1. This evening Laura and I are going to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. It’s a time where people in our church get together and share each other’s food and apparently also get to know each other in the process. I’m making vegetarian past and good old fashioned meat pasta. I can’t be bothered to be innovative for tonight.
2. Again last night… four hour of sleep. This is not good. At all. I went to be at 2300, 2400, 0100, 0200, 0300, 0330, 0400… and the last one was the one that took. But now I’m functioning on nothing more than diet cola and coffee.
3. Laura dropped by the office to say hello and bring me some food. Good wife, that one! And not just because she brings me food.
4. I’m voting NDP this election. I like Jack Layton, I like a lot of their platform, but I especially like their IP stance. Ever since I saw Charlie Angus debating Jim Prentice in the House of Commons, I’ve kind of warmed to the party. But with the Green Party’s current leadership — she looks and talks like a troll and not even a funny GNAA troll or something, plus she seemed out of touch and just a little dumb — looking a little lacklustre, who else to vote for? Certainly not the Liberals, curse their rotten bones. Absolutely not the Conservatives and their Rove-style politics. So there we go.
5. Canadian parliamentary politics is pretty interesting. The only thing that matters in these elections is the PM. All his MPs vote with him on all matter except the rare free votes. All his backbenchers vote with him unless they’re resigned to being backbenchers for the rest of their careers. I don’t like this. What’s the point of having MPs if they can only vote as the PM wills? We may as well just vote for a 4-year dictator and his assorted civil servants: After all, what are the MPs doing but spearheading policy issues for the PM and party brass? The MP voting and selection process is broken and meaningless.
6. I don’t like change any more. I generally don’t like new people. I like the people I already know and the faces I’m already familiar with and the places I’m used to going. Maybe that makes me old or something, but I don’t mind. The only thing I really like is new music. I can get into new music.
7. Oh, and I pretty much hate a lot of worship music. It’s bland, boring, artificial, meaningless junk for the most part.
8. Soon I will be at home cooking a mean. This is good.

• It’s rare that I blog in the evening, much less that I assemble a list of bullet points in the evening, but I haven’t had a moment to slow down today.
• The economy may be slowing down, but business is heating up at work. We’ve had several really solid sales days. If we could keep that up — by getting the salesmen to actually be on the road selling things! — we’d be rolling in it. Part of our current success is several new contracts with Bombardier and Heroux Devtek. Our tooling is knocking them dead. Though not literally, I hope.
• Listening to Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm is an exercise in noticing they used to be fun and interesting to listen to but are no longer fun or interesting. Several big producers and big albums later and they’re just well-coordinated noise. Remember “Positive Tension”? Great song.
• Nathan was playing a Collective Soul song at work today. It reminded me of a more innocent time, when the Mix 99.9 played actual music, and I was dating Laura #1. Not a particularly great time in my life, but still, a more innocent time. I drove a blue Saturn! (Was it blue?) It had those seatbelts that automatically sealed you into your seat but annoyingly required the lap belt to be done up manually. In any case, the point of this point is: Collective Soul sucks. They always have, and they always will. They aren’t innovative. They’re bland. They aren’t interesting. They’re stale. If you like them, that’s fine; just don’t expect me to share your excitement.
• How I Met Your Mother is in the download queue! Yes!
• It strikes me that morality is, after all, innate. A priori. Arts and Letters is right on that count.
• Part of me wants the US government to bail out the banks. Another part of me wants the US government to nuke the banks from space. I’m torn.
• Cats can really smell up a place real quick. Especially younger cats.
• I’m reading “Dune” again right now. It’s a lot more interesting than I remember. But it’s still ruined by its surrounding novels, the prequels especially but also the sequels. Neither Herbert’s continuing vision or his son’s diving into its past have added anything to “Dune” but taken much away. It should be the only book in the canon.
• I got something like 4 hours of sleep last night. I rather hope some of my friends’ sleep problems aren’t catching or anything like that.
• People using the laptop on the toilet really freaks me out. What if, right now, you were talking to someone and you had no idea they were sitting on the can? That’s uncool!
• I’m making a main course for a thing our church does. It’s called “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” and it’s a basically a way for people to meet other people they might not know. It’s pretty much awesome, but I haven’t the foggiest clue what to make for it. Do you people have any good recipes I should make? Keep in mind I can do multiple dishes!

Those of you who know me know I don’t talk about politics much. That doesn’t mean I’m not interested, of course, and nothing interests me more than US politics. Mostly because Canada — my birth nation — sits right on top of the States and when they jump, we usually feel the impact.

I’m a little late to the game on Sarah Palin, yes. I’d like to get a word in edgewise anyhow.

I like Sarah Palin. I know I’m not supposed to, as a Canadian, like a Republican vice presidential candidate, especially one who so vocally opposes a lot of the values I hold dear. Still, I like her. She does, however, scare me.

She’s probably a great person. She looks like she’d be a lot of fun to be around. She seems to be vivacious and spunky, and if you’ve ever met my wife you’ll see I like to be around those kinds of people.

Yet for all the things I like about her personally — for all the things about her personality I admire — I can’t help but be scared by her. The policies she represents, the sort of religious Republican right-wing agenda she embodies, and the stunning lack of knowledge she displays all roll together to make me extremely leery of what she would do as a vice president.

Vice presidents for the longest time did absolutely nothing. They sat around and waited for the President to die. They were the guy in the wings who reads novels while the main actors perform the play. That era is clearly past, with the Vice President — along with the First Lady, should she be so inclined — filling a much more activist role. That is to say, VPs are the bully pulpit to the President’s political manoeuvrings. Vice Presidents use their position to nudge policy their way, even though their role in the Executive Branch is ill-defined and essentially powerless. Recent Vice Presidents, such as Dick Cheney, have had a great influence on the direction the government takes. They are spokespeople for their various causes, and have a great platform from which to raise awareness and money for whatever they put their minds to.

Sarah Palin looks ill-equipped to properly serve this function. Even if she were informed about issues other than oil and bridges to nowhere much, her agenda would probably be too right wing even for me.

Bear in mind that a hundred years ago I would have probably been a Republican. I’m pro-life — I despise abortion, but also execution and euthanasia — I hate big government, and I believe that history bears out the free market as the best solution for quite a few problems. Yet in the USA, the Democratic party seems to be the one leading, from FDR on, the charge for innovative policy that actually helps people. The Republicans have become a sort of big-government, military-industrial party, completely separated from their roots while every once in a while appointing or choosing or electing a politician who harkens back to the good old days, back when neo-Conservatism wasn’t more than a loosely grouped glimmer in that back of Leo Strauss’s head.

This person is Sarah Palin. She has been chosen as a Vice Presidential candidate in a stunningly crass bit of political cunning, at once appealing the Republican base — mixed up Christians who have somehow integrated politics and religion, much to the diminishing of Christ — and making the party seem fresh and young, despite being anything of the kind.

She is the veneer on the reality of the Republican party as it stands today. It’s a party speaking out of both sides of its mouth. Sarah Palin is pro-life. This is good. Yet the Republican party has said that it wants “the debate” about abortion to continue, which is to say that they would very much like for everyone to keep talking and no-one to do much about it. She is anti-homosexual. This is good, or bad depending on what you take that term to mean. Yet the parade — pardon the pun — of gay rights marches on unabated in the United States, and the Republican party wishes nothing more than to stop that march. Yet legislating lifestyle and denying genetics is just the sort of thing one might expect from Big Government. Or Big Brother, if you’re particularly pessimistic. Sarah Palin is pro-gun, despite the avalanche of evidence that guns are harmful to society at large. Sarah Palin is pro-oil, willing to spoil the last great reserve of American wildlife to drill for it, willing to sacrifice anything at any cost to feed the American oil habit. She shows no interests in alternatives, even though drilling can only satisfy this craving for so long. Drilling for more oil a a thumb in a dam full of holes. Sarah Palin is, in the last analysis, critically lacking in knowledge about things — the Bush Doctrine being a recent example — that even I, a humble Canadian, can elucidate with almost embarrassing ease. She is not a crash-course away from being knowledgeable. She is fully unprepared to fill any bully pulpit whatsoever.

I could go on. I won’t. I have a glass of scotch calling my name. Just let me say thing: I don’t dislike her as a person, but I disagree with her politics and thing she is a crass and irresponsible choice for a VP candidate. Biden, though I don’t particularly like his style, seems a much more wise and measured choice. The sort of choice one might expect from a man who seems to be fairly wise in his own right.

I’m a Christian in Canada. I’d probably be considered an evangelical Christian by anyone bothering with the taxonomy. For the most part, this means I should be voting FCP or Conservative.

The FCP is just dangerous. Mixing politics and religion is a recipe for the corruption of both.

But the Conservatives are much more benign, right? They’re like the Liberals, except just a bit more trustworthy and industry-friendly, right?

I don’t care anymore. When the current Conservative government introduces its copyright legislation, when I read that legislation and it appears carbon copied from the disastrous US DMCA and practically written by American corporate interests, they will have lost my vote. And I don’t mean in this election, I mean for as long as I feel they are corrupt and beholden to interests other than the interests of Canadians.

This is what bothers me. They are not serving voters. How will DMCA-like provisions in Canade aid people on the ground? Not at all. It will not provide them with jobs or health care or safety or any other measurable public good. It will simply make yet another class of thing against the law, and trust me, we already have enough ridiculous things that are against the law here. (For instace, smoking pot. There’s no way that should be illegal. Ill advised? Sure. Illegal? No.) There’s no public good here. There’s a supposed good for American content producers, of course, and for an American copyright regime spreading almost virally around the world.

We’re not even acting in our own national interests here. We’re acting in the interests of the USA. We’re the Eastern European nation that does whatever the might America says in the hope that one day we’ll be shown a photo of a pot of jam.

We’re helping to propagate the myth that the USA and its knowledge economy can dominate on the world stage as long as everyone everywhere obeys the same set of laws. And these laws are not, I might add, tilted in the favour of customers and citizens. The USA is using its international power to create and Information Technology Hegemony where it creates the content and the rest of the world has no choice but to consume said content.

It won’t work in the long term, of course. But in the meantime we’ll be saddling ourselves with a law whose intentions are not to help Canadians but instead to hinder them. Not to hinder them in order to help them, but to help media companies stick their hands further in citizens’ wallets.

I’m supposed to be Conservative, and for the most part I am still conservative. But this party and this government is slowly but surely starting to represent the interests of the industries and countries it has aligned itself with. They should be representing me and people like me who voted for them.

But they’re not. And if this policy comes to pass, I simply will not vote for them. It’s that simple.

• Transit strikes.

I can get on board with unions. They’re necessary to balance the interests of workers against the interests of corporations. I get that. Yet when it comes to transit workers, some of the most overpaid and impolite unionised individuals in existence barring perhaps automotive workers, I’m not on their side. Especially when the TTC members reject an offer that would make them the highest paid transit workers in the country, even in the face of their union recommending they take the deal. Especially when they give an hour or less notice that they’ve decided to strike, stranding tens of thousands of people who count on the TTC to operate. They could not possibly have engendered less public support for their actions. Almost everyone I’ve talked to about the strike is enraged at the TTC. Couldn’t the union have simply started a work-to-rule campaign wherein they stopped accepting fares? That would have put pressure on the city without garnering for themselves the further, aggravated dislike of an entire city.

• Shark fin soup.

I watched Sharkworld last night. The film is amazing, but the events portrayed in the film are a travesty. An unmitigated, utterly barbaric raping of the oceans. Frankly, anyone who eats shark fin soup should have his arms and legs chopped off and be left to starve on the side of a road somewhere. If flaunting your wealth involves damaging the life-support system of the entire earth, perhaps you should be made to feel the cost of that. I hope future generations look back on the Chinese and Taiwanese as a sort of barbarian race of ecological terrorists whose actions severely diminished the richness of the world’s oceans. Not that I have much of a high horse to speak from; Canada’s seal hunts and government subsidised fisheries are just as ruthless and unconcerned with long-term impact. Personally, I stopped eating fish — any fish, at all — about six months back, after reading A Short History of Nearly Everything. And it’s sad to see that a bunch of nutcases at Greenpeace are doing God’s work (in their own strange, rabid way) while the vast majority of Christians don’t bother to tend to the world’s largest garden: the seas.

• Evangelicals in bed with the Republican party

Certainly after Mr Bush’s disastrous dual terms in office, some of the Republicans in the States must be second-guessing their religious affiliation with their party. That it took a bunch of crooks to do that is a great tragedy. That some will never question that affiliation is a greater tragedy still. Still, with the mythology of the Pilgrims and Religious Freedom and Democracy and Fighting The Evil British and God Is On Our Side still going strong, it’s not really that strange. It’s just… sad. America is no more on God’s side than Charlemagne or Constantine (whose in hoc signo vinces should still ring as an affront to the very ethic of Jesus, and one of the greatest lies the devil has managed to perpetuate over the ages). You mix your religion with your politics and you find that they make very bad bedfellows. Your religion must of course inform your political views, but politics must not ever inform your religion. Politics is about the exercise earthly power; Jesus is about the exercise of heavenly power. These things are very, very different. They are oil and water. You should not mix them up, or soon you find people painting Jesus on the side of their nuclear warheads.

• Cliches in sermons.

If you are attempting to preach an authentic sermon, something that resonates in the hearts and minds of your listeners, don’t use cliches. Don’t use marketspeak. You’re not a motivational speaker. You’re not an entertainer. You must approach scripture and let it inform your method of preaching. People do not need handy bullet points that rhyme and have a particularly pleasing cadence. Bullet points do not impart truth, at least not any sort of useful truth. As anyone trying to implement and idea will tell you, it’s not simply enough to have a great idea: you need a great implementation. That is to say that while a turn of phrase might be handy to encapsulate the thrust of your message, the nuances are where the magic lies. Or, you might say, the difference between Mac OS X and Windows. There’s a reason Jesus used parables and not a lot of handy tracts. You can mine a parable for ages, you can look at it from different directions and see things you didn’t see before, you can over-analyse it, you can approach it with too much gravitas, you can do all kinds of things. A bullet point is boring. A bullet point that rhymes and sticks in your head is annoying and boring.

I have to expand on this. Jesus told stories that had a particular richness to them. They weren’t simple anecdotes with simple points. They were designed so you have to look at them just the right way — often in hindsight — to get the point. And often you’ll quite dislike the point because it hits you dead-centre.

These days preachers tend to tell stories both brief and humorous that make a particular broad point that lines up with their sermons. These stories are blunt instruments. They’re not really narrative: they’re cleverly disguised bullet points. There’s no meat. There’s no content. They’re like a dancing monkey with colourful clothes: it might be briefly entertaining, but you certainly wouldn’t want to marry the monkey. It’s just a monkey. Take off all the clothes and strip away the dancing routine and it’s just a monkey. And you’ll find that monkeys are rather boring, after all.

I’d like to be told the truth. Not a particularly one-dimensional version of the truth that can fit in three points and thirty minutes. If telling the truth means you need to go into overtime and tell stories and confuse me and dig deeper than I’m prepared to go, DO IT. God knows I’m never going to do that myself, willingly.

When the founders of the United States first envisioned their country, it seemed they saw a country where religion would inform government, but government wouldn’t impose strictures on religion. Obviously, this sort of pragmatic stance resulted from the obsession old world’s states had with organised religion, as if without a state-mandated faith, their societies would crumble. It probably also had a lot to do with economics, but that’s a whole other topic.

We’ve come far from that point. In Canada, I’m pretty sure we never even were at that point. Now, separation of church and state means more that both government and religion should not inform eachother as much as is possible. This is what we call the secular state.

Christians of all stripes can view this a bunch of ways, I think. There are some that think that a secular state is an impossibility, and that trying to create one is a mistake. Others view the secular state as a sort of unfortunate necessity, a goal that can’t really be reached, but must be, under the circumstances.

I think both are fair positions to take. They both take a different kind of nation with different kinds of goals, sure. Yet they’re both reasonable.

I’m in the second camp, mostly. I say mostly because those categories are a reduction, a sort of boiling down of a whole range of though. I’m not expecting anyone reading this to fall exactly into either category. Life isn’t that binary. I’m mostly in the second on the list. Mostly.

Here’s what I think. The Christian faith has a bunch of goals, right? There’s an overarching purpose to it all, that God glorified himself, as he should. Yet there are smaller goals as well. Jesus restoring his creation to himself. His followers living like him and practicing true religion. Christians loving their neighbors, whoever that may be. Praise. Loving God. The pursuit of holiness. These are some of the goals of the Christian faith.

Nations-states, however, have a radically different agenda. Their overarching purpose, though it may unwittingly glorify God, is self-preservation. Like any other organisation, a nation-state takes on the agenda of its constituents, and exists simply to exist. There are smaller goals beneath that, like expressing ethnic identity, gathering around a shared value, or simply protecting a bunch of land. At the end of the day, though, nations are about self-preservation, whether offensively or defensively or both.

These goals clash. Christians simply don’t spread the faith through violence and force. Nations preserve themselves through force: it’s not a perfect world.

When these two entities co-mingle, the resulting monster is hard to put down. The state intrudes into the faith and suddenly there is tyranny and persecution. The faith intrudes into the state and suddenly there is fanatical nationalism and oppression.

Christians can be politicians, and politicians can be Christians, no problem. But the domain of the state is not conducive to the practice of true religion: you do not wage a “Christian” war, and you should not crouch a war in religious terminology. While the state must use force, the Christian absolutely must not.

On the other hand, though the government must not be a respecter of religions, religions are not bound by such strictures. Religions are about opposing truth claims. Christianity makes truth claims that say, among other things, that all the other religions of the world are counterfeits. And while governments must not make these sorts of claims, Christianity must be free to do so, whether it irks the tolerant soul of every civil servant labouring towards an equal commons.

This is essentially what I believe on this matter. Freedom of religion is essential, a secular state is essential, and the separation of the two is the guiding essential that keep both from collapsing into and ruining eachother.

When the Conservative government came to power, I was excited. Finally, the Liberals were gone! Even a minority government, I though, was better than nothing.

Two years later, I’m having major doubts. Some recent developments — especially restarting the Chalk River reactor against the advice of the CNSC — are beginning to cast the Prime Minister and his government in a very unflattering light. Coupled with the government’s delegation to the latest environmental summit including oil company representatives (WTF, Mr Harper?), this year’s closed-doors meeting with the US and industry regarding water supplies, and the recently tabled copyright bill (an absolute disgrace to every Canadian ideal, a shameful travesty that essentially looks written by media executives themselves, and something Mr Prentice should be embarrassed to have even proposed), it seems my government is shackling itself to the very industries it is supposed to regulate and govern.

I’m quite certain that elected officials in the States are essentially bought and paid for by big oil, big media, big guns, and the like. But here? That’s not the kind of government I want.

I’m strongly thinking of voting Green in the next election. I have no faith in the Liberals (who have essentially handed Mr Harper a shadow majority with their political ineptitude). I’m just glad the Conservatives don’t have a majority: imagine the damage he could do to this country if Mr Harper were unfettered from consensus!

I’m 26, which is pretty old in the grand scheme of things. I used to look up at 26 year old people when I was maybe 10 and think how old and mature they seemed. Of course, I was 10, and when you’re 10 you don’t exactly have an accurate outlook on the world. I was probably mistaking the confidence that generally comes with age for maturity or something.

All I know is that some revelations come disappointingly late in life. For instance, I’ve looked at the world as it were somehow binary for the longest time. It isn’t, of course, though sometimes it is. There isn’t this one great liberal political issue, and this one great conservative issue, around which entire countries revolve. The categories “liberal” and “conservative” are almost meaningless in Canada anyway. There’s no particularly sound reason a conservative can’t care about the environment and social justice, and there’s no reason a liberal can’t want sane financial management.

What I’m describing sounds a bit like a middle-of-the-road thing, but truth be told, I’m not sure that politics or life or marriage or anything can be defined in terms of roads. I used to have discussions with friends where we’d say “okay, we’ve fallen into this ditch, but we have to make sure we don’t fall in the other ditch”, as if somehow the safest thing was to stay in the middle of the road.

That’s so limiting. As if somehow everything falls into one spectrum and can be described as a point on a line. People thought this sort of thing about genetics before Mendel opened that particular door with his (apocryphal?) bean plants; you mix two things and you get a combination of two things. Yet, this isn’t true. You mix two things and you get something different, something recessive or dominant.

Biology seems aware that everything would simply fall to the median if pre-Mendelian genetics were true: diversity is good, it contributes in a large way to the health of the biosphere. In the same way when you mix liberal and conservative you don’t get some weak-kneed hybrid. You get something new, something above liberal and conservative, something that critique both and praise both and take the good from both.

Isn’t the alternative less like a position and more like a cage? As a conservative American (or even worse, a conservative American Christian), you can feel as if you positions are written for you. But are they really? Do you have to believe in trickle-down economics? Individualism? The “war on terror”? Do you have to support a neo-conservative president like Mr Bush, even when his worst excesses tower over his strengths? Are you somehow required to believe that your nation is the culmination of history, the focal point of Christianity, and the beacon for freedom the world over?

Maybe. I mean, if those things are good, by all means. I happen to think they’re not. I certainly don’t like what a lot of liberals espouse. But I don’t want to be trapped in this one mode of thinking that says “this philosophy is good” and “this philosophy is bad”.

To the south, Americans seem more socially conservative than they have been in fifty years. Although social liberals in the United States most certainly exist en masse, it seems axiomatic that the States’ social policy is drifting right-of-centre. Partly driving this shift is the disproportionate power of the evangelical political arm, which is to the social conservatives as the gay lobby is to the social liberals. The shift is also driven by the hopelessly broken American electoral system, in which the only two parties of any consequence, the Democrats and Republicans, are essentially cut from the same cloth and advocate policies differing from eachother in (what looks like to the rest of the world) minor details.

Yet, the United States has the largest military force in the history of mankind. The country is a cultural hub for the entire world. It’s the consumer power that drives entire economies. It’s a geopolitical superpower unlike any other before or likely to arise anytime soon.

What’s a simple Canadian to do? I am not an American, yet I am affected by the actions of that powerhouse on my doorstep. I am affected in countless ways. Some of these ways are too subtle to quantify. Others are so obvious they’re not worth talking about.

I come from a long tradition of Canadian social liberalism, in that I’m Canadian. I also come from a short tradition of social conservatism, in that I’m third-generation immigrant stock. Depending on who you choose to believe, the influence of the United States in Canadian politics and social life is a terrible intrusion or conversely a long-needed correction.

I’m not going to spell out some long argument in favour of social liberalism, nor am I going to cast (too many) aspersions on our neighbours to the south. I will, however, point to results as a guide for my own cast of mind.

Canada is a secular government. This is, of course, ridiculous, as no-one can be truly secular. Everyone has a religious bias of some kind. Yet, secular government is the best thing we’ve found yet to protect disparate people from the ravages of raw religious power. We insulate everyone against that possibility by forcing those in power to separate church and state, to keep religion out of politics, to keep religion out of schools, and to keep religion in the churches and mosques. Impossible? Yes. But it works. It works most of the time. The balance sometimes sways too far in favour of anti-religious sentiment, but secular government works.

This secular government has resulted in acceptance in the form of multiculturalism, rights for minorities, gay rights, voting for women, abolition of slavery, tolerance, and that sort of thing. Some of these values are strongly antithetical to my beliefs as a Christian. Yet I accept that in a secular state, I cannot legislate lifestyle. If I could legislate lifestyle, I would be doing damage to my reputation as a Christian, and to the reputation of Christians as a group, and to the liberty of other consciences than my own. Thus I accept — and seek to protect — the secular state, and accept that this secular society will by definition accept and mandate things I find reprehensible.

What does this have to do with the USA? In the US, there’s a grand tradition of social liberalism as well. Yet there’s an even stronger current of social conservatism — the country was founded by religious fundamentalist extremists, after all — that stretches back to the USA’s very beginnings. Also, while Canada was founded by agreement, confederation, and negotiation, America was founded in the crucible of violence, civil disobedience leading ultimately to war, a war prompted almost purely by economic considerations.

The founders of the USA were, despite their origins, quite interesting people. They envisioned a secular state. They referenced a God that seems, in retrospect, to simply be some sort of elemental force. They separated church and state. They had seen what religion and political power does when mixed and didn’t want it repeated.

What happened?

Why is it now that some amorphous political arm of a bunch of squabbling evangelicals can command policy shifts in the world’s only remaining superpower? What happened to that secular state? Why does Canada embrace diversity while America embraces homogeneity? Why does America look like, to the rest of the world, verging on fascism?

I don’t know the answer to these questions. Part of it may be that the static political system in the US has existed so long that every participant instinctively knows how to game it. Part of it may be the almost comical fear that seems to pervade the US experience. Part of it may be the fierce nationalism that seems to periodically seize the national mindsphere.

As far as I can tell, it’s not a good direction to travel in. Isolationism? Bad. Fierce nationalism? Bad. Lack of tolerance? Bad. Religion dipping its censor into the inferno of politics? Superbad.

And having read all five party platforms (NDP, Tory, Liberal, Green, Freedom, those that I feel might be relevant to me), I’m so very divided between voting Green and voting Freedom.

The Green Party’s focus on transferring taxes to environmentally costly areas, for instance, is quite attractive. On the other hand, the Freedom Party is, for me, a strong idealogical fit. What I like most about both parties, though, is that they simple stand for something. Greens are unabashedly Green, and don’t fear saying that the populace must pay for what the populace does, and in fact they should pay for that instead of paying for other things. The Freedom Party is unabashedly libertarian. Read it: their platform is like nothing else you will read in Canadian politics. These are not parties pandering to get votes; they exist so I can vote my conscience, to raise awareness, and perhaps even wait for their time to come.

(As a side note, I used to believe in the “throwing away your vote” view, that if you vote for a party no-one thinks can possibly win, you’re basically burning your vote. Which is, of course, a fallacy: if everyone does that, no wonder these parties don’t get much of the vote, even when people may find their platforms extremely attractive. Now, I think that voting according to your conscience is much, much more important than voting for the Tories or the Liberals — who are essentially the same party! — regardless of your party’s chances of winning. Do I go to the ballot box as an arbiter of the lesser evil? No. I go as a contributor to the greater good.)

The NDP are a bunch of left-wing nutbags, which to their credit is something of an impressive feat in Canadian politics. The Conservatives and Liberals are essentially the same party with different faces. (If you want evidence of this, note that the issues both campaigns are focusing on and consider whether these are anything more than niggling variations on each other. The Tories are Red, and the Liberals are Redder. They’re pretty much interchangeable.)

If there’s anyone out there who wants to help sway me to an alternative perspective, by all means, do so! In the meantime, read the parties’ platforms here:

The Freedom Party Platform
The Green Party Platform