Right in the centre - A clear but flawed choice

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Published on Thursday, July 2, 2015

By Ken Waddell

The Neepawa Banner

Canada is at a crossroads with the upcoming federal election. At this point, there are only really two choices for government and for prime minister. The NDP and Thomas Mulcair and the Conservative Party of Canada and Stephen Harper.

Is there really a choice?

Thomas Mulcair leads a party that may say it’s moving away from socialism but that’s hard to believe. There are many people in the NDP who believe that socialism is the way to go for Canada in the 2000s. If one doesn’t like studying the history of the 1900s, where socialism crashed and burned in so many countries, then please at least look at the current situation in Greece and some of its neighbouring countries. Greece is defaulting on its loan payments, the unemployment rate is reported to be 25 per cent and the country’s pensioners are faced with deprivation and starvation. Socialism is a disaster and the NDP are socialists, plain and simple.

The Conservative Party of Canada is not without its faults. It would appear that Canada has severely dragged its feet on the treatment of our war veterans, the younger ones especially. When a country sends its soldiers to war, they have to be fully supportive when they come home as well. It doesn’t appear that we have done that. But those problems can and should be fixed. Financially, it’s a very small problem compared the woes of Greece.

The Conservative party has lots of shortfalls, the severity of which will be assessed differently by different people. They made a big mistake in how they handled the Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) program. And that has had a very negative impact in the Banner readership area. The TFW brings people in to fill the many vacant jobs but the federal policy does not provide the kinds of support that is needed. Only when the workers have been here two years, do they get the kinds of support they need. Some of the TFW changes were stupid. That said, the party can and should fix  those mistakes.

The third party, the Liberal Party of Canada, simply can’t be taken seriously. Justin Trudeau is very good at making speeches about all the things he would do from the oil industry to legalizing marijuana. He has never costed out any of his promises and he knows full well that he will never have to actually implement any of his ideas, at least not after this next election.

The fourth party, the Bloc Quebecois, which unfortunately didn’t disappear after the last election, will play a small part in the election. Gilles Duceppe has come back as leader and he’s a powerful campaigner, debater and politician. Let’s face it though, the only stick that the Bloc carries is a somewhat veiled threat to leave Canada. Quebec isn’t going to leave Canada. Separation is a pipe dream of Rene Levesque and his various supporters and successors. It has been used as a club to beat up Canada for decades and quite frankly, the separatists should be told to take a hike. The voters of Quebec nearly did so in the last election. The Bloc is more socialist than the NDP and may take some seats from the NDP Quebec total.

People get disillusioned with politics and rightly so. No party totally represents the view of any one person. But we have to make a choice and in deciding how to vote, we pick the party that most closely represents our views. The Conservative Party of Canada is far from perfect but it’s really the only clear choice for Canada for this next election. The NDP, the Liberals and the Bloc are all socialist based and that simply is not the way to build and sustain a country.

That leaves the conservatives and it’s up to all of us to push for improvements in the party and in our country.