Tuesday, March 04, 2008

The need for a united left

Alright, since the numbers began pouring in I've been contemplating what the hell went wrong here. By all means, the NDP should have picked up at least two seats, and the liberals should have had at least six or more, by the worst case scenario.

Aside from the obvious fact we were too optimistic and fell in love with the various random sampling polls, there are some clear points about this election.

1) Only around half the population voted, and of that half only half voted Con, so the current government has the support of around 25% of the population.

2) There is an epidemic of rather spoiled young people who continually use the mantra "I don't vote because I don't understand the issues." but can tell you thousands of facts about their sports team, favourite tv shows or video games.

3) We could have won without them anyway, or at least restricted the cons to a minority.

The main problem was that the Cons etched by in a lot of ridings because either the Liberals had around 4500 votes and the NDP 1000, or the other way around. The two parties spent so much time fighting each other for whatever reason that they completely missed the opportunity to actually accomplish something. So now, because they got greedy, we now have another 3+ years of Con rule, we will live to see the "celebration" of 30 years of one party government, oil companies will continue to pollute our rivers and our air and spread cancer across our first nations while paying resource royalties lower than anywhere in the United States or in any country that isn't currently experiencing a civil war, for that matter. Oil sands development will continue at full speed ahead, dragging already overstrained infrastructures, education and health care systems along the pavement with it.

So, whoever inherits this mess of the left after this fallout, enough infighting. There are not enough left thinkers in this province that the NDP, Liberals, Greens and anyone else can fight each other for votes. Isolate the ridings where the NDP did best, only run NDP candidates instead of NDPs, Liberals and Greens. Isolate the ridings where the Liberals did best, don't run NDPs and Greens. I think it's a reasonable assumption that most Liberal voters, NDP voters and Green voters would much rather have a coalition government of Liberal, NDP and Green MLAs than the Conservatives.

Its high time that the Alberta left decide whats more important to them; their chosen club or the actual problems at hand.

1 comment:

Foodie said...

Can you please, please post a picture from the famous mall for me?? :)