I am, by definition, a swing voter. I treat every election as a new beginning and spend a great deal of time during each campaign thinking about who I might vote for.
I refuse to be a partisan. I refuse to vote for the same party every time. I choose instead to allow all parties the opportunity to earn my vote in each and every election.
Most recently, in the by-election that saw Stephen Harper elected to parliament, I voted Green. It was primarily a protest vote. I was protesting the fact that neither the Conservatives nor the Liberals were willing to offer me a choice.
Since neither party would run a candidate and since Harper and his Alliance were not my cup of tea, my choices were limited to NDP or Green. So, for the first time in my life, I went Green.
But that was then; this is now. In my mind, the slate was wiped clean on the day this election was called. All parties once again had an opportunity to earn my vote. I entered this campaign in the "decidedly undecided" category.
Two weeks into the campaign, I am still mostly undecided. I say "mostly" because I have arrived at some conclusions already.
I will not be voting for Mr. Harper -- the man most likely to be the new Prime Minister of Canada this summer.
I will not support him because I don't perceive him to be any more trustworthy than Paul Martin. I cannot support him because I don't yet have a good sense of where his "new" conservative party will be centred once they finally draft a comprehensive set of policies.
I suspect that they will come up with a mix of policies not much different from the other parties. Most will be policies I can live with. But I'm not 100 per cent certain of that yet. So I am taking a wait and see attitude. Perhaps they will earn my vote next time around.
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Of course, living where I live, this means that I will be voting for a loser because nothing is going to stop Mr. Harper from winning Calgary Southwest.
That's fine with me. I can accept that outcome. Some of the best candidates I have ever voted for were losers on election day. That's the nature of democracy.
The question for me this year is which loser I will be voting for.
Dr. Avalon Roberts, the Liberal here, is an excellent candidate. I trust her completely on health care. Unfortunately, I don't feel the same way about her leader. I can't help but think that if Paul Martin and the Liberal Party were capable of fixing heath care from Ottawa it would be fixed by now.
Daria Fox, the NDP candidate here meanwhile, has all of Jack Layton's enthusiasm but none of his experience. As a 24-year-old newlywed, she is focused on getting out the youth vote. It's a fine sentiment, but may not be quite enough to earn my middle-aged vote.
On the other hand, Darcy Kraus, our Green Party candidate is not much older and he does not live in the riding. So if he is to get my vote, I am going to have to be seriously impressed with his leader.
Unfortunately, I may not get much of a chance to see his leader in action this year. In spite of the fact that the Green Party is running candidates in every riding in the country, has a broad platform of policy issues and are polling 5 per cent nationally (outpolling the NDP in some regions), the Greens are being denied a place on the national stage.
The powers that be have decided that Jim Harris, leader of the Green Party of Canada, will not be allowed to participate in the Leaders Debate. The Bloc Québécois, which is not running candidates outside of Quebec is invited. So is the NDP, which did not have much more support last election than the Green Party has now.
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To a swing voter like me, this is a shame. Given their broad base of support nationally and the breadth of their platform, I don't see the Green Party as a fringe party anymore. I see them as a rising mainstream party who may one day hold a balance of power in a minority government.
Given recent changes to political party funding in Canada, moreover, the Green Party is about to get a whole bag full of taxpayer money -- around a half-million dollars, say most experts.
Yet when I turn on the national Leaders Debates next week (English or French), I will not see Jim Harris or anyone else from the Green Party on my television screen. I will see four party leaders from the parties represented in the House of Commons.
What I should see, what I would like to see at the very least, are four leaders and five podiums. The one empty podium should be there to remind me that there is a fifth choice.
The one empty podium should be there as a challenge to every swing voter in Canada. If we don't like what we see from the four leaders who are invited, we can always choose to put a fifth leader up there to fill the empty podium.
That way we could be sure that they are actually earning our votes and not conspiring with the media giants to limit our choices to the same old same old.
© Brent Johner. Originally published in the Calgary Herald, June 2004. Reprint rights available.
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