By DON MACPHERSON, The Gazette May 5, 2011
New young MPs hit the Jackopot
Traffic cones in NDP orange are about as involved in politics as some of the candidates Quebecers elected on Monday. Just remember not to blame me. I didn’t vote for the New Democratic Party. I might have; the NDP was on my short list.
Then it became apparent late in the campaign for Monday’s federal election that the New Democrats were poised for a breakthrough in Quebec, and their candidate in my riding might get elected.
We hadn’t received any information from her. So, as a responsible voter would, I tried to find out something about her. I found no more information than what was on her campaign signs - her name and her photograph. There was nothing about her background, her qualifications, even her hometown.
In other words, she was what is known in Quebec as un poteau - literally, a post, an inactive candidate for a party that has no intention of competing for the riding.
So, being unwilling to give a blank cheque to a total stranger who doesn’t even seem to want it anyway, I scratched her off my list. A lot of other voters weren’t that diligent.
Times have changed. It used to be that this province was so Liberal that a fire hydrant could get elected because it was painted red.
But for this spring, the suddenly fashionable colour is orange, orange, orange! It’s Jackomania!
“Tout le monde le fait, fais-le donc” is a famous 1970s slogan of a Montreal radio station - everybody’s doing it, so you should too.
On Monday, more than a million Quebecers voted for NDP candidates who might as well be orange traffic cones.
And now this province will be represented in the new Parliament and the caucus of the official opposition party by Thomas Mulcair, maybe a dozen other serious members, and another 40 or so orange traffic cones, all paid at least $157,731 a year.
As @67Capt_Canuck tweeted, the celebrated Ruth Ellen Brosseau, the fugitive “honourable member for Las Vegas,” has hit the Jackopot. Somebody should get word to her so that she can show up to collect her winnings.
“Well, some of them will turn out all right,” their apologists say. OK then, what would be an acceptable failure rate? Three-quarters? Half ? Your MP, or mine?
The issue is not their youth, and this is not just an old fart yelling at the kids to turn down that darned hippityhop music or whatever they call it, and while they’re at it, pull up their pants. The more young people involved in politics the better. But the key word here is “involved.”
Over the years, I’ve known many promising politicians in their 20s. But their promise was already apparent in their backgrounds by the time they ran for office. And when they did run, they were involved enough to actually go to their ridings and campaign.
It says a lot about what the NDP thinks of most of its new MPs from this province that even before the election, it forbade many of them from speaking to reporters. And it has kept all but a few of the more presentable ones muzzled since.
Maybe the party is afraid that they might reveal the nominating process by which functionally unilingual anglophones were mismatched with predominantly French-speaking ridings, and vice-versa.
What was it? Did the poteaux take turns drawing the names of ridings from a hat? Or did they hold a pub night when, after a few beers, they tossed a dart at a map?
It says a lot about the low esteem in which so many Quebecers hold their elected representatives that they would ungratefully turf deserving longtime incumbents in favour of unknown surrogates for Jack Layton.
In doing so, they made a joke of the election and their duty as citizens. But in terms of their effective representation, the joke is on them.
As for me, every time I pass an orange traffic cone now, I’m tempted to wave, because I think of my new member of Parliament.
