SovietCanuckistan

The most appalling thing to happen so far in this year's race to the bottom, er, 'Canadian Federal Election' is encapsulated in this quote from the consortium of broadcasters:

"The Consortium approached the parties to explore the possibility of including the Green Party in all or part of the Leaders' Debates. However, three parties opposed their inclusion and it became clear that if the Green Party were included, there would be no Leaders' Debates. In the interest of Canadians, the Consortium has determined that it is better to broadcast the debates with the four major party leaders, rather than not at all."

ref: Globe and Mail

My read of the tea leaves is that the parties that stymied the effort to include the Greens in the debate were the Grits, Cons, and The Bloc. I would hope that Jack Layton and the NDP would not be so hypocritical as to include themselves actively in this, mind you considering the current typical NDP voting coalition, they probably have the most votes to lose to the Greens. Whichever parties were involved: SHAME on you you bunch of political hacks. You're a bunch of mindless jerks who can't stand the thought of a little competition.

The blunt reality is that the fractioned parties in the center-left spectrum of Canadian Politics will seemingly always benefit the only right-wing party, leading to a situation where the Cons edge into minority or slim majority territory, depending on how weak and wounded the Grits are. As long as we continue with the current system of first-past-the-post voting, anyway.

As the polling suggests, more people in Canada are for a party that is not the Cons, the real problem is that they cannot agree which center-left party to support. The Greens are still in their infancy and still being shut out of the mainstream campaign. The NDP talks environment out of one side of their mouth and a watered-down 'working families' Socialist dogma out of the other. The Liberals are already fatally wounded by their ill-advised choice of Dion as leader, and have lost tons of respect in Quebec and the west. The Bloc? I don't give a shit about the Bloc, I'm from B.C.

My personal hope is that we go through this process and come out the other side with effectively no movement. The Cons may gain some seats, but I suspect the dark specter of a Conservative majority may get the majority of Canadians who don't like the Cons to consolidate their votes towards the Grits. The net result of this would be a lot of serious navel gazing in the NDP, Liberal *and* Conservative camps, and hopefully new leadership on all sides. Harper in particular will have had a number of chances to deliver a majority mandate from the Canadian people for the Conservative party, and he has thus far failed to do so.

What I would LOVE to see happen instead is some sort of good-faith agreement between the Greens, the NDP and the Liberals to cede battleground ridings sensibly and endorse each other's candidates, and use the leadership debates to drown Harper in mud instead of swiping at each other. The polls I have seen are all over the place and often contradict each other, so it is hard to tell exactly what will happen with these data sets.

UPDATE: turns out it was the NDP, Cons, and BQ that opposed the Greens being included in the debates. Looks like 'Magic Jack' has really jumped the shark here.