changes

After a wet week, miraculously we had a fine and lovely weekend. I took several gentle strolls through our neighbourhood. The Canal is still reduced to its wintry state, just a puddle at the bottom of an untidy-looking ditch. Usually the lock gates downtown are closed and the Canal is filled before the end of April, but this year I suppose that auspicious event has been postponed because repair work on the walls isn't quite finished. Almost all the gardens near here have crocuses, some have tulips already flowering; we have both in the little patch of garden outside our condo. I heard, but didn't see, at least two robins singing for mates, saw several redwing blackbirds, and saw a large, plump bird in the dove or pigeon family that I've never seen in these parts before. Today it's raining again; well, it's Monday, so who cares? It's also election day, and eerily quiet, as though the nation is holding its breath while we await our fate. It's too much to hope that the right-wing populist, closet fascists who have misruled Canada for the past five years will be flung out of office, but I'm encouraged by the reports of larger numbers of young people voting than ever before. The crazy electoral system here often leads to government by a party that gets only a third of the votes, and so it will probably be again this time when the dust settles. Canada, the USA, and the UK are the only so-called democracies where this bizarre system exists; everyone else uses proportional representation or preferential voting as we had in Australia. If we had that in Canada, the results of this election would be dramatically different, and a truer picture of what people really want. Well, we will know in a few hours whether the divide and rule approach of the incumbents is working. I hope it isn't, hope there is a change for the better. I wrote this yesterday afternoon while people were voting, voting in large numbers. Now the worst has happened. A majority of Canadians have ignored the crimes and misdemeanors of these extreme right-wing populists whose first action when disagreeable facts are presented to them by scientific advisers is to fire the adviser and listen instead to their own ideology which is uninformed by facts. The census is gutted, nuclear safety is determined by sales, the RCMP complaints commission has no commissioner, the chief electoral officer and the parliamentary budget officer are ignored, will probably be fired and political flunkeys will be appointed in place of the skilled advisers who held their offices because of their merit, not their political affiliation. And Canada's international reputation? We have none. We just do what the Israeli government tells us to do, like the USA; decades of trust, our national reputation for impartiality, have been swept away in a region desperate for impartial judgements. Yes, it's a sad day.