The Humiliations of Election 2019

What happens when the people who want to run the country are the very last people who should run a country?

I AM DEJECTED by this election. And I can’t quite figure out why. It’s an election like all others, isn’t it? What makes this one so feel so particularly bleak? Maybe, with liberal democracies across the globe committing preposterous acts of self-harm, the stakes seem particularly high for us to embody, in that typically Canadian way, how a sober, stable nation ought to carry itself.

But for someone like me, not hunkered down in an ideological trench, with no tribal affiliations to defend, no grenades to throw, who can I turn to? The thirsty bae who weaponized his wokeness, only to reveal himself, retroactively, as just another oblivious private school bro who can’t distinguish between a joke and a hate crime? The chinless ventriloquist’s doll brought to life by a gypsy’s curse, who, like some sinister grinning presence from a Stephen King novel, keeps whispering promises to put money back in my pocket? Sure, I’d prefer the cool aunt with the progressive recycling ideas, or the earnest Sikh with…whatever he might be standing for at this particular minute. But even they have disappointed me. Honestly, has there ever been such a weightless gang of candidates at the forefront of our national politics? Next to them even Boris Johnson — perpetually cosplaying a toddler who just woke up from an afternoon nap — seems possessed of a Churchillian gravitas.

What is missing in these top four? That ineffable thing: solidity, conviction. All of them are, to various degrees, career politicians, and they suffer the genetic defects common to the species: politics is their livelihood, and they have bills to pay, promotions to earn, legacies to consider, retirements to save for. Winning, for them, is an existential matter. Of course they’re going to play the game. Of course they’re going to do whatever it takes. Therein lies the unacknowledged irony of democracy: that the people who actively seek to run the country are usually the very worst people to run a country.

Maybe I should heed that old adage: don’t hate the player, hate the game. Because I do — I hate the game. I deplore it. The absurd theatre of tree-planting photo-ops and real-talk greasy spoon breakfasts. The performance-art press conferences, the Twitter slap-fights. In this period when substance should matter more than anything, what, of substance, do the candidates offer on the campaign trail? They clutch their talking points like rosary beads, incant their meme-worthy catchphrases. They make idiots of themselves during debates and spend the following days bragging that they won. They go where the poll numbers tell them to go and avoid the places where no votes can be filched; they love to score points by referencing the breadth and diversity of our country, but refuse to engage with it.

I’m not just dejected by this election. I’m humiliated by it. So are we all. To be a Canadian voter, in 2019, is to suffer a bombardment of insults: to one’s intelligence, to one’s principles, to one’s autonomy. (And, quick reminder: this is a white guy saying this — I can’t begin to comprehend, and so won’t even try to define, the astonishing disrespect First Nations and racialized people have suffered this past month.)

I want my vote to be strategic, not symbolic — a weapon not a wish. I want it to matter. I want to exert some measure of control. Isn’t that what a representative democracy is all about? A system in which the public exerts control over the people who represent them? Our ballot is supposed to be a cattle-prod, a carrot on a stick, a stone to throw — a way to make sure the people we elect are serving us and not themselves. But every potential vote, this year, feels like a vote in favour of low-key racism and shady corporatism, or an invisible protest vote that clears the path for it.

So, sure, yeah, I’ll watch the results on Monday night. And whatever the outcome — a couple more years of disingenuous pandering camouflaged as progressivism, or a horrifying new era of that dead-eyed dummy peeking out of the sewer grates on Parliament Hill — I will feel the vast distance between the vote I have cast and the government that is formed.

It certainly won’t be mine. And I wonder: will it be anyone’s?

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