Elections Digest

Hey there,

Remember when I said this would be a weekly blog? Ha! Wasn't that funny...

So it's election time! Yippee! First thing I like to do before jumping into the fray (as should most voters) is check out the platforms of each party. Fortunately for everyone, they've been released already. I took the chance to review them, and this is what I came up with:

Conservative Party of Canada
Title: Here for Canada
Number of Pages: 68
Pictures of Steven Harper: 9

The Conservative platform focuses on five key points: Creating Jobs, Supporting Families, Eliminating the Deficit, Making our Streets Safe, and Standing on Guard for Canada. The booklet itself is fairly well-put-together, and seems to me to focus a lot on continuing what they've been doing over the last few years with a minority (but they still want that majority!). Lots of reasonable points here, though, the question is only how they really plan on implementing them.

Liberal Party of Canada
Title: Your Family. Your Future. Your Canada.
Number of Pages: 12 (summary), 98 (full)
Pictures of Michael Ignatieff: 1 (summary), 18 (full)

The Liberal platform highlights a couple issues, namely "Economy: Better Choices", "Families, Finances and the Futures", "Clean Environment", and "Bringing Canadians Together". Distastefully, however, their front page of their summary has a comparison of their promises versus stuff the Conservatives have already done. I'm not reading your booklet to find out why the other guys weren't awesome, I'm trying to find out if you are! Gah. Otherwise there are some nice graphs, some gentle assurances that everyone matters, and some really grainy photos on the full document (shudder).

New Democratic Party of Canada
Title: Giving Your Family a Break - Practical First Steps
Number of Pages: 28
Pictures of Jack Layton: 19

The NDP's first steps are (hopefully in no particular order): Hire more doctors and nurses, Strengthen your pension, Kick-start job creation, Help out your family budget, and Fix Ottawa for good. The document also comes with a handy-dandy cut-out for you to put on your fridge to hold them to their promises! If we ignore the fact that this platform document looks like a photo album of Jack Layton (19 pictures? Really?), we get a reasonable document, I suppose, in that it does go into a good amount of detail on their various points. The question comes, again, as to whether or not these can or will actually be done.

So right around this point you're probably saying "Hey! You just skimmed these and pulled useless stats from them! You don't know anything!" If you're saying this, you are mostly correct. I'm not really going to comment one way or another on their actual policies until I've done more research, but I thought I'd just share my first impressions with y'allz!

Catch ya next time,

MDR