Tuesday will mark the end of what might have been the nastiest American election campaign in recent history and that says a lot.
While the rhetoric, fear mongering and attacks of American politics are not really new and can be cast aside by most Canadians as somebody else’s problem, it hits closer to home than many might think.
Like the proverbial frog slowly boiling to death, the American-style of hate-filled, vitriolic politics has been seeping more and more into every level of Canadian political campaigns.
The polarity of the left and the right has reached such a divide in the United States that it has made extremists out of basically every partisan American.
Unfortunately, that same blind and aggressive devotion to conservative or liberal ideology is beginning to creep into the Canadian discourse and it is to the detriment of nation building and national unity.
The only people who truly benefit from near zealous adherence to right or left political tenets is the politicians who use buzz words, fear and often empty campaign promises to drive their acolytes to the polls.
Once in power, those same politicians must become immovable in their ideological philosophies to ensure they retain the followers they have baptized to their cause. That means regardless of economic or social realities – which are always changing – political parties cannot be adaptable or they risk losing their base of indoctrinated supporters.
That flies in the face of democracy where representatives are supposedly elected to serve the best interests of their constituencies, which are wide and varying and not a job that can be taken lightly or without a great deal of thought.
As in life where nothing is black and white, politics can’t be left or right. It’s just not that simple. We don’t live in a one-size-fits-all world and the needs of a society require balance – both fiscal and social.
The simple truth of that can be seen in the cyclical nature of our federal governments that bounce between liberal and conservative leaning governments with almost clockwork precision as the electorate tries to achieve political equilibrium.
One government trying to undo the practices of the one before it in four or eight-year intervals is not sustainable.
Canadians deserve governments that can be adaptable. Unfortunately, the one thing religious adherence to any belief has proven time and time again is the inability to adapt, because that would undermine the stalwart “correctness” of its cause.
We must stop allowing politicians to shepherd us into pens of their own devising and begin demanding better of our governments. For a nation to thrive it must take a balanced approach to governance and that will never happen if the objective is to continue to divide the populace in an effort to simply stay in power.
