Esther Matharu on Election Blues

I don’t know about you but after the elections, a great tiredness came over me. The idea that we had to continue to fight for such elementary things as votes that count (electoral reform), child-care support (why should something be run as a business when the majority of Canadians see child care as a national human rights issue like the right to health care), and the sheer offensiveness of the guns, jails and wars that the current PM will exact from our purses at the expense of our poor, is staggering. Enough to send anyone to bed with an acute headache!

After a few days of numbness, time to lick our wounds, as eloquently wrote David Julianan Wightman in the X-Ray Magazine (http://xraymagazine.ca/22/) editorial, we pick up the pieces and start thinking of what now?

Post mortems are sometimes fun, but it all adds to the fatigue. I personally am very selective with my post mortems. I’d rather not think about the elections. I’d rather think about nice things, spring, for example.

But it won’t go away. Is there any other angle to this? Happily, we can thank women for most of the good news.

There are more women in the House than ever before – a jump from 20% to 25%. That means every fourth person is a woman, instead of every fifth. Thanks to NDP.

Elizabeth May will be in Parliament, and she has already indicated that the moment they start ‘bickering’ to use a now infamous word use by a contemptuous person, she simply walk out. What a powerful message! I hope that every woman in the House will follow her out. I hope they will all go and have a cup of tea and discuss how best to run our country. I hope they will talk about issues and not parties, about families and not money, about peace and not war.

How about we envision what we would like to see happening in the next years?

Certainly the ridicule that Canada has heaped on its head - an unpopular leader backed by less than 40% of the electorate is now sitting in a place of practically unbridled power because of the weakness of our constitution - is something we would like very much to see reversed. To quote the late Eugene Forsey’s excellent ‘How Canadians Govern Themselves’ (7^th edition): The constitution still contains not one syllable on prime ministerial qualifications, the method of election or removal, or the prime minister’s powers (except for the calling of constitutional conferences).

So who writes up and/or protects the Constitution? The Supreme Court. It is this body that interprets the written Constitution and defines the limits of federal and provincial powers. Who appoints the nine judges who sit on the Supreme Court? The Governor General on the advice of the national cabinet. Ah yes. But who appoints the Governor General, or for that matter the national cabinet members? Her Majesty the Queen, accepts the advice of the Prime Minister on who should be the Governor General and he/she chooses the cabinet . There you have it, full circle. The PM appoints the cabinet members, the Governor General and the Supreme Court judges, who are the only ones who can interpret the constitution and define the powers (of the PM!).

Maybe I am wrong, and please correct me, but I think something is very wrong with our constitution which gives so much power to one person. One only hopes that in our current leader we will have a benevolent dictator who will rule us with benevolence.

But back to the future. The Women’s Alliance Party says stop spilling soup over who split the votes and how, and get down to having a major constitutional reform. Call out the lawyers, the pundits and the wise women and men. Now is time to put democracy back on the agenda and see what needs to be done to protect it. Obviously it needs safeguarding