Thursday, September 21, 2006

Conservative Pac-West versus Liberal Atl-East divide Canada

Canada is now as divided as the United States politically, thanks in large part to the political polarization of the populis, just as we have now completed our final journey into it up here to the North. You are either one of us - a Red state in the Majority as a Republican or one of them - a Blue state in the Minority as a Democrat, change the colours around, make Republican Conservative and Democrat Liberal and replace state with province or territory and you could be speaking of the Great White North politically with ease. Yet with a Minority Government, one could forgive another's deeply-felt belief that this continuance of polarization which the high Tories seem to believe will come in handy at the present, will return as it has in the past to the currently lowly Grits in the future and kick them in their keyster once more for good measure.

Stephen Harper understands the Pac-West Cons versus Atl-East Libs game, just as George W. Bush understands the South-West Reps versus North-East Dems game, they keep to their own constituents, make the home-town voter happy but work towards getting the gains through government payoffs, projects or subsidies in the first years of their office term as they come yet willing to lose them in the last years of their office term if their voting core feels disillusioned by these unprinciped actions in their leadership, just to be re-elected again without a broader consensus of support outside of their own ideological clique. These two twins in the 2000s, just as the 1990s were for Jean Chrétien and Bill Clinton by actions before them, Brian Mulroney's 1984 and George H.W. Bush's 1988 (both winning over 50% of their popular and over 75% of the electoral) before them and onward and soforth, stuck to this winning mantra like glue. But changes have begun to show, Chrétien won on soft minorities thanks to the Bloc, Reform and Alliance parties, like Clinton won his elections with under 50 percent (average of 42.5% of vote) of the national popular vote, unlike Clinton didn't have a high urban-low rural electoral college vote to remain their watchdog rebalancing the final talley. The effect both Lucien Bouchard's and Gilles Duceppe's Bloc Québécois, Preston Manning's and Ross Perot's Reform Party and Stockwell Day's Canadian Alliance had on the votes in both countries can't be ignored, forcing the mainstream status-quo to think twice about how they run their campaigns, to a point where they no longer commanded the attention of the majority of the populis, is huge, let alone the agenda of these governments once elected as Bouchard/Duceppe, Manning/Perot and Day/Harper would later show. A change whose very sole mission is to give people a chance at a choice in their collective and individual futures, one which the Independence, Progressive, Green, Libertarian and Constitutional parties of the fringe have picked up successfully to the the South since 1998, whereas only the Greens have continued in the North after the merger of the Alliance, Reform's failed project of the grassroots, in 2004.

Will either of our two differing nations within the North America union understand the need for a Purple state, province or territory, a region that understands the political system well enough to know intuitively that electing RepubliCrats or LiberCons will give you the same results everytime. Third parties always bring change, change can be bad or good, but I would argue bad change is easier to remove that the bad status-quo, as change always changes, the status-quo always simply remains the same, therefore change can eventually change into good change. We need some good change, we need a third party, which is principled and competitive, to bring us some good change from the bad status-quo, if not changed, we may very well subject ourselves to long-term political polarization of the populis, which in the short-term, has created minor regional disparity and could grow into major regional separation between these two twin colours in their respective countries within the union.