If you ever sit in on question period on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, you may find yourself severely disappointed. To call it a pathetic 45-minute long highschool-like affair tantamount to flinging spitballs does a disservice to the general quality and maturity of high school students across the country. It hardly makes one think of them as Canada’s best and brightest, let alone make the participants worthy of a salary over $170,000 a year. It’s something no party seems exempt from.
With the exception of the occasional news highlight, however, this petulance remains confined to one room in Ottawa. However, with it being an election year, the puss is starting to burst out.
The federal Conservative party took heat this week for releasing an attack ad on the Liberals using some Heritage Minutes branding, leading the former to have to respond.
“We did not intend to draw negative attention to Historica Canada,” the Conservative party tweeted.
“They do great work profiling Canadian history and we wish to maintain our positive relationship with the organization.”
Justin Trudeau is famously known for his “sunny ways” and, while he may be less keen on attack ads, don’t believe that he or others are above this by any stretch of the imagination. The Liberals, for example, have already been hard at work to paint Andrew Sheer with the Stephen Harper brush.
Increasingly, it’s also popping up outside of the realm of career politicians. Small protests are starting to be organized across the country and with the election season approaching, social media becoming even more of a cesspool than it already was. The South Cariboo is no different in this regard than any other part of the country.
It’s really easy to be opposed to an issue and all agree that any given solution is bad. It’s the hallmark of today’s political movements. However, when you ask what this unified would like to see instead, there’s anything but consensus. This is how you end up with a government that does nothing at all.
Perhaps the best example of this is the U.K.’s decision to leave the European Union. Just over 50 per cent agreed that they were against staying in the EU. However, with no agreement whatsoever in that group as to what their relationship with the EU should look like their government has not been able to accomplish anything on the matter and consequently has been flaccid on everything else while it remains preoccupied.
If you’re dissatisfied with a policy, it’s much better to get behind a different solution than to simply oppose the current solution. It’s much more likely to see a government that works for you that way.
If nothing else, the repeated mudslinging by politicians and others alike, seems somewhat un-Canadian in a country known for politeness.