Nobody Goes To Jail

There are no "low information voters." The problem is not "media bias." The problem is not that people don't know about the gas plant scandal or the email deletion scandal or any number of Liberal scandals. The problem is that there is more corruption, lawbreaking, and general bad behaviour in politics now than there has ever been, and nobody gets punished for it.

The voters have accepted that in a world where everything is the next Adscam but nobody ever goes to jail or suffers serious life consequences as a result of whatever wrongdoing may or may not have happened, it is utterly pointless to pay attention to the constant scandalmongering of opposition parties, because they know nothing is going to come of it, win or lose.

Whatever level of government you are at, wherever you live, political partisans are whacking each over the head with each other's scandals as hard as they can. For every ORNGE, there's a Walkerton. For every Mike Duffy, there's a Mac Harb. For every Rob Ford crack video, there's a David Miller garbage strike. Everybody is up to their waists in the same muck while complaining that it's the other guys who smell bad, not them.

Driving this madness is the perception amongst politicos that voters are tired of scandal (which is true) and that the solution is not to send the scandalmakers to jail, but to replace them with a different group of (what will eventually be) scandalmakers, because everyone (especially these selfsame politicos) knows that after a time, governments buckle under the weight of scandal. Then the politicos throw their hands up in wonderment and ask themselves why the voters stick to the devil they know.

And it's important that a change in government is the only consequence that can come as a result of political screwballery- that, and no more- because once people start getting sent to jail for this kind of thing, it's going to be inconvenient for a whole lot of people. A whole caste of government workers without the ability or will to survive in the private sector or in the regulated professions will suddenly have to be under the microscope. Useless nephews and relatives will be out of work across the country. The PR fraternity (all of whom have their own dirty laundry which I'm sure they wouldn't appreciate being put out into the public eye) will suddenly experience a big drying up in client revenue, because the law is the law and precedent is pretty hard to handwave away with a few strategically placed press releases.

Not only that, but how in the hell are we ever going to get top quality candidates to put their lives on hold for the prospect of holding political office if they know they could end up in jail someday? In a world where Ken Kirupa gets called a no-name candidate by the Toronto Sun just because he isn't Doug Holyday, we can't afford to do anything that will alienate the Chrystia Freelands of the world from making the jump. No, indeed- that future is too scary to contemplate seriously.

Under these circumstances, the thing most people do is blame Tim Hudak and the people around him and assume that if only Tim would just get the message right the province would be a sea of Tory blue. If these people had knocked on any doors in the past month, however, they might have discovered a whole range of voters who had decided that "they're all the same" and that it made no difference who was running, or who was leading, or what the message was, or what scandal was currently taking up how much space in which newspaper or TV news program that was driving whatever agenda.

Meanwhile the NDP continue to mobilize their people and take ridings from the Liberals, while their leader gets plaudits from the media for her "positive approach" which isn't a positive approach at all because she believes that everyone who isn't a union hack is a puppet of the 1%. Instead of hacking away at scandals, she wants to redistribute privilege, which is understandably a very tantalizing prospect for the many underprivileged people we have in Ontario as a result of the Liberal reign of error. And when privilege is redistributed- through use of guillotines, if necessary- you had better believe that lots of people are going to suffer for having offended our new union overlords.

Not the stuffy, slow-moving rule-of-law type of justice we would have expected from a functional society, but how long has it been since Ontario's been functional?