I have now been living in Canada for 17 years but have not become a Canadian Citizen. My ex-wife and my three kids took the oath years ago. The thing is, despite the fact I have been here for so long, I am still quintessentially English. I take a healthy interest in the politics of where I am now but although I have strong opinions about what happens in Canada, in British Columbia, in the city of Vancouver and the riding I live in I have no voice in terms of being able to exercise a citizen’s right to vote.
Having said that I’m not complaining, the situation is of my own making but I find myself reluctant to compromise my Englishness. With the omnipresent internet I follow what is happening back at home on a daily basis reading not only the main daily British newspapers but my home town’s rag as well but, if I’m honest, most my reading time when I look at these is spent on keeping up with what is happening in sports.
My evenings are spent, when I am writing, listening to a Vancouver News-Talk radio station – CKNW – which crawls relentlessly and in a repeating pattern with the local political stories of the day either concerning the politics of the Province or the City.
Which brings me to my point. The politicians I listen to, particularly the Provincial Ministers are no more qualified to do the jobs they have been appointed to than anybody else with a reasonable level of education. They are not experts in the areas of the Ministries they are in charge of which leads them into fudging the issues that arise, damage limitation and just blatant avoidance of the truth on many occasions which leads to shambolic governance.
A classic example in point is the British Columbia Premier Christy Clarke, who managed against all odds to win the last election, by what one commentator called ‘dreaming in technicolor’ in relation to her promises of an economic boom on the back of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG), which she said would wipe out the Provincial debt and create a ‘prosperity fund’ so everybody would live lives of luxury and unbounded fun.
Nearly four years later none of those promises has been realized. Not one of the developers of LNG plants has decided that the massive investment begetting subsequent thousands of jobs has decided to go ahead and her promises of oodles of riches for everybody in B.C. has nimbly avoided turning into reality. It was all words based on a hope intended to achieve one thing, to win what looked like an unwinnable election.
It’s not all Clarke’s fault though. She wasn’t an expert in the LNG industry, she couldn’t foresee the downturn in the oil and gas industry anymore than she knew how to win her own riding (which she lost), she could only parrot the words other people fed her like all of the other politicians she put in charge of the Ministries.
All politicians have is a party ideology that they can use a broad brush to paint on detailed policy decisions. They don’t have a clue, in a complex global world, whether their beliefs will work or not.
So why do they do it? For their own personal gain of course, whether that be monetary or power or prestige. Very few actually care about the people who elect them to the jobs which, once claimed, will do the personal prospects of making a very good living no harm at all.
Which leads me to quote from Douglas Adams book ‘The Restaurant at the End of the Universe’ the following?
“It is a well-know fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it” and that therefore those people who are capable of getting themselves elected should on no account be allowed to do the job.
Which does the leave the sticky problem of if the people who want to do the job are excluded whose going to do it?