the traditional ‘ruling’ parties. Their preferences are not for social and environmental equity but for the in kind friendship of big oil, big coal, and big money.