I’ve made up my mind for tomorrow’s election.  After weighing the many issues (as described in an earlier post) I’ve decided that I have to act in the interest of local politics.  Too many times during this campaign, I’ve felt like more than one party has gone with the “our voters are really dumb” approach.  My vote will not be supporting that philosophy.

It started for me with Elizabeth May, when she was excluded from the leader’s debate.  Now there are lots of good reasons why Elizabeth May should have been invited to that debate, and I’m sure plenty of nefarious reasons why she wasn’t.  There are a wealth of arguments I would have reached for to get Canadians on her side and get her now very legitimate party represented on the national stage.  However she chose to invent a gender-based conspiracy about how all of the male party leaders and male network executives were trying to keep a woman out of the debate.  Really Elizabeth?  You went there?  She lost my respect right then and there, and until that point I had a very positive opinion of her as the Green leader.

And then the Conservatives got on the bandwagon.  Nationally, they took an unflattering photo of Stephan Dion and plastered it over every piece of demeaning print, online, and TV advertising they could come up with.  The technicolour puffin-laden marketing came off like something out of a highschool student council poster campaign.  Oh look, it’s bright and shiny and Stephan Dion looks like a tool, count my vote!  Locally, the Conservatives poured salt in the wounds of a region where many are still smarting from the earlier expulsion of our MP from the party.  They parachuted in a candidate who, based on the word of people that I know and trust, was placed in spite of the wishes of the local riding association.  I met her briefly, when I was getting my hair cut at the local barber shop.  Her handlers brought her in for a photo op and to introduce her to my barber slash city councillor.  She approached a random kid in the barber chair, said something irrelevant long enough to get a picture, and then left.  It’s an awkward position for anyone to be sure and I feel for her on that point, but I left the barber shop that day with a feeling I had just seen dishonest pandering in action.  The net of all the Conservative messaging (intentional or not) sits with me as:  All anyone pays attention to is Stephen Harper, and the people of Halton are too stupid to realize that we don’t care at all about local representation.  That is not a position I can reward with a vote, the repercussions of allowing them to get away with that type of thinking will last with us for decades. 

So my vote this year goes towards democracy.  The right of the electorate to local representation, the expectation of transparency from those who act on our behalf, and the fundamental principle of government of and for the people.  This year, my vote is going to Garth Turner.