Canada's Apathy-Based Politics

We're headed for an election, and not even the Liberals care.

The writers in The Mark Newsroom had high hopes when we spotted this column in the Ottawa Citizen by Jonathan Malloy. The headline reads, “Why you should care how Parliament operates,” so we were expecting an impassioned plea about how the rules that govern Canadian democracy matter, or at least an impassioned plea about something. Instead, the best Malloy can come up with is, “The bending of unwritten conventions and understandings may seem solely an academic matter with limited implications for an election. But Canadians need to take some time to reflect and inform themselves on this rule-bending, and only then can they express whether this is truly the way they want the system to work.” That’s not exactly going to make anyone sit up and take notice.

The National Post’s Tasha Kheiriddin sounds almost downright uninterested in accusations of malfeasance in government, which is a little puzzling from a political affairs columnist in a major national newspaper. “The worse the Tories behave, the more solid their lead appears” in the polls, she writes. “[M]aybe if Mr. Harper knocked over a liquor store, he’d cement a majority.” Is not the bad-behaviour-leads-to-more-votes rubric the least bit troubling to Kheiriddin? Would it be if the Liberals were manipulating it as deftly as the Tories?

According to L. Ian MacDonald in the Montreal Gazette, even the Liberals are groaning with boredom at the prospect of going to an election over the Tories’ alleged ethics violations. Faced with the prospect of almost certain defeat, MacDonald characterizes the Grits’ attitude as “Let’s get it over with … There are even some Liberals who have privately expressed the hope that Stephen Harper will be returned with a majority so they can get on with properly rebuilding the party.” If that’s true, some Liberals are showing a stunning lack of the instinct of self-preservation. Who’s to say there will be anything left to rebuild if they get trampled in the next election?