Election

[bunsen_h]

Bleah.

At the provincial level, we have:

• The Liberals.  They broke a lot of promises last time.  Many of their promises I thought unkeepable to begin with.  This is behaviour that I despise.
• The Conservatives.  Last time they were in power, they kept many of their promises... in a deal-with-the-devil, wish-from-an-evil-genie sense, where the actual results were disastrously bad.  What they promised in terms of results didn't happen, and was pretty much guaranteed not to happen based on any sane kind of analysis.
• The NDP.  Lately they've been cozying up to the Conservatives, in an effort to drag down the Liberals, and recently they've been taking pot-shots at the Green Party.
• The Greens, and several much less significant organizations, including some more or less scary wingnuts.

I detest the Conservatives rather more strongly than I detest the Liberals.  Their honesty levels seem to be comparable; the Conservatives have a history of being much more destructive (and self-serving, in terms of sending out lots of advertising at public expense to tell us how wonderful everything was, rather than spending the money to actually improve things).

I might be inclined to vote for the Greens.

Except that locally, it's expected to be a close race between:

• Conservative Mike Patton.  He padded his "resume" and lied while trying to spin the resulting bad publicity.  He lied about the non-political, non-campaign appearance of incumbent MPP Jim Watson, in his official capacity as Minister of Health Promotion, at a local school on the day that the election writ was dropped.
• Liberal Jim Watson.  He's had considerable experience: as a city councillor, as Mayor of Nepean, etc.  He's got a record of doing good work.

Until this evening, I thought I knew who I would be voting for.  That's when I got home and found that Watson's campaign office had used an automated system to leave telephone spam on my answering machine.  Actually, just half a message; it didn't even wait for my "Greetings..." outgoing message to stop before beginning its blather.  I hate spam, telephone, street, and otherwise.

Bleah.

Comments

[kattale.livejournal.com]

In Centretown yesterday, *somebody* had gone along and vandalized most people's signs, in particular the Green Party who got hit particularly hard. The surprising thing was that all the NDP signs were still standing. Hmmmm.

That kind of dirty vandalism makes me so riled up I can't find words. I hate the visual noise of the signs enough as it is - but to then play schoolyard games to turn their "name recognition" attempts into trash and debris... Oooooooh. *fumes*

I hate elections.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

Smells like a frame-up. If you want to make someone look like dirty tricksters because they aren't...what do you do?

[kattale.livejournal.com]

Actually, I got an NDP sign for my lawn a couple of elections ago. When the guy came, we chatted for a bit about signs and sign vandalism. I mentioned a time when an NDP sign person and my husband, a Liberal person, were both putting signs up along Booth street - the guy had gotten pretty abusive with my husband. At the end of the sign run, my husband turned back to find that all of his signs had been kicked down - he watched the guy kick down his signs for the last 3 corners. When he called the NDP campaign office to complain, he got more abuse.

Turns out, the guy who brought me the sign here in the west end, *was* the guy that had been kicking down my husbands signs. At first he said, "I remember that. It wasn't me, it happened after I left." Then when I mentioned that my husband had watched him kick down some of the signs, he said, "Yeah, well he was putting them up on the same corners as I was - he was following me." I pointed out that they were both given a list of "corners" that are public property and permit signage and he said, "Well I didn't like where he put the signs."

That was enough admission for me... I've never regretted an NDP vote before that. I'd already voted in the advance polls, otherwise I would have taken down the sign and told the campain office where to shove it...

Gods, I'm glad this election is over. Can you tell I get riled up?

[kattale.livejournal.com]

Moria tells me that Jim has actually been having a volunteer shortage, and is not terribly impressed that he has to resort to things even *he* doesn't like, to get his name around.

[kattale.livejournal.com]

It's interesting. Moria has started thinking/talking about the whole election concept. On the premise that we *want* people to vote, and the premise that we *want* candidates to listen to their consituents, or at least be aware of them and interact with them (rather than be lofty and apart). During the one month of election time, the candidate ideally should personally visit some 40,000 families to talk to them, convince them to vote (hopefully for the candidate) and have an opportunity to listen to where the constituent's interests lie.

Ideally this would be done during all candidates debates and meet the candidate open houses. But very very few of the 40,000 people would show up for them (in no small part because they are very poorly publicized...) It's physically impossible to reach 40,000 people, (and Moria tells me Jim is likely to go door to door to 10,000 houses in a month). So the candidates resort to volunteers, phoning homes, recorded messages, and any way to guarantee that every single household gets some kind of contact from him and is not ignored.

Personally, I hate invasive telemarketing and bugging me at inconvenient times. I would prefer to go to the candidate to find out what I need to know to make contact. But the majority of constituents can't be bothered. This is their way of touching as many people as possible. Even if it is as annoying as all hell...

Long winded - i guess our choices are a detached candidate, an involved candidate who only reaches a quarter of the constituency, or someone who uses annoying techniques...

So that was the lecture I was subjected to this morning... thought I'd share... *grin*

[duncanmac.livejournal.com]

Sigh. Elections are a reminder of how politics of any kind (and not just city, provincial, and federal kinds) can be a tiresome pain.

Now that the election is over, what's your opinion of the final result? Do you think, as I do, that the entire effort was rendered a waste of time when John Tory shot himself in the foot? [I might add the neo-cons have made Conservative a dirty and detestable word; I firmly believe that Tory and the neo-Tories got what they deserved in full measure.) What about the Greens and the NDP, or the MMP (partial-PR) referendum?

[bunsen-h.livejournal.com]

I'd have preferred a Liberal minority government to the majority government we got, but I prefer what we got to anything with the Conservatives in power. I was somewhat disappointed that that one issue, the faith-based school thing, seemed to dominate the discussions.

I was also surprised and disappointed that the results of the referendum were so strongly against changing to MMP. I didn't know which way it would go but I'd expected that the vote would be closer.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

I had similar expectations, but I sensed a lack of enthusiasm in our Incumbents for this...