Blessed by the Potato

I was watching TV today — honest-to-goodness TV with commercials and everything. It’s been quite a while, since almost all the commercials I saw were new to me. A few that I thought were neat were political ones from a group called the Working Families Coalition. They were reminder ads, basically reminding us that we don’t want to go back to the days of the Conservatives, with four different ads about health care, education, poverty, and water/food safety. I liked them: they didn’t have that angry attack-ad feeling to them, and they weren’t too explicit in their Tory fear-mongering, but they did get the message across. Looking at their website, I can’t find much information about who they are, really. They don’t look to be a Liberal shell (while they’re anti-Tory, they’re not specifically pro-Liberal).

I’m a little surprised at how much support the Tories appear to be getting; I personally couldn’t even conceive of going back to a conservative-controlled Ontario. A lot of people are upset at McGuinty, especially about the health tax (though his last-minute pork barreling isn’t helping), but I don’t think the Liberals have been all that bad for Ontario. They haven’t been fantastic, but I hardly think we should be chasing them out with pitchforks and torches.

The Green Party may turn out to be a bit of a spoiler in this election, especially since they’re the only ones willing to change the status quo and scale back the catholic school funding. It is, perhaps, telling that the “working families” site has a link to the other parties but not the Greens, and that one of their supporting groups is the catholic school teachers association. Of course, it could also be that like so many others, they simply don’t see the Greens as a credible alternative since they haven’t yet had an elected member.

A bigger issue, one I hope I haven’t beaten to death already, is electoral reform. I just got in my mailbox a link to the now up-and-running voteformmp.ca, a site associated with Fair Vote Canada. A criticism of the site is that the “about MMP” section is quite vague, and you have to go to the PDFs in “campaign materials” to see what your ballot would look like under the new system. Remember to vote for the referendum on October 10, even if you wouldn’t ordinarily vote for your MPP!