Democracy at Work

Last week I wrote about the political hullaballoo in Canadian politics.
The attempt at the power grab by the combined opposition parties --- the coalition, or Dion's Last Stand --- did not fly. Parliament is in recess. The official word is that the Governor General prorogued it. Yes I know! I had to look it up ... it just means that government has been suspended until a given date which is January 26 in this case, so that all can go back to the drawing board and let cooler heads prevail. Prime Minster Harper's first job of the day will be to present the budget.

Of course the coalition did not want cooler heads to prevail. The opposition party with the largest number of seats, the Liberals, have since literally disintegrated. Their leader resigned, another candidate stepped down, and a new leader of the official opposition was crowned without due political process. The new man is Michael Ignatieff.

We know little of the man here. He is relatively new to politics and only returned to Canada a few years ago from the US where he was a professor at Harvard. So the boy is not exactly stupid, at least not academically.

Will he too try to topple the government? The pundits all seem to think not. While he is saying all the "right" things to support the shennanigins of his predecessor, it is generally believed that he will work with the current government and take the time to rebuild his party. The next election several years down the road should indeed be an interesting one.

Politics is a strange animal. It has always been my belief that the elected government makes policies and takes action for the betterment of the country and its citizens, and what that means to me is party brand be damned, lets roll up our sleeves and make things work. That is democracy at work. Given that each party has some fundamental differences from the others, debate, disagreements and occassionally downright opposition are not uncommon. That's ok too. Its democracy at work.

What boondoggled my brain here was the "damn the election, damn the results" posturing of the opposition and a trumped up outrage to oust the just re-elected government. Now that's not ok. At least not with me and from the outpouring of the comments on radio, blogs, call ins to any type of a public show, it wasn't ok with the majority of other Canadians too. But then I guess I don't understand, because, that too apparently is democracy at work!