The Weird World of Politics
There are over 7 billion people in this world, with a government run in different ways with different country leaders. Each country is ran either as a democracy, monarchy, oligarchy or dictatorship. In Canada’s case, a democracy with a heritage of a British monarch. That today, has no real power over the government in Canada. If you would like to know more about our constitutional monarchy and the different forms of government, I recommend watching this video. Our classes’ newest project is on Canadian politics, and “coincidently” there was a federal election that just happened yesterday, as well as a student vote run by our class. Which is the topic of today’s post.
The Liberal party has been running our federal government since 2015, and they’ve been a minority government since our last election, in 2019. Which was one of the reasons that Justin Trudeau and the Liberals called this election after only 2 years, in hopes of gaining a majority government. A majority government would of course allow for a quicker process for the making of new policies without having to worry about the opposition. In the federal debate, many of the other party leaders were calling out Trudeau for how terrible timing it was to call the election. Yet, something tells me that they would’ve probably all done the same if they were in his position and were only really saying that to get less votes for the Liberals and more for their own parties. Unfortunately, this is usually the case in the game of politics, it usually comes to election tactics to gain more votes and less about doing the right thing.
For example, the Conservative party leader, Erin O’Toole ran on a platform that was more focused on bringing the party to the centre with a climate change plan and child care tax benefit while at the same time, trying to bring in right-wing votes with statements of getting rid of elements of the gun laws and not requiring his own party to have the vaccine. The NDP party’s plan to tax the ultra rich will not fund the spending habits of their government. Plus, the ultra rich are known for finding ways to lower their own taxes. The Liberals ran on a platform of lots of spending with no concrete plan to actually reduce the deficit. And finally, I actually couldn’t find anything that the Green party may be saying just to get votes, besides doing anything for the economy, which is pretty obvious since their platform largely consists of doing things for the people and environment.
The game of politics also extends to it’s individual provinces and territories. It is common for politicians to focus their campaign more in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec because the majority of the population is in those two provinces (and have the most ridings, there are 121 and 75 out of 338 seats located in Ontario and Quebec). In Canada, the party who wins the most ridings wins the election. And not necessarily the highest popular vote. In fact, the Conservatives had a lead in votes for the last 2 elections.
However, if you look at our student election, it’s the same issue. The Liberals won the most schools/ridings but the highest vote count was for the NDP. Now, obviously the NDP party did not do as well in the federal election as they did in the student vote. But why is that? It was most likely that many students voted for NDP because of Jagmeet Singh, who is one of the most liked party leaders right now and who’s platform also caters most to the younger population, and has had quite a large impact on them. Some parents may also influence their kid’s values and beliefs in that way, which could be why the Conservative and Liberal parties were both pretty close to each other in second and third for number of votes.
This GIF above represents how election voting typically works, even in our student election. As you can see in the GIF, the person was voting for the NDP, which happens to be who had the most votes from students in our riding and across the country. When the lightbulb popped up, he came to the decision that the NDP party resonated most with his values and beliefs. This visual is also meant to show how every vote counts, even just one vote could make a difference. Unfortunately, we only had about 62% of Canadians who took advantage of the fact that we are a democracy, which is usually the case for every year. For example, many young adults/new voters don’t have as big a voter turn out as there should be, which means that we have older generations making decisions for ours and our futures.
In the end, what we can see is that our country is divided, showing the different beliefs and values of the population. In fact, a large number of our most recent elections have been minority governments, which is a prime example of the division of our country that has been present for decades. This explains why so many people are unsatisfied with and complain about the decisions being made from the government. Plus, the world is complicated and filled with a number of problems, that would be very difficult to fix.
It could be argued that minority governments are good for Canada, because in some ways, they are forced to set aside their differences and work together to potentially do the right thing, in the form of new policies (eg. climate change, Liberal + NDP). Annamie Paul had actually mentioned this very point in the federal debate, that all parties should come together. In fact, if the world is going to make any steps into fixing the devastating effects of climate change, our governments around the world will need to somehow work together. For the good of the human race and the future of our planet. Now that may seem impossible, but I really think it’s worth a try.