eveglass | Thoughts on the upcoming election

As most of you know, there's an election coming up. I couldn't figure out where to vote, because my permanent address is in Monteal but I will be in Toronto for the election and tthe advance voting days. So I called up my local Elections Canada office, who told me that I vote in my Montreal riding, and I can come in whenever I want and vote before election day. I've discovered that the list of official candidates will be out by Jan 5th, so I'll probably do it a day or two before I go back to Toronto.

Now that I know I'll be voting in the riding of Mount Royal, I have had to pick who I'm voting for. I'm in a somewhat ambiguous situation. You see, the riding of Mount Royal is overwhelmingly Liberal and has been since 1940. To give a sense of perspective, this is Pierre Trudeau's old riding, it was Sheila Finestone's riding, and the current Liberal incumbent (Irwin Cotler) took the 2004 election with over 75% of the vote. This riding is considered one of the safest Liberal ridings in Canada.

All this means that my vote really doesn't matter for who gets elected. It's going to be Cotler, and everyone knows it.

So this leaves me with the option of using my vote as protest, without either spoiling my ballot or fearing that a party I really don't like (the Bloq, for example) will get a foothold because of little old me. Because of this, I'm probably going to be voting Green. I like their platform and I like that they've managed to put a candidate in every Canadian riding. The man running in Mount Royal is Damien Pichereau, who is apparently a social worker and currently in his final year of cegep, training in special education. He is also, incidentally, my age.

My only problem with the Green party platform is that their policies sometimes seem to only be implementable if they formed a majority government. In reality, the best they can probably hope for this election is one or two seats. I'd love to see a platform that takes into account their actual standing in terms of the rankings (ie: only a few MPs), and how they'd work within that framework.

Regardless, Green is still closest to the values I currently hold, and if I keep voting, and others join me, eventually they'll reach party status and possible even take the government one day down the road. Stranger things have happened. And at the moment, my vote can be part of the statistic they point to in terms of percentage of total vote, where I can make a difference.

Because, in the end, no matter what I do, Cotler is taking Mount Royal.