Vote Suppression is Systemic in Canada

So many people seem to be in a huff about the automated phone calls that were made during the last federal election in order to confuse voters as to the location of their polling station, thereby making it more difficult to cast their vote.

Scandalous. How could the Tories stoop so low? Canada’s democracy is in tatters!

Blah, blah, blah and more blah, blah, delivered with feigned indignation.

Let’s face the facts. Canada is not democratic. We are ruled by a professional political class. The way who will govern is determined is to play a winner-take-all electoral game in which the candidate who gets the most votes, even if it is less than 50% of the votes cast, is said to have won the electoral district.

Distortions of the popular vote you say? You bet! How do you think a majority government (sounds like the label came from the Ministry of Truth) can be formed with less than 40% of the popular vote?

If your candidate didn’t win, that’s too bad. Better luck next time. So your voice is not represented in Parliament? Don’t be glum. More than 50% of the electorate who even bother to vote can say the same.

If you are so concerned about the quality of democracy in Canada, change the fricken voting system!!!

Vote suppression occurs in every election that is held with the archaic first-past-the-post method.

Chances are that if you thought your preferred candidate had little chance of winning the electoral game in the last general election, you didn’t vote.

But that’s how politics works in Canada. The game is no longer about attracting voters to a political platform. It’s about trying to scare away as many voters from your opponents as possible while hanging onto the party faithful.

And if that doesn’t work, there’s always robocalls.

Canada's GDP Set to Take Off in 2012

"By the end of the year, we expect that we will see a record number of Big Ass Canadians showing up in our analysis of Canada's economic well being."

(Niles Crumbley, Annual Report on Canada's Gross Domestic Posterior)

A new report from the D.V.D. Howe Institute to be released later this year paints a rosy picture for Canada's economy in 2012 as researchers have come up with a new method to calculate the health of the economy by adjusting what is meant by GDP.

Spokesperson for the Institute, Niles Crumbley, stated that the old fashioned way of adding up all the commercial transactions regardless of their impact upon the society to obtain what is referred to as the Gross Domestic Product is no longer a suitable way to measure the economy.

According to Crumbley, "People have finally caught on to the fact that not all the boats rise on the same tide. In fact, there exists a rather large body of research that demonstrates that as the Gross Domestic Product grows, a disproportional percentage of the newly created wealth is skimmed off by the very rich of a society while leaving the vast majority of the population with little or no gain."

"Reluctantly, we have to let go of the traditional approach because people are starting to use GDP statistics to bolster their arguments that present economic policies are, in fact, making the problem of income inequality even worse. This presents a major problem for those who want the status quo to remain. Consequently, we thought the best way to get people to think differently about the economy is to change the way its key indicator is measured."

He went on to say, "We wanted an indicator that would conjure up an impression of a more equitable distribution of wealth, and that's when we hit upon the notion of the Gross Domestic Posterior. After all, having a big ass is a good indicator of material well being since having one means that the person doesn't perform enough physical work to burn off the excessive number of calories he or she has the luxury to consume. Moreover, because of our society's dietary habits, the incidence of having a big butt is distributed more evenly through the quintiles, thus giving the impression that the society is more equitable. In short, although not everybody can be financially rich, anyone can have a big ass in Canada, and as our statistics point out the number of Big Ass Canadians is reaching record proportions. Finally, this new way of measuring the economy has the advantage of not freaking everyone out when the GDP contracts. Who knows, there might actually come a time, when politicians will be evaluated for their capacity to shrink it."

The D.V.D. Howe report is scheduled to be released at the onset of the next economic recession.