So there’s an election Monday. Let’s get this over with first:
This blog endorses Diane Freeman for the riding of Waterloo.
I’m making this endorsement for two reasons. One, I honestly think she’s the best candidate for the job. And two, C-51.
Also the TPP, which has come along recently, but that only helped reaffirm my decision to vote NDP this time around. We’ll get back to that.
C-51
C-51 is a travesty of a law, enshrining secret trials and creating secret police, eviscerating any remaining Internet privacy protection. It needs to be repealed. It can’t just be amended, slapping on a little bit of oversight. It furthers the Conservatives’ agenda to criminalize dissent and flies in the face of our Constitution and Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
It cynically exploits the murder of a Canadian soldier to strip Canadians of the rights that our soldiers supposedly died for. Soldiers that Harper so dearly loves to talk about. Soldiers Nathan Cirillo was standing guard over.
It makes me so fucking angry.
I’m appalled that the Liberals supported this bill and even more shocked that they’d choose to defend it in this election campaign. For that reason alone, I can’t vote Liberal this time around. Strategic voting be damned.
Two parties have pledged to repeal C-51: the NDP and the Greens. So those are my choices.
More background reading about C-51:
- Anti-terror Bill, C-51, passes the House amid angry and personal exchanges
- Why The Anti-Terrorism Bill is Really an Anti-Privacy Bill: Bill C-51?s Evisceration of Privacy Protection [Michael Geist]
- Guest column: Why Elizabeth May is fighting Bill C-51 – Saanich News
- In Bill C-51, you can be ORDERED to help CSIS violate the Charter
- Conrad Black: Alarm bells must ring in response to the government’s new anti-terror bill [Conrad fucking Black!]
TPP
You know, I like free trade. Eliminating trade barriers is a good thing. There are some caveats to that that I can get into, but if the Trans-Pacific Partnership was a trade deal, I’d probably be all for it.
But it isn’t. It’s something else entirely. It’s corporate interests doing an end run around democratic governments, giving monopolies to entrenched interests, giving the entertainment industry all the ridiculous copyright nonsense they’ve been pushing for for decades, and giving corporations the right to sue democratically elected governments for any policy that runs counter to their interests.
It’s got to go. And the NDP has promised to ignore it. This is what I want.
- The Final Leaked TPP Text Is All That We Feared [EFF]
- The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement: A dead end for jobs [Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives]
- Why Canadians Have Good Reason to Be Wary of the TPP [Michael Geist]
- Why Internet Users Should be Very Angry about the TPP [OpenMedia.ca]
The Best Candidate for the Job
I like Diane Freeman. She’s smart and diligent and stands for the sorts of things I believe in.
I’m the sort of person who pays attention to city council, and Freeman frequently impresses me as someone who knows what she’s doing. She asks smart, incisive questions and does her homework. These are all qualities I want in my MP.
I like Bardish Chagger, but with stuff like C-51 and the TPP, I haven’t seen anything that would convince me that she’s going to stand up to her party to stop them.
Richard Walsh of the Greens is an interesting guy. He’s an environmentalist and a poverty advocate, but he’s also a zero-growth crazy person. The Green Party is great in that it allows its members to stand for and advocate things that are not necessarily part of the party platform. Which is a good thing. But that also means that while I may agree with Elizabeth May wholeheartedly on pretty much everything, any given Green candidate isn’t going to be a carbon copy of Elizabeth May. Which is something I like about the Greens. But I can’t vote for Richard.
Peter Braid seems like a nice enough fellow, but the fact that he stands for the party he does shows a profound lapse of judgement.
My brilliant and lovely wife has a blog post about her feelings towards the candidates, which is a bit more exhaustive than mine:
This election is so important. We have a chance here to change Canada for the better. We have an obligation to turn it away from the dangerous path we’ve been on. Please, get out and vote.
