The biggest news from Canada’s federal election this past Monday wasn’t who came in first — voters returned the governing Conservatives to power, this time with a majority of seats in the House of Commons — but the second-place finish of the socialist New Democratic Party. The NDP benefitted from the slow collapse of Canada’s former ruling party, the Liberals, and the more sudden collapse of the secessionist Bloc Québécois. Indeed, the NDP’s rise from a third-place party with 36 seats to the official opposition with 102 seats was due almost exclusively to gaining 57 seats in the Province of Québec, all at the expense of the Bloc, which lost all but four of its 47 seats from the previous Parliament.
In the post-election haze, the storyline of the NDP’s Québec victory has turned to the strange collection of new Members of Parliament swept into office. Chief among them is Ruth-Ellen Brosseau, the MP-elect for a French-speaking district outside Montreal. Brosseau doesn’t speak French. She doesn’t even live in Québec. Nor did she make any effort to actually campaign in support of her own election. Apparently, she never even set foot in the district or made a single public statement during the six-week election campaign. Nevertheless, she defeated the incumbent Bloc MP by more than 10 percentage points.
Miss Brosseau hasn’t appeared in public or spoken since her victory. The only confirmation of her existence comes from her father — who spoke to a reporter before he was quietly hushed by NDP officials — and her boss at the Ottawa college bar where she works as an assistant manager. The boss said he didn’t even know she was a candidate in the election.
This is the certainly the most comical indictment of democracy I’ve seen in quite some time. Voters openly backed a candidate they’d never seen or heard, and conversely expressed no interest in being seen or heard. News reports said Miss Brosseau spent a good part of the campaign on a pre-scheduled vacation in Las Vegas.
It doesn’t take a political strategist to figure out what happened here. Like many political parties, the NDP wanted to field as many candidates as they could throughout Canada. They didn’t expect to win many seats in Québec given the Bloc’s previous popularity (and the lack of any prior support for the NDP). So they asked Ms. Brosseau, no doubt a party loyalist who had a friend somewhere in the campaign’s high command, to allow her name to stand on the ballot. And then Québec voters went nuts and staged a mass defection from the Bloc to the NDP — the one federalist party that hadn’t pissed them off in the past.
That the NDP indiscriminately fielded candidates without vetting them — or having them run even a barebones campaign — is also a consequence of the Canadian election system’s perverse economic incentives. Political parties receive a $2-per-vote subsidy from the federal treasury based on the results of the previous election. So even if the NDP fields a token candidate who gets 1,000 votes in a safe Conservative district, that’s $2,000 more for the party treasury next time around. As always, when the government subsidizes something, you get quantity over quality.
National Post columnist Lorne Gunter, a Liberal who nonetheless sympahtizes with Miss Brosseau, sums up the entire affair thusly:
It’s not Ruth Ellen Brosseau’s fault she won election to the House of Commons in Monday’s election. Heaven knows she didn’t want to win or expect to win, or even try to win.
The story here isn’t Miss Brosseau, but the people who voted for her. And I’m not suggesting they made a mistake or turned the election into a farce. In reality, it didn’t matter if they voted for her, the Bloc candidate, or an inanimate carbon rod. In a parliamentary democracy, if you don’t vote for the party that controls the government — and Québec hasn’t done that since the Bloc’s rise in the early 1990s — then your vote is simply irrelevant. Unlike the market, democracy disregards any act that doesn’t directly advance the individuals who claim a rightful monopoly on power (or as Prime Minister Stephen Harper called it, a “mandate.”)
And it’s not as if some Biblical calamity will befall the poor souls who voted for Miss Brosseau. The election was a momentary protest of years of perceived neglect by the Bloc and the other federalist parties. They may well change their minds in a few years and return some other completely unknown bartender to the House. The sun will continue to rise every day.
So Miss Brosseau’s election is, I think, a positive sign. Anything that reinforces the notion that elections aren’t the most important events in the world — and throwing your vote away in protest is nothing to be ashamed of — only encourages individuals to seek alternatives to politics as a mean of social organization. Miss Brosseau’s successful non-campaign is perhaps a model for future anarchist protest — quite literally defeating something with nothing. Perhaps instead of concocting new ways to convince voters to support libertarian-minded candidates, the better strategy is to run completely unknown individuals and then make no real effort to elect them, instead relying on apathy towards the existing parties to force the voters into an impulsive act of protest.
As for Miss Brosseau, she’s basically won the Québec lottery. She’ll receive a nice salary for the next four years — roughly $157,000 per annum — from the very taxpayers who were silly enough to vote for her in the first place. No doubt she’ll continue to endure some short-term scorn from the media and political elites in Ottawa, at least until she finally makes some public appearance. But in the end she’ll be just another minority backbencher with no real power — just another MP hearing complaints from pig farmers who accidentally accepted a six-hour prank collect call from the United States. Or something like that.
{ 15 comments }
Actually, I think I heard that one of the things the Conservatives want to do is to eliminate the taxpayer subsidies to political parties (apparently, the Conservatives are the only party that can fund themselves with voluntary donations). I think the opposition parties nearly forced an election a few years ago when they tried to do this.
Actually, I have thought about running for office before. If I can get elected without actually having to campaign and then get to spend a few years advancing libertarian ideas that I believe in, I think that sounds like a pretty good job to have. Sometimes I wonder if libertarians might have a better chance of getting elected if we would just stick our names on the ballot for the major parties and not even bother with a campaign. The South Carolina Democratic Party actually nominated a candidate for Senate last year who never campaigned for the nomination instead of the hand-picked candidate of the establishment (the previous Senate race, they ran a paleo-conservative instead of their hand-picked candidate). However, I think if we put our names on the ballot for (to use one example) school board, we might have a decent chance of getting elected and being able to be the Ron Paul of our local school boards for a few years. The requirements to run for local office are usually nowhere near as hard to achieve as the requirements to run for national office.
The Democrats in South Carolina thought Alvin Greene was soul and gospel singer Al Green
My fellow Canadians, tonight I say, we must move forward not backward, upward not forward,
and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!
It doesn’t matter which one of us you vote for. Either way your planet is doomed. DOOMED!
Was that a Simpsons reference at the end?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LST_x29L6zA
So too was the “inanimate carbon rod” from the middle of the piece.
And the title.
I missed those. thanks!
Talk about the stupidity of democracy. The tools in Quebec recognized the Liberal and Bloc Quebecois parties as being completely irrelevant, so they threw their votes at an even more irrelevant party, the NDP, who have not stood for anything at all (except for high taxes and free abortions) since the heady days of government unionization and wage and price controls in the early 1970s. But that’s Quebec for you. Back in the 1970s, they were still voting in MPs belonging to a party of monetary cranks called “Social Credit” which had been irrelevant since the 1930s.
I don’t think this is entirely true. Those non-government MPs still hold some power in Ottawa, or rather their party leaders and whips hold power. Here is how it works. Most MPs slack off most of the time and don’t actually bother to show up at parliamentary debates, votes and committee meetings. If the opposition MPs and especially their leaders were not bribed with goodies from the government then they could wreak havoc on the nation’s business (sic) if they showed up in Parliament and committees, when the government members are off screwing the pooch, and torpedoed votes and procedures of various kinds. Therefore, lots of pork and patronage is allocated to these opposition nobodies, so that they don’t rock the boat and force the government MPs to actually show up for work and pretend that they give a damn. Not as much pork and patronage as goes to government MPs (especially cabinet ministers), but enough to make the life of opposition MPs (especially the opposition leaders) and their families and cronies well worth living.
The idiot voters may think that this pork and patronage somehow benefits them, but the entire province of Quebec with its poverty and corruption is living proof of the fallacy of the political trickle-down theory. They’ve been electing MPs for 150 years with the express intention that these MPs should go to Ottawa and squeeze the maximum amount of money out of the Rest of Canada, and not a damn bit of good has it done for the average Quebecker. (though it has been fantastically lucrative for a small minority with government jobs or who own a handful of subsidized and protected companies)
So you’re right – voting in an opposition MP is a complete waste of time for the average voter. But it’s just as irrelevant voting in an MP belonging to the winning side. Unless you have very good connections to the top political leaders and their backroom boys, your “reward” for voting is probably going to be no better than a sh_t job at an ethanol plant.
I think in this case I should then refrain from buying Canadian dollars…
Solid post, though Lorne Gunter hasn’t been a Liberal party supporter since the early 80s, before he came to much public prominence. He’s now identified (and himself identifies) with the right side of the Canadian political spectrum.
Apparently she lives in Gatineau, Quebec. I haven’t seen her driver’s licence, but that is where her parents live and daycare in Quebec is only $7 a day, so that would make for her to live on the Quebec side of the border and commute to her Carleton University barmaid job.
Here’s another example, this one from Brazil: last year, Sao Paulo State elected a professional clown to the Federal Chamber. This is a man who made headlines in the late 90s with a couple of funny songs, only to be later labeled as a racist and disappear from the media. This is a man who has a serious learning disability – although he recognizes the letters in the alphabet, he is hardly able to write or read (in a court-mandated dictation, he got ~70% of the words wrong).
Now, get this: the guy was chosen to be a member of the Chamber’s Committee on Education and Culture!
Nike Air Max 90 shoes are used for a purpose and unstructured activities. Nike is often a popular brand name from the technology and specifically the youth who are usually sports. Nike Air Max 2009 Shoes are generally really tough for him to go through the specific use of that arises because of the major formation.
Comments on this entry are closed.