The End Of The Affair

      Well, it looks like Ontario's brief little flirtation with the Conservatives has passed and she's gone back to her manipulative and sometimes abusive Liberal husband.   I simplify, of course.  Ontario's going back to the Liberals because it wanted to scare the Liberals a bit, and then they got scared by the Connies. No, that's too simplistic, too. Ontario's going back to the lesser of two losers. Only in Canada do all our political parties -- with the exception it seems of the very un-Canadian Bloc Québecois-- seem to set out to lose elections rather than win them.

      To my readers, however many or however few of you are out there, can we start a small movement?   Not a political movement.  I mean a movement that might actually make a difference.   It's also a very undemanding movement, which, we all know, should make it very popular.  Here it is:  from now on, let's collectively decide not to talk to pollsters.   Let's not give them honest feedback.    Tell them anything but the truth of what you feel, unless you are God's-honest-sworn-and-foresworn-committed to your political beliefs-- then you can say what you want.    For the rest of us, those of us who make our decisions on an election-by-election basis, don't talk to pollsters.    There are so many advantages to this.   One is that, after a while, the data collected by pollsters will be useless and perhaps even detrimental, and not only will pollsters start to leave us alone, they'll have a lot less work from political parties tapping them to make their decisions for them.    Another is that such polling has had the nasty effect of exaggerating the pandering effect, as politicians, like comedians, play to the bits that work and run cowardly away from the bits that don't.    Let's face it, politicians and political parties use polls like the rest of use weather reports: let's make them actually have to go outside to find out if it's raining or not.    There's yet another bonus, the polling headlines won't have the same currency that they do now, particularly in terms of making people think they're voting for/against someone or something based on "numbers."    We might start to get away from these insufferably annoying day-to-day polls that media-kill us all, as if it were somehow crucial to the future of the world that we know overnight what 600 people in the Peterborough area thought about Stephen Harper's words on Air Canada.   No, pollsters now are as much a part of the problem as the political parties.   The less we tell them, the more likely it is the politicians might actually have to figure out what we want-- and the more we might be able to make an informed decision, rather depending on gut-reaction answers to the question, "which of these bastards least offends me?"

      And we might actually be able to sit down to eat our dinners or watch our television programmes or read our books or have our late-afternoon quickies without fear of the phone ringing.   How's that for a bonus?

      So, there it is.   Let's play coy from now on.    Let's lie, omit, falsify, antagonize, ignore, infuriate, befuddle.   Let's tell the politicians and the pollsters, "Well, if you don't know what's wrong, I'm not going to tell you."    And let's watch them stew in their juices trying to figure it all out.   This strategy pretty much always works, right?   Think about it.   Just ask...   No, I'm not going to say that, I'm not going to say that at all....

      But you all know what I'm talking about, and you all know how well it works.

      Let the revolution begin.