E minus 1: Issues

I must begin by apologizing for having over-promised and under-delivered. I did not post every day as I had promised, barring brain death, etc. etc. I did post four short essays, plus this one, which is not an essay, and learned a bit about blogging: I suppose I could have delivered each day if I had broken the essays up into shorter bites.

Thank heavens for Newfoundland. Where would we be without you? Where would we be without Rex Murphy and Rick Mercer? Whether you agree with them or not (I do not often agree with Mr. Murphy, and I’m sure he doesn’t care), at least they are thinking and they are eloquent.

The other night Rex Murphy suggested that all our political parties had tacitly agreed not to talk about Afghanistan and Libya, about what Canada is still doing in a ten-year old war, and in a new one before we even know what we want from the first. Good for him.

I did hear very briefly about Afghanistan during the English-language leaders’ debate, but it didn’t stick. Like Mr. Murphy, I did not hear anything about Libya. Nor have I heard (enough) about a great many other things I believe should concern us. Here are just a few, in no particular order:

Item 1: Child poverty

Remember when we were going to eradicate child poverty in this country by the year 2000? Millions of children wake up and go to bed hungry in Canada. This is not just shameful, it is stupid and shortsighted.

If you don’t care about these children, at least care about yourself. Your pension depends on these children. If you feed them and school them and show them that they matter, they may well look after you when you’ll need it. If you teach them that they have no value because you cannot pull an immediate benefit out of them, how do you think they’ll feel about your pension?

Item 2: Global warming

Yes, I insist on calling it what it is and not “climate change”, which is what the deniers want it called. All the experts agree. And in this country we’ve done as much about global warming as we’ve done about child poverty.

Item 3: Education

Twelve years of schooling is no longer sufficient. Our children need 16 or more years of schooling to be able to enter the workforce doing anything but the most menial jobs. And, if this country wants to compete in the world, we need an educated workforce. So, why is post-secondary education not free? Michael Ignatieff talked about some education passport.

How about starting afresh with truly free and accessible education, from start to finish?

Item 4: Energy

English is the lingua franca of the world today because some time in the 17^th century the English had used up their forests and turned to coal for energy. As luck would have it, fossil fuel turned out to be much more efficient than wood, and the rest of the world was left playing catch-up to coal-burning England.

The future belongs to the nation that first moves from fossil fuels to the next energy source. What is our plan?

Item 5: Transportation

Belgium gave up its national airline. But you can bicycle across Belgium in a day. Why does it cost more to fly from Ottawa to Vancouver than from Ottawa to Paris?

If any country needs a transportation policy, we do. Why do we subsidize highways in cities, where just about any other method of transportation would be better? Remember, the point is to move people and goods, not to move cars. Why do we build high-speed trains here only for export? If Turkey can build high-speed rail connections across its mountains, what are we missing?

Item 6: Bankruptcy protection — for the employees

Remember Nortel? There are countless others. Workers left with nothing after their companies spent their pensions. Ask just about anyone in Hamilton.

Other countries, such as France, have laws protecting employees’ wages and pensions if a company goes bankrupt. It’s good for the employees, and it's good for the company. Employees don’t abandon ship at the first sign of trouble, afraid that they’ll discover they’ve been working for nothing.

In this country, go to the back of the line and hope there’ll be something left for you. There won’t be.

Item 7: Senate reform

Senate stuffing is more like it. It takes a man or woman of uncommon integrity to resist the temptation once in power.  That person was not Jean Chrétien or Paul Martin or, despite the ardent promises, Stephen Harper.

 
Item 8: Electoral reform

In view of what vote splitting might get us on Monday,  the pollsters and pundits are on this one. I’ll put money on their forgetting it within a week.

Here’s a quick exercise that illustrates well the perversity of our first past the post electoral system. Monday, after the votes are counted and seats allocated, calculate how many votes each party had to pay for each one of its seats.

I’ve done this for quite a few other elections, federal and provincial. Here is the 1993 federal election, as an example.

If you don’t feel like doing the arithmetic, then please be patient. I won’t be able to resist doing it myself, and I’ll post the results here.