Ray Rider wrote:To you and Dukasaur then, what's the point of voting for one party over another then? Seems rather pointless if their words are meaningless before gaining leadership and it's too late afterwards. On the contrary--in my opinion, their promises are only worthless if we expect them to be worthless and don't hold them to account for broken promises.
It's a good question. I guess my answer would be first of all, that while I expect all politicians to be dishonest, I don't expect them all to be dishonest to the same degree or about the same things. So there are differences.
In a lot of areas, though, you can safely discount anything the politicians say. For instance, the realpolitik is that Canadian business is so hopelessly dominated by American exports that we cannot afford to seriously piss off the Americans. On the other hand, the voters expect a Canadian politician to make symbolic noises about how we chart an independent path and will tell the Americans what's what. So in this area, you can pretty much expect the same from all parties. They'll talk about our independent path, and then quietly do whatever Uncle Sam tells them in any area that really matters.
The F-35 is probably typical in this regard. I would love nothing more than to have us buy more cost-effective planes from Europe. The realpolitik, though, is that there's a groundswell of protectionism in the U.S., and investing the Uncle Sam's current pet project may be saving thousands of Canadian jobs. It's a shame, but it probably would happen regardless of who was in power. So, although I briefly heard something about Trudeau talking about no F-35, I ignored it, because I knew that other forces would settle this deal regardless of intent.
There's a couple things I noticed while reviewing those links. First of all, there's an obvious bias on this site. Reviewing Harper's fullfilled promises I find, "subject prisoners to mandatory drug testing" "lay charges against prisoners who fail drug tests" and "deny parole to prisoners who fail drug tests" credited as three separate fulfilled promises, when really they are all one program. It's a little bit of resume padding to credit these as three different promises. But, small matter.
What is interesting is that you cite these as evidence of your fondness for Harper and your animus for Trudeau, but in fact, these numbers show the opposite of what you see in them. Harper's 21 of 140 promises broken represent a "breakage" level of 15%, while Trudeau's 30 broken promises of 228 represent a breakage level of 13.5%. I don't want to get painted here as Trudeau's champion against Harper (I neither love nor hate either of them to any great degree) but I did want to point that out to you. Maybe your pre-existing notions are colouring your perceptions even when the numbers are right in front of you.
