Monday, August 20, 2012

I Will Never Vote Liberal Again, Until...

I vow to never vote for a Liberal candidate again until the party puts forward meaningful policies to reverse the growing inequality in Canada and to deal with global warming, in all its aspects.

Inequality - of wealth, of income, of opportunity - is a malignancy that metastasizes the longer it goes untreated.  It undermines democracy and destroys the middle class.   Any party that ignores that reality and does not give it a top priority for real action tacitly supports the wasting of our democracy, our economy and our society.

As Joe Stiglitz writes, when the major parties dodge the issue of inequality, democracy becomes "one dollar, one vote" instead of "one citizen, one vote."   The Liberal Party has been shamefully reluctant to champion this cause.

Of equal priority must be global warming - anthropogenic climate change.   We now know that just 2% of Canadians, just one in fifty, continue to deny the reality of man-made climate change.   If Canadians so overwhelmingly "get" climate change they also get the role that CO2 emissions play in endangering our planet.  They get the link between our emissions and the increasing threat that results.   At this point, what they need is leadership from a party with genuine policies on adaptation and remediation.

We need a party that is prepared to decarbonize our economy, our society; a party that will decouple Canada from its dependence on fossil fuel energy.   Canadian municipalities are engaging the realities of what confronts their communities.   Some of the provinces are stirring to life on climate change.   Yet the Liberal Party lags far behind when it has no excuse for not leading.

If the Liberal Party cannot embrace these as top priorities, they're not fit to govern and they certainly don't deserve my vote - or yours.    They earned their way from Sussex Drive to Stornoway to Motel 6 and they damned well deserve to stay there until they earn their way back.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Relax, the Liberal party is dead, it has been replaced by the NDP. The NDP have always resided left of the Liberal party but now that the Lib party is dead, the NDP will move more right to where the Liberal PArty used to reside. In effect, the Liberal party will return under a new name, the NDP. Its only aname change that's all. The NDP have not moved there yet, but the process has already begun.

cheers

klem

Edstock said...

"They earned their way from Sussex Drive to Stornoway to Motel 6 and they damned well deserve to stay there until they earn their way back."

Um, that sums it up. Change or die.

Anonymous said...

Green. That's the only answer.

Anonymous said...

Celebrating the rise of another ill prepared party to possibly govern Canada seems a strange thing to do.

The bunch we have now are still in Reform school and will never graduate, so why would elevating another group of also rans who lucked out be any better?

I too prefer the Green Party over the rest, but let's be realistic.

Anyong said...

Governments in Canada, all of them, are swimming at eye level in the ocean.