What I found profoundly disgusting about the electoral process in Canada, and it seems to have become acceptable - is the belief on either/any side that the opposition does not first and foremost have the interests of Canada at heart.
Such disrespect is juvenile and intellectually stunted and it needs to stop.
No party is innocent in this respect; Harper and Dion perpetually exchange snide condescending remarks in the newspapers. This snarkiness tears the fabric of discourse and collaboration upon which the parliamentary system is founded.
I am confident that Sir MacDonald, a man famous for among other things a wickedly barbed tongue, would find the kind of invective interchange going about simply pathetically amateurish. Not only do they do it, they do it poorly - the party leaders in Canada retain the wit of an upset teenager.
Disagreement does not necessitate disrespect. I am a Liberal but under no circumstances could anyone ever get me to admit that a Conservative, by virtue of being a Conservative, has anything but the interests of the country as the primary motivation for her policy choices. Someone can be informed, rational, logically consistent, altruistic and yet still painfully irrevocably wrong.
Unfortunately for the parties in Canada, it seems that if someone disagrees with you it is because they are stupid, naive or corrupt. This is childish and cowardly - if one can’t reconcile that someone intelligent and informed can come to a contrary position, one has no place in politics - or really any intellectual pursuit.
One’s policy suppositions must rest soundly on the evidence used to develop them, not on some lentel of counterfactuals or a presupposed ideological framework.
So it is therefore difficult to introduce topics into campaign debate that are difficult to square with the attempted campaign narrative of each respective parties. As David Eaves points out, there is a gaping hole where foreign policy should be. I observed that technology has no place in the discussion, except in reference to the economy (it seems curious that something so important to all the campaign planks of all the parties gets no attention and is just presupposed to work as intended).
The Liberals cannot win with symmetric tactics - Harper can rout the painfully wooden, extremely francophone Dion in the battle for emotional connection. What Harper cannot hope to dominate is the world of reality and factual information.
Harper is drafting policy for the Canada we see on CTV; not for the real one. Basic, elementary facts, within the intellectual grasp of a child fly in the face of swaths of policy.
But here’s the tactic that will kill Harper - recognize some good ideas he has. Say loud and clear “We the Liberal party are not opposed to good ideas. The Conservatives, once in a while, have decent policy - when that happens we’ll use it - but do you want occasionally good policy? Or do you want the party that will pick the policy every single time?”
Of course, this is boil the ocean problem-solving lunacy on my part; but wouldn’t it be nice to hear SOMEBODY aside from Michael Ignatieff express an interest in picking the BEST policy options instead of slagging a party’s religiosity or haplessness?