The Road Back If We're Brave Enough to Take It. It's Not for the Timid or Those Who Play Safe.

We like to call ourselves progressives but very little of what we write, what we advocate for, is genuinely progressive.   Far too much of it is simply whining, bitching.

How many times can we chant, "Stephen Harper is a shit, Stephen Harper is a shit," before we accept that we're not making anything better in the doing?

Of course he's a shit, so what?   That shit has been in power for what, going on seven years now?   And he has a majority government to show for his perfidy.  So we've got a prime ministerial shit with a majority government.

We keep focusing on all of his faults even as we furiously avoid the slightest attention to our own.   Yet what stands between us and restoration of the sort of government we claim the country needs isn't Stephen Joseph Harper, it's us.   And we can't change SJH, we can't fix SJH, but we can sure as hell change us.  We can certainly fix us and everything that's still not working for us.

What's holding us back isn't Stephen J. Harper, it's us.   Accept that.  Until we wrap our minds around that reality, we are waiting for the government to fall into our laps by default.  We're waiting for Harper to lose it, not working for us to win it.   That only guarantees once the clock finally runs out on the Harper Conservatives we're not going to right this country's keel, or heal the wounds, or rebuild our democracy and restore our social cohesiveness.

Canadians want a vision for the future.   Canadians know we're not going in the right direction.   A lot of Canadians are dismayed at the calamity that has befallen our democracy and the mean-spirited authoritarianism and the divide and conquer politics that have become the benchmark of our federal government.

Give them hope and you will reconnect with those disaffected, disengaged voters.   Give them something to believe in, something to aspire to and you won't have to wait until Harper loses an election, you can actually win one on your merits.

We are still a liberal people.   We believe in social justice and fair play.   We want our democratic institutions restored and strengthened.   We want to breathe democracy again and we're weary of this stunted and adulterated cloud that hangs over us and sears our lungs.

You know what JT and the Liberals should do?   They should go to the Green Party web site and read the clear policies that are to be found there, right out in the open.  You know what they'll find there?  They'll find the very principles that used to be embraced by the Liberal Party back when it was great, before it morphed into this shelled-out, centre-right, stand for almost nothing excuse it has become today.

That road back begins with restoring democracy to the Canadian people.  We need a free press again in Canada, one that is widely held and free of corporate monopolistic control.   Canadians need access to the widest range of information and opinion so we can again have an informed populace.   That is how you build an informed electorate, one that has access to information instead of messaging.   Without that our democracy will not be safe.   Without that we can never hope to restore cohesiveness to Canadian society.

The second step on the road back entails acting to arrest and then reverse the cancer of inequality.   That must include inequality not only of wealth and income but, above all, inequality of opportunity.   That inequality undermines and enfeebles our middle class, itself the engine of democracy.   Every one deserves equality of opportunity and fundamental to that is provision of proper health care and education.   We need healthy and educated young people to secure our future.  It's vital that we understand we need that for ourselves every bit as much as we need that for them.  

We need to understand that modern inequality isn't market-driven but the product of government regulation and legislation.  It's the government transferring wealth from the many to the few - and that's simply wrong.

It was progressivism that propelled Canada to its zenith and the loss of that progressivism is contributing to our decline.  We are listing, badly, to the right.   We must even our keel.