Can I Get That in Writing?

Against my better judgement, I watched about an hour of the debate yesterday. Afterwards, I tried to think of any new information I had gained and could only come up with Paul Martin's out of the blue announcement that the Liberals would remove the Federal Government's ability to use the notwithstanding clause. Maybe the lack of new information just reflects me paying a fair bit of attention to politics, I'm not sure.

I guess that doing a good job in the debate must be tough - the party leaders sure make it look tough, at any rate. On the other hand, I am sure that being the moderator of a debate can't be easy, yet Steve Paiken, who I always enjoyed watching on Studio 2 on TVO, made it look pretty easy, and the questions he asked were pretty well thought out, in my opinion.

But in terms of helping me decide who to vote for? - pretty much useless. Part of the trouble is that I think I am in the minority which prefers people to just tell it like it is rather than concealing everything in spin and talking points¹. But only Duceppe (who has little on the line in the English debates) even approaches this style. I think Harper would like to, but he knows he'd get killed if he did. Meanwhile Martin and Layton have internalized the spinning approach to talking so that they probably don't even realize they are doing it anymore.

In the Globe, Scott Colborne (sub. only) is on the same wavelength and suggests that the leaders should watch Office Space and start acting like the main character in that movie does after being hypnotized (he starts telling everyone exactly what he thinks about everything). Of course the same straight talking relaxed character in the movie also embarks on a plan to embezzle millions of dollars so the leaders wouldn't want to take the analogy too far. Still, it would work for me, even though I think the media would spin whatever the straight-talking leader said into a big crisis and they'd be back to sounding like a pre-programmed drone in no time. It's also too bad that one of the most prominent politicians who succeeded with a straight-talking strategy - Mike Harris - was also one of the worst politicians (from a policy perspective) I've ever encountered. Sigh.

Anyway, all this is a distraction from the business of figuring out which party's policies would benefit the country most (damage the country least, if you're cynical) and who I should vote for. It sure would be helpful if the parties would put their proposed policies in writing, sometime before the election. At this point I'm getting close to voting Green, simply because they are the only party that has a platform (if I'm wrong please direct me to any newly released platforms I might have missed).


-------
¹ Of course, if you got people to self-identify, this would be a huge majority, but I think a lot of people are kidding themselves. Look for people who routinely write posts and make comments expressing shock and horror about what so and so said, often taking it out of context or harping on comments made years ago as the type of people who demand that politicians talk only in drone-mode for fear of setting loose the hounds of outrage.