What Do We Do About the Broken Parliament?

I have a feeling that things are going to get alot worse before they get better. People definitely do want Parliament to get back to work, the thing is that they don't necessarily want a new Government. Sure the Conservatives are down a bit, the Liberals are up a bit but if there were an election today it appears that it would be another Conservative minority. Canadians certainly told Michael Ignatieff that they didn't want a new election. They told the coalition that they didn't wand that either. So, Canadians are unhappy about the proroguing of Parliament but that shouldn't embolden the opposition much.

I won't go into the problems with the Harper Government, I talk about those alot. The Liberals though have yet to distinguish themselves as sufficiently different from the Conservatives. I honestly can't give you any idea what the Ignatieff Liberals stand for (other than a few vagaries.) Neither the NDP nor the Greens have shown that they have anything close to the popular support to form a government and the Bloc will always be part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

All of this seriously begs for electoral reform and Parliamentary reform. The current system is totally and completely broken and there is no sign that there will be another majority Government of any stripe for the foreseeable future and it comes at the worst possible time.

We have serious problems to fix. What we are experiencing is not a recession, it is a geo-political realignment. The power has shifted from the US to the East. While we went through this recession, China has continued to grow, they are now the biggest auto market in the world and have passed Germany as the #1 exporter in the world. The US meanwhile is in three wars it can't win (Iraq, Afghanistan and the Drug War) and is far deeper in debt (federally and individually) than it was when the recession caused by bad debt began.

Add to the shift in global economic power the looming environmental crisis, the looming shortages of food generally and the possible decertification of the world's oceans and the perpetual problems of unemployment and poverty and you can conclude nothing except that we are facing some very serious problems and we need very serious solutions.

What Canada seems to want, to really, really want is for all of our MPs of every stripe to get back to work and hammer out some solutions. An election that returns a Conservative minority won't fix things, neither will the parties going after each other in the hope of a one or two point bump in the polls. The hapless Liberals would have won more points giving the money they are spending on attack ads to their local food bank, or to an environmental charity than they will win by telling us what we already know.

Would I like a leader other than Stephen Harper, sure I would. But I can't say for sure that Michael Ignatieff would be better (or at least not enough of an improvement to warrant the 300 million dollar cost of an election) and nothing I've seen or heard leads me to believe that Canadians are about to elect the Greens or the NDP. So, whatever else they do our current MPs need to get back to work, forget that they are in different political parties, and try to find some real solutions to some very serious problems.

If they want to start with electoral reform and/or Parliamentary reform that would be fine.