Well, I guess I should write something about this god damned fucking election.

For my American friends : this upcoming Monday, May 2, we Canadians will be going to the polls for a national election. Steven Harper’s Conservative minority government has fallen, and so it is once again time for us Canadians to do our patriotic duty and go to our riding’s polling station on Monday, and vote.

I am a little less than completely enthused.

It’s not that we’re having to vote that has me feeling down in the dumps. It’s the state of Canadian politics in general. I have never felt more like there was no good choices out there. You just have to hold your nose pick the poison you hate the least.

This malaise is, I suspect, common to all modern democracies (or at least, ones dominated by two major parties) at this point in history. It’s not just that the inherent weaknesses of representational democracy becoming increasingly grating on the population as our social reality evolves and our democracy remains the same as it was in the era of the horse and buggy. That’s a major factor, undoubtedly, and I could go on and on about that (trust me), but there’s something more specific afoot here.

It has to two with the two party system. In the USA you have that more or less explicitly. In Canada, we have fewer barriers to third parties than the USA, and indeed we have what might be considered an Official Third Party in the NDP, but due to historical inertia and (in my opinion) a general lack of courage and imagination in the population, our politics are still dominated by the two massive historical juggernauts, the Liberals and the Conservatives.

And to be blunt, that’s just not fucking good enough any more.

Democracy works a lot like capitalism, and hence, it thrives on competition. The more competition, the better the outcome for the consumer, or in this case, the voter. And any economist or business theorist will tell you that having only two players on the field does not a robust and consumer-friendly contest make.

And it shows. To me, it’s abundantly clear that all the Liberals and Conservatives care about is screwing the other party and getting elected. Neither has a clear moral focus or vision of the future of Canada any more. In terms of policy, they drift closer to one another every day in their all-consuming attempts to be That One Party Anyone Can Vote for. The names are meaningless, the Conservatives are anything but and the Liberals have obviously stopped feeling like they need to be any more liberal than it takes to be slightly better than the Conservatives, and of course, the Conservatives are only too happy to make that as low a bar to jump as they can possibly get away with.

So the party names are mere labels now. Gone are the days of truly ideological politics, where there was a feeling that the political parties represented clearly defined points of view and you could choose the one that matched your own. Now, it increasingly feels as meaningless as choosing any other mass produced and fundamentally identical consumer product. Gee, do I want the toothpaste with Whitening Action or the one with Stain Fighting Power? I just want clean teeth, god damn it.

Partly, I blame the consultants. Politics is dominated by image experts, message specialists, groomers, trainers, coaches, and all other forms of professional bullshit peddlers who have completely eroded all traces of genuine ideology and sincerity out from under the party’s platforms in their never-ending quest to justify their enormous consulting fees. As a result, politicians don’t even seem like human beings any more. They have no chance of genuinely connecting with the people and inspiring them. They are nothing but the sum of their various handlers, and hence, about as human as an airbrushed supermodel on a billboard.

But the problem goes deeper than that. There is a reason why nearly every voter decries all the negative advertising you see on TV and negative campaigning you hear from the mouths of of the candidates and yet it continues unabated, and indeed, seems to get much worse with every election.

It’s because the hegemony of the two party system relies on one overpowering message, one on which both parties wholeheartedly agree : there are only two choices. They have to convince you that the other party is the worst kind of evil because then you will feel like to vote for anyone but them is essentially to vote for The Other Guy, who is Satan, more or less. This squeezes out third parties without having to lift a finger directly against them. Combined with media collusion in the form of not treating third parties with any respect at all, and indeed often completely ignoring them and thus reinforcing the message that there are only two parties worth noticing, it keeps the competition low and the elections easy.

And they don’t care that they are destroying democracy by discouraging voters in the process. As far as they and their corporate masters are concerned, the fewer voters, the better. Makes elections easier to manipulate. And as long as the two big parties are entirely dependent on enormous amounts of election bucks to pay for all that negative advertising and soul-crushing consulting, they will continue to be panting at the end of the big corporations’ very short leash.

And that’s why, no matter who you vote for, nothing really changes.

This election, I am voting NDP. I don’t know who their person in my riding is, and I don’t really care. I just cannot stand either of the two big parties, and Jack Layton actually has some good ideas.

And thankfully, he’s not considered important enough to be worth compromising. Yet.

I guess that makes me officially a grumpy old cynic. And I’m only 37. Well, I was always ahead of my age group in school.