– Mark MacDonald is the Publisher of the Business Examiner, and President of Invest Northwest Publishing.
BC – There has been a seismic shift in our political system and the way Canada gets things done – or stops them altogether.
Non-political organizations, which are really political action groups like LeadNow, Tides Canada and the Dogwood Initiative, have become extremely effective political “push” groups, driving their ideologies through the path of most effectiveness – candidates and parties that see things the way they do.
They have found a way, mostly through social media, to circumvent Elections Canada guidelines that are supposed to ensure fairness in this country, spending untrackable revenue via virtually untraceable methods to capture public opinion and carry out their own agenda through election campaigns.
It’s most ironic that Canada, a country that sees itself as a beacon of democracy and fairness, and which sends citizens throughout the world to monitor elections in other countries to ensure those same standards are maintained, is now suffering from the same maladies they’re trying to cure elsewhere.
U.S. groups mostly opposed to Canadian resource development amply fund organizations like these. For some reason, Canadians are not enraged to discover that their domestic policies and livelihoods are being directed by American special interest financing. Financiers include the oil industry, as they want to keep Canada at its current competitive disadvantage by maintaining the current 35 per cent discount U.S. companies have long held with Canadian suppliers.
Want more information? Check out the work of Vivian Krause at: fairquestions.typepad.com/rethink_campaigns.
Anti-free enterprise political parties like the NDP and Greens are the direct beneficiaries. While the NDP’s mismanagement of government is well-chronicled – see Alberta under Rachel Notley, Ontario under Bob Rae and BC under Dave Barrett, Mike Harcourt, Glen Clark and Ujjal Dosanjh, there is no such track record for the one-note Greens.
The Green Party’s list of “demands” for negotiation reportedly include the possibility of thwarting Site C dam construction and the twinning of the Kinder Morgan Pipeline – both representing thousands of direct, well-paying jobs.
The Green push for electoral reform, more specifically proportional representation, is its most cunning.
It is this plank that provided the missing link to ignite BC voters to fight Premier Christy Clark with almost the same vigour with which it assailed former Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau catered to that during the last federal campaign then reneged, which only incited those same masses to rally in similar fashion during this provincial election.
The suggestion that “first past the post” elections are unjust and unfair demonstrates a profound ignorance about how our governments are constructed and operate. Our system, while imperfect, was designed to be fair, and allows for a clear winner and a time frame in which to do things, unhindered.
The Green preference will ensure political logjams and an inability to make decisions on major projects in perpetuity, giving them exactly what anti-free enterprisers have discovered is the way to stop everything: Through slow strangulation.
That strategy includes three essentials: Delay, delay and delay. Long enough to drain the resources of individuals and companies who want to actually do something. In that way, it’s mission accomplished.
Really, it is pure socialism.
These groups capitalize on anti-business public relations on a national scale, aka brainwashing, by cinema, the media, and many involved in public education.
Hollywood does an effective job of producing heroic story lines about “the little people” rising up to “take back” the country from developers and overall corporate greed. The message? Business is bad, owners are greedy, against the people.
Most taxpayers see their contributions to public education as a good thing, although they can’t be happy that 90 per cent of public school funding goes towards salaries. But what are the kids learning in school? Reading? Writing? Arithmetic? Often, not until after they’re indoctrinated in the “most important” aspects of life – the environment and, of course, self esteem.
The end result? Generations of new voters heading to the polls after years of indoctrination by unionized teachers, members of the BC Teachers Federation, which spends thousands of dollars supporting the NDP, in hopes of their political allies having the final say on how much more money is being spent on education. No conflict there, right?
The media also has a part to play, with editorialized opinions constantly hidden in news stories. The negative, anti-free enterprise drumbeat drones on, year after year, pre-empted only by the occasional editorial or opinion piece just prior to voting day. That last-gasp attempt is virtually fruitless, as it’s impossible to have one opinion in one issue/program offset years of anti-free enterprise messaging.
Less than five per cent of Canadians pay regular attention to politics, so election campaigns become a crash course in catching up to what’s going on, looking at what is being promised, and weeding through the myriad of aggressive messages sent out by competing parties.
Emotion causes people to purchase goods and services. And vote. These groups know that, and are deft at fanning the strong feelings of hatred and violation within people raised on anti-free enterprise diets. Voting day is simply time to reap from all those seeds, sown through various methods, for years.
And these groups get what they want: Anti-business governments to carry out their own agendas, hi-jacking democracy in the process. Paid for, largely, by Americans.
They may not want to say they’re anti-business, but once in power, their boa constrictor-like deliberate actions reveal they will have succeeded in stopping economic progress.
