The world is a different place.
Sure, it might not seem different, you might get up and feel like you are looking out the window at exactly the same thing as you did last week, and you might feel exactly the same, but it is different all right.
For one thing, Harper has a majority.
While this might not seem drastic, I am a little bit afraid.
Not necessarily of the new government, but of what it says about either the voting public or the electoral system itself.
Harper’s term in office has included charges of contempt, investigations into members of his office for potential fraud, and potentially a misspending of taxpayer dollars for the G8 summit which could put the Liberal’s past escapades to shame.
Yet he was re-elected with a resounding majority.
Now, to me this begs the question: Why?
Is it because as voters we are so jaded as to believe it doesn’t even matter anymore if our political leaders are misspending the money we give them and lying to parliament?
Could it be we are so inured to the extremely immoral behaviour we are seeing because we simply can’t believe any of the other political parties or leaders are any more honest or any less immoral?
Perhaps.
Or maybe it is because there is only one significant party on the right since the Reform and the Progressive Conservatives came together to form the Conservative Party of Canada and there are three parties splitting everything to the left of them.
But perhaps it is also because many Canadians aren’t even aware of the fraud/contempt/missuse of
tax dollars.
Part of this is the fault of the media, who is always looking for a way to get some attention, and eventually, people become numb to it. And as we race to get the story out even faster with less resources, sometimes we might take too many shortcuts or go for the more dramatic angle, which isn’t always the more productive route in engaging or educating people.
As the public has become increasingly inundated with information in what is sometimes termed ‘The Information Age’, we are hardly able to keep up with our iPhone/Facebook/Twitter messages, let alone read the news.
But for those of you who still do, we must get the message out there that politics matters. Ottawa is not just some abstract concept or ‘Never-never Land’ where people go to eat beaver tail donuts and live off of taxpayer dollars.
It is where the decisions that affect our daily lives are made.
Policies made there change how we live, how we eat, where our loved ones in the military are sent and how our dollars are spent.
While it was nice to see the numbers of Canadians voting did not decline again, it would be even nicer to see those numbers go up and people once again engage with the system.
But maybe the system itself is the problem, and people feel like their one vote doesn’t make a difference.
This is the very system Stephen Harper used to say needed reform before he became prime minister.
I say: Mr. Prime Minister, it’s time.