There's a Federal election going on. There's plenty of issues I would like to hear candidates talk about:
Salmon farms in the Broughton Archipelago;
Offshore oil and gas drilling;
“Deep integration”: Did you know that Paul Martin recently signed the “Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America”? What else is being negotiated between the Federal government and the Bush administration? Don't you think we should be told about it? Is this a good time to be talking about a common currency? No, it isn't.
Uranium mining and export of Candu reactors: We provide plutonium-manufacturing plants to two countries that produce nuclear weapons, India and Pakistan. Yes, I'm concerned about the possibility of religious fanatics getting their hands on a nuclear weapon, even a very crude one, at some time in the future.
“Peak oil”: The time is coming soon when it will take more energy to pump a barrel of oil out of the ground than that barrel of oil produces. What sort of plans should we be making for alternative energy sources?
Genetically Modified Organisms: David Suzuki says, “Any politician or scientist who tells you these products are safe is either very stupid or lying. The experiments have simply not been done.” Genetically modified wheat doesn't benefit Canadian farmers; it benefits Monsanto. If you haven't seen the film “The Future of Food”, do so.
Canada's military has been neglected for years. A recent Senate study recommended that funding be doubled to $30 billion. (See Canadian Forces at a breaking point.) When Canadians sent on peacekeeping missions and put in harm's way, they need to be given the appropriate tools to do their job.
Do you think I'm trying to convince you to vote for the Green Party? Let's address that subject right now. I have sent a contribution to Andrew Lewis, the Green candidate for Saanich-Gulf Islands. Andrew would be a great MP, if enough voters in Saanich-Gulf Islands choose to give him the opportunity.
I'm aware of three other Green candidates who can walk and chew gum at the same time: Ariel Lade in Victoria, Silvaine Zimmermann in West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast-Sea-to-Sky Country, and Rob Hornsey in Pitt Meadows-Maple Ridge-Mission.
Unfortunately, I don't live in one of these ridings. If you don't live in one of these ridings, either, ask your local Green candidate why the federal Green Party hired Don Toffaletto to do media relations for them, and let me know what sort of answer you get. Another concern is, being an MP is a job that pays $130,000/year, and the federal Green Party has selected some candidates who simply aren't qualified, in order to collect the $1.75/vote of federal election funding. Of course, the voters have the ultimate decision over who is qualified to be an MP, but I think the policy of putting up warm bodies to be candidates for the sake of having candidates in every riding is wrong.
I'll put in a word for another worthy candidate, Connie Fogal, who is running in Vancouver-Kingsway. She is the leader of the Canadian Action Party, and she has proven herself to be very adept at taking up issues that other parties shy away from.
Besides helping out Andrew Lewis, the extent of my involvement in this election, so far, has been to ask the local NDP candidate, Dawn Black, what her position was on another important issue, the proposed widening of the Port Mann Bridge and the freeway from Langley to East Vancouver. (Yes, there could be federal money going into this.) It took a week and a half to get an answer, but I did get the answer I wanted; yes, she is against this project. There was no need for me to quiz the Liberal candidate, Joyce Murray, about this, because she was in the provincial Cabinet when this waste of tax dollars was cooked up.
Now that the subject of the Liberals has come up, it's time to start preaching. The sponsorship scandal is just the tip of the iceberg, and I'm presenting this as a fact. I'll present just two examples here, with the assumption that you already know about Martin's “flag of convenience” container ships. (If you don't, click here for a CBC story about it.)
I like watching strippers just as much as the next guy, but should bringing in more of them really be an immigration priority? When the fast-tracking of visas for strippers became public knowledge, Immigration Minister Judy Sgro said that they would stop doing it, but her ministry continued doing it anyway. If facilitating the white slave traffic isn't corruption, I don't know what is. Here's someone else's story about it: MPs Charge Liberals with Complicity in Trafficking of Women with Continued Fast-Tracking of Stripper Visas.
Martin was, for a while, a director of IMASCO, which was the manufacturer of Players, du Maurier, and Matinee cigarettes. When Martin became Finance Minister in 1993, the mostly foreign-owned tobacco industry had a problem; high taxes on cigarettes were causing hundreds of thousands of Canadians to quit smoking. So, the tobacco industry created a “smuggling problem” (it was actually the tobacco industry itself that was responsible for the smuggling), and Martin dealt with this “problem” by not only reducing federal taxes on cigarettes, but strong-arming Ontario and Quebec into reducing their provincial taxes on cigarettes as well.
Would replacing Martin with Stephen Harper be an improvement? No, and here's why. The Fraser Institute had a 30th anniversary dinner this past October, and Harper was a guest of honour. If you believe that your local Conservative candidate cares about what you think, he or she is worthy of your consideration, but don't think for one minute that Stephen Harper cares what you think. Like George W. Bush and Gordon Campbell, Harper has bought into an ideology, and ideologues don't care about voters.
Let's take, for example, something that has been an issue in this election campaign; crime and minimum sentences for criminals. Why do criminals get light sentences? Because of lack of courtroom space and judges to hear cases, and lack of prison space to keep criminals locked up. Why do we lack these things? Because special-interest groups like the Fraser Institute and Harper's National Citizens Coalition think that people shouldn't pay taxes. Do you want less crime or do you want the GST reduced to 5%? I'm waiting for somebody to take Harper to task on this.
Now, I briefly mentioned the NDP earlier. I won't tell you that an NDP MP where you live would be any more answerable to you than a Liberal or a Conservative MP. (Unless you live in Burnaby-New Westminster; I'll vouch for Peter Julian in the same way that I vouched for Andrew Lewis earlier.) I can tell you, however, that Jack Layton said that if the NDP ends up with enough seats to hold the balance of power in the next Parliament, the NDP will make proportional representation a key condition of support. This is a change that would be of benefit to almost everyone. If you are unable to decide who to vote for based on any other criteria, I've just given you, free of charge, a reason to vote NDP. Give Layton a chance to deliver on this campaign promise. And who knows? If we get proportional representation for federal elections, the NDP in British Columbia might be embarrassed enough to support proportional representation for provincial elections, too.
