Democracy - Canadian Style

For those still laboring under the delusion that here in Canada we live in a democracy, this last week in the British Columbia legislature might give pause for doubt. Once again, as has happened many times in the past, a member of the legislature, and a member of the official opposition no less, has been unceremoniously kicked out of the party caucus for speaking his mind. It makes no difference if he was voicing the views of his constituents, those who elected him to represent their interests, he offended the leader of the party and was booted from the caucus.

Every four years, or there about, the electorate of the country, or the province, are asked to vote for individuals running for the various parties in their riding. The idea being that the one who garners the greatest number of votes will go to either the Federal or Provincial Legislatures and be their voters voice in those milieus. Of course, what actually happens is the party which winds up with the most members elected takes office, Federal or Provincial, and the party leader, chosen by the party not the electorate, becomes a virtual monarch for the next for years; assuming that his party holds a majority of parliamentary seats. The vast majority of the party members, who form the government, do exactly what they are told to do by the leader for the balance of their term of office. The leader says ‘Jump’ and the party members jump, they may ask how high they must jump,also when they may come down. This is known in our system as a ‘democracy’.

Once the party with the greatest number of seats takes the control the leader of that party runs the parliament pretty much as he sees fit and the voters have no further input for the next four to five years. This may be the reason why the voters take less and less interest in the process and the number of people actually participating in the vote constantly decreases. Another aspect of the system is that rarely, if ever, does the winning party receive 50% of the vote; ergo, a party that usually managed to get no more than about 40% of the popular vote rules us.

I other systems, for instance that of Switzerland, all enacted legislation is subject to the possibility of a binding referendum. Should the legislation affect the country’s constitution then a referendum is mandatory. This arrangement, one feels, would require the government to be very careful what it foisted on the voters and would also cause the general public to take a continuing interest in how they are governed; a far cry our paternalistic approach

Canadian Census

What is it with Canadians that they get so uptight about not being forced, by law, to divulge private information on themselves every five years? The more socially advanced countries in Europe have in the past, and are currently canning censuses as having little value compared to the information readily available on the Internet.



Are we such a bunch of sheep that we need to be treated like school-children and threatened with punishment if we don’t tell big brother important stuff like how many bedrooms we have at home. Finland, for example, still has a watered down voluntary census that costs 20 cents a head to collect, the US census, meanwhile, costs $36.00 a head. While we are not in the US cost league, whatever we’re paying is largely a waste of money considering that more information than the census provides is available free from the Internet.



Get over it folks and join the 21st century.

War on Drugs

One feels totally awed by the dramatic success of the US led war on drugs. Having brought all of the vast sum of knowledge gained by the United States from its voyage into the prohibition of alcohol in the 1920’s; and due also the obedience of other Western countries in following the US plan, drug pushers are now permanent fixtures on virtually every street corner in many Western citys.

The war on drugs is largely responsible for an industry that has grown from nothing at the beginning of the last century to an $88 billion leviathan by the beginning of this one. Like all wars, the war on drugs as been responsible for the violent death of thousands. Apparently we now have South and Central American states that are virtually ungovernable due to the corruption stemming from the drug trade. We have what amounts to virtually a civil war in Mexico, were drug lords kill thousands in their fight for market share. In Africa drugs passing through on their way to Europe are corrupting Western African governments, and one wonders just how far up the food chain drug money is going in most countries.

This whole mess could have been avoided had the war on drugs been fought by treating addiction as the sickness it truly is. The way the drug industry works is to provide cheap drugs to people until they become addicted, once hooked, the price goes up; followed by the petty thefts and crime that occurs to support the addiction. I London in the early 1950’s there were pushers selling heroin, there were also doctors who provided prescriptions to addicts so that they could obtain their drugs through the national health care system, hardly a profitable venture for the pushers, things were fairly well controlled until the war on drugs changed everything. Well done the war on drugs.